As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.

But for the most part, flexible work arrangements still seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

That’s why I was eager to read Mass Career Customization, a book written by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, two Deloitte executives who created the program of the same name at the New York-based consulting firm. Benko is chief talent officer at Deloitte and Weisberg is senior advisor to Deloitte’s women’s initiative.

I first heard about Deloitte’s mass career customization program a few months ago at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm that advises law firms on work/life balance issues. Benko and Weisberg made the presentation.

Benko immediately got my attention by saying that the problem with flexible work arrangements today is that they “look at the job instead of the career.” She explained that if we look at the entire course of an employee’s career, we will see ups and downs in areas like pace and workload. The trick, she says, is for companies to create a formalized process around these ebbs and flows.

Mass career customization attempts to do that. At Deloitte, which has been piloting the program for the past two years, employees are each given a profile demonstrating where they are in regard to four categories: pace, workload, location/schedule and role. “This profile gets embedded into the employee’s career development,” Benko says.

By establishing this profile, Deloitte employees can discuss the option of “dialing up,” as well as dialing down. That makes the conversation not just about reducing workload, but also about accepting more responsibility, she says. For employers, the program offers an opportunity to better manage their talent, because at any given time they will be able to access a snapshot of who is working full steam and ready to take on more responsibilities and who isn’t.

In their book detailing the program, Benko and Weissberg provide very clear examples of how mass career customization can be implemented, complete with visuals of how an employee’s profile may change throughout his or her career.

It is incredibly easy to understand, but also very metric-based, making this program not just another soft flex-work offering. It is new, however. Deloitte is just now rolling out the program to all 38,000 U.S. employees, so evidence of its ultimate success remains to be seen.

But so far the pilot offers some promising results. Of the 7,700 employees who participated in the pilot, 30 percent showed interest in dialing up or dialing down; 13 percent ended up applying to do so and 9 percent got approved.

The fact that not every employee is clamoring to dial down should serve as evidence that this is a program worth evaluating. And the book also provides lots of other reasons (talent shortage, different needs of changing workforce, etc.) why HR executives should embrace these programs.

But what I like the most about this program is that it isn’t designed just to make working moms’ lives easier. By giving employees the option to dial up or dial down, mass career customization makes the conversation much bigger—and that to me is what will determine its ultimate success. It also moves the idea of flexible work beyond the domain of working moms.

For companies that want to create a more engaged workforce, have the ability to easily identify and move talent around their organizations and maybe even get some buzz for doing something forward thinking, reading Mass Career Customization may be a good place to start.