Case Study

Career Customization for Everyone: Deloittes Career/Life Program

Deloitte is the brand under which tens of thousands of dedicated professionals in independent firms throughout the world collaborate to provide audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management and tax services to selected clients. These firms are members of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL), a UK private company limited by guarantee.

Like any other company, Deloitte seeks to be productive, to be profitable, and to growin short, to succeed. For Deloitte to succeed, it must retain talented employees; however, retaining these employees has become increasingly challenging given the nature of traditional career paths in public accounting.

For many decades, employees of public accounting firms traditionally followed rather predictable career paths. However, those predictable career paths are changing, and alternative career paths are becoming increasingly common. Cheryl Leitschuh, president of Leitschuh Leadership Consulting in Minneapolis, says, I dont think theres any official definition, but anything that falls out of the 80-hours-a-week, face-time traditional career model, which is the paradigm that has brought the profession to where it is, is considered an alternative career path. In considering what younger people want in their careers, Anne Weisberg, Deloittes director of talent diversity, asserts that you cant assume that the way you manage your career is going to work for generations behind you. So dont overlay your experiences on them and expect them to fall into the way you did things. Some of the career features that Deloittes younger employees seek in these alternative career paths include long-term career development, multiple experiences within a single company, flexibility, a sense of purpose, respect and open communication.

In 2005, Deloitte LLP began experimenting with changes to the traditional employer-employee relationship in order to retain more of their well-educated, carefully recruited, high-potential mid-career employees. The experimental program, known as Mass Career Customization (MCC) was born out of Deloittes own need to address attrition and to keep high performers. Based on an analysis of employee exit-survey data, Cathy Benko, Deloittes chief talent officer, and her team discovered that lack of flexibility was the number one reason women gave for leaving the company, and the number two reason that men provided for leaving. Yet, according to Benko, Deloitte had 69 different types of flexible work arrangementsranging from telecommuting to compressed workweeksand people were still leaving because of [the] lack of flexibility.

MCC was designed to provide all of Deloittes employeesnot just its superstarswith opportunities to have the flexibility they wanted and needed in their careers. MCC enables employees to better manage their careers in relation to changing work/life issues. MCC focuses on how employees want their careers to unfold, which also helps to foster greater employee loyalty to the firm.

Under the MCC program, [e]mployees periodically fill out a profile detailing whether they want to stay on their current course, dial up by taking on more projects and responsibility, or dial down, reducing their hours or amount of travel, for example. MCC allows people to dial up or dial down, depending on life circumstances, whether theyre fresh out of school or a harried new parent. For the latter, this can mean putting in fewer hours or passing on travel or new projects, without hurting the chance of promotion in the future.

As a starting point for career planning, each employee receives a default profile that reflects the employees current career situation. The MCC default profile contains four career dimensions that can be dialed up or dialed down as employees progress through their careers and face changing life circumstances. The career dimensions are (1) pace of career (the rate of career progression), (2) workload (the quantity of work output), (3) location/schedule (when and where the work is performed), and (4) role (the employees position and responsibilities within the firm.

Dialing down can mean cutting back work hours or work load or even working from home. Dialing up means that employees will take on added responsibilities so they can gain a broader and richer set of work experiences. Although dialing up is not a promotion, it does make an employee more marketable. However, [j]ust because employees ask to dial up or dial down doesnt mean that they will be approved by their managers. David Rosenblum, a Los Angeles-based partner in Deloittes consulting practice, indicates that dial up requests can be more challenging than dial down requests. According to Rosenblum, employees experiences cant be accelerated when they need to do certain things before they move to the next level.

According to Cathy Benko, the program was rolled out to 80 percent of employees in the companys U.S. offices by the end of 2009. Of those employees choosing to avail themselves of the non-traditional career path afforded by MCC, about two-thirds dial up their careers and about one-third dial down their careers. Moreover, men are as likely as women to dial up or dial down their careers. The MCC program seems to be resonating with employees as indicated by improvements in employee satisfaction with overall career/life fit and retention of high-performing employees. With its record of success with the MCC program, Deloitte now is trying to make believers of its clients.

Discussion Questions

1. Explain the basic nature of Deloittes MCC program. 2. Explain how Deloittes MCC program can help employees in managing their careers and in dealing with work/life issues.

3. Explain how you would deal with work/life issues if you worked for Deloitte 4. What are the benefits of MCC for Deloitte and its employees?

5. Are these good benefits and would you change them?

6. Do you think there is a downside to the MCC program for Deloitte and its employees? FULLY Explain your answer. 7. Would Deloittes MCC program be easily adapted in other companies? Why or why not?

ANSWER ALL QUESTION!!!