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.
I’m a sucker for management books. I read a lot of them—a habit I picked up in business school—and over the course of time I’ve developed a pretty good eye for what is truly great management thinking, as well as what is just run-of-the-mill management chatter.
Unfortunately, that’s not what you get in The Management Gurus—Lessons From the Best Management Books of All Time. Chalk it up to the lack of truth in advertising here. While there are some decent lessons from a few solid management thinkers, there is nothing that rises to the level of Drucker, or Collins, or Porter, or even the writing of Jack Welch.
At first I thought that this might be a simple rights and permission issue, but in the foreword of the book, “author” Chris Lauer thanks no fewer than 10 different publishing houses “who allowed the words and works of their authors to be featured in The Management Gurus.” No, this was simply a failure of imagination and marketing run amok, because The Management Gurus fails to deliver on its promise of bringing together “the best management books of all time” the same way the fast-food joint down the street fails to deliver on its promise of serving “the world’s best hamburger.
There are a few others, like Warren Bennis and Kenichi Ohmae, that are worth a look and some time, but really, is this enough high-level management writing (and thinking) to sustain the overhyped notion by the publisher that this book contains “lessons from the best management books of all time”?
Worst of all, this book has Jeffrey Krames writing on Jack Welch and The 4 E’s of Leadership. I don’t know Jeffrey Krames, but why would you possibly have someone like him writing about the management wisdom of Jack Welch instead of simply publishing an excerpt from one of the many management books written by the great Jack himself? It’s like traveling to China and seeing a movie about the Great Wall instead of walking on it yourself.
My advice is to take a pass on The Management Gurus. You would be better off getting a subscription to the Harvard Business Review—or better yet, reading firsthand some of the management books by real, honest-to-god business gurus like Drucker, Collins, Welch and Porter. This may take you a little more time, but it will be a lot more valuable. And a lot less full of hype.
There is a lot of concern over the state of the U.S. health care system, but there is another crisis brewing that anyone who manages workers—or who works, for that matter—can’t afford to ignore. In the next several years, more and more employees are going to find that they can’t afford to retire.
As Teresa Ghilarducci notes in her most recent book, When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, retirement is a generally accepted part of the American Dream. After years of working hard, we will all be able to retire and enjoy a period of leisure before we die.
But this period of relaxation apparently is getting shorter and shorter. By 2010, 65-year-olds will be living longer than ever before. However, their expected months in retirement will fall by 14 percent, Ghilarducci writes.
So the good news is people are living longer, but the bad news is they are going to be working longer too.
Ghilarducci goes into great detail about why this is happening. She largely attributes the problem of inadequate retirement funds to the switch from defined-benefit plans to 401(k) plans.
There are lots of problems with 401(k)s, and many of Ghilarducci’s criticisms are not new, although I feel like they have been muffled a bit by the passage of the Pension Protection Act. The act, which took effect in 2007, encourages companies to put their 401(k)s on auto-pilot, so that employees are automatically enrolled in the plans. Most often these employees are enrolled into target-date funds, which reallocate to more conservative investments as the employee gets closer to retirement. Saving, and saving right, becomes a no-brainer. Or so the theory goes.
However the Pension Protection Act doesn’t solve all of the problems, and Ghilarducci notes many of the ones that remain. First, even with automatic enrollment, too often employees don’t contribute enough to their 401(k)s. Many times when workers switch jobs, they cash out their plans—causing another hit to their retirement savings. Many low-income workers don’t contribute to these plans at all. And nothing in the act addresses a major issue for retirees: how to make sure they don’t outlive their savings.
Those are just some of the concerns that Ghilarducci has about 401(k)s. Although many of these issues have been brought up by critics before, she does have some interesting theories on why 401(k)s have replaced traditional defined-benefit plans as the primary retirement savings vehicle at most companies.
Ghilarducci rejects two commonly held beliefs about this shift: that employees prefer 401(k)s and that pension plans cause companies to get into financial trouble.
On the first issue, the accepted notion is that 401(k)s make better sense for today’s workers, who are much more mobile than the lifers of 20 or 30 years ago.
However, Ghilarducci provides evidence showing that workers don’t switch jobs as much as some of the hype would have us believe.
She cites statistics showing that the percentage of employees with more than 10 years of service in one job increased from 1996 to 2004—from 30.4 percent to 30.6 percent for men and from 27.9 percent to 28.6 percent for women.
Ghilarducci also doesn’t believe that defined-benefit plans are the reason that so many companies recently have declared bankruptcy. She argues that these companies were already well down that path to begin with, even if they didn’t have a pension plan.
According to Ghilarducci, the real reason that companies are shifting to 401(k)s is because the plans are better for employers—they take on less risk and less cost.
Again, that’s not a new argument, but Ghilarducci comes up with an interesting twist that I hadn’t heard before: She points out that companies can use 401(k) plans to reward their most productive employees. Ghilarducci cites research showing that productive employees are the most likely to contribute to their 401(k) plans, and thus receive the employer match.
“This in turn means that the employer is paying a higher wage to the most productive worker, which makes sense economically,” Ghilarducci writes. “In these ways, 401(k) plans not only reduce pension costs but are also clearly efficient forms of compensation.”
She goes a step further to imply that employers are setting up this whole system and promoting this culture of working in retirement because it suits their own needs.
Ghilarducci argues that the more retirees that continue to work, the greater the labor pool and thus the less pressure there is on employers to raise wages. “Working ‘retirees’ help manufacture healthy profits.”
OK, so it’s in the best interest for employers to keep us working, and it looks like many of us are going to have to anyway. So what’s working America to do?
Ghilarducci has an answer: guaranteed retirement accounts, which would be mandatory retirement savings accounts managed by the Social Security Administration and invested by the Thrift Savings Plan. Basically, employees would be required to contribute 5 percent of their earnings, which can be split with their employers, and instead of the contributions being tax-deferred, employees would receive a $600 tax credit. While 401(k) plans and their tax breaks could be maintained (because many high-income employees would still want them), Ghilarducci estimates that the guaranteed accounts, along with Social Security, could allow employees to retire when they want to and have 70 percent of their pre-retirement income.
Ghilarducci’s proposal is a bit more complex and has some nuances, but it’s very interesting and definitely something worth further examination.
I am not sure how feasible her idea is, given the heavily entrenched interests in the 401(k) industry (financial services companies, consultants, etc.). But again, I think the point is that the Pension Protection Act didn’t solve all of our retirement savings issues. It just shaved a little off the tip of the iceberg.
And although many employers may be concerned about the pending talent shortage, I very much doubt they want to retain disgruntled retirees who are working only because they have to.
Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.
With work/life balance, it’s all about one portion of person’s life suffering for the sake of another. Friedman doesn’t believe it has to be that way.
In his new book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Friedman talks about how people can be successful at home, at work, within their community and as individuals all at once. According to Friedman, the trick is taking a more integrated approach to how we view the different areas of our life, rather than trying to balance them all.
“Total Leadership represents a new step in the evolution for the work/life field: it is a systematic method for producing four-way wins that is tailored to fit the lives of individuals.”
Wow, that sounds lovely. But how do you do it?
Total Leadership provides readers with a series of exercises that they can do with one or more partners to figure out what their priorities are, who the core stakeholders are in their lives and what can they do to realign their lives to better meet their own needs, as well as the needs of the stakeholders.
I think Friedman’s book has a lot of great suggestions. The exercises are valuable, really, for anyone who feels that there are some disconnects between how they spend their time and how they’d like to be spending it. (And who doesn’t fall into that category?)
And I agree with Friedman’s thesis that there needs to be a new dialogue that goes beyond the idea of work/life balance. As a working mother of a young infant, I know all too well that there really is no such thing.
But I’m really skeptical about how likely it is that most people could sit down with their bosses and speak frankly about their needs. Even if they couch it in “I statements” and ask their bosses what they want from them, as Friedman suggests, I know a lot of people whose bosses don’t even ask them how their weekends were, let alone have conversations about how they are doing on a personal front.
The fact is that those employees who are feeling this disconnect the most are the ones whose bosses are least likely to be receptive to these conversations.
However, maybe this will start to change as employees become more disgruntled about their lack of work/life balance—or integration, as Friedman sees it.
As a result, it’s possible that more bosses are going to be forced into having these discussions, and if you are one of these bosses, Friedman’s Total Leadership would be a great book to share with your workforce.
The June 24 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article introducing readers to the radical idea that a nursing home could be a place where you or a loved one might want to live, not just a place in which to die. The story followed one of the industry pioneers, physician Bill Thomas, who developed an elder care model called Green Houses. Step into a Green House and you step into a small, tight knit community of 10 to 12 residents and their caregivers, where people live together in a ranch-style home in an atmosphere that’s more like a family than a facility.
What the Journal article did not mention was that not only are Green Houses improving the lives of the elderly who live there, but they also are transforming the workplace of the aides who care for the residents. For the workforce management perspective on nursing homes, I turned to Beth Baker’s Old Age in a New Age: The Promise of Transformative Nursing Homes, an engaging, compassionate and well-researched book that anyone who plans to live beyond 80 would benefit from reading. The book landed in my inbox a day before the Journal article, so I welcomed the chance to offer a workforce management response to a promising development in the $122 billion nursing home industry.
Baker’s book includes a chapter on the dire workforce shortages, high turnover and poor working conditions of nursing homes, all of which have contributed to their reputation as destinations of last resort. Most HR executives know well enough our nation’s shortage of nurses. And many know of a similarly looming shortage of nursing home aides, a crisis that is expected to grow as baby boomers age. With the help of hard stats and previous research, Baker frames this issue in no uncertain terms. Turnover among aides—the people who are the homes’ frontline workers—is 70 percent nationally and 100 percent in 10 states. Annually, staff turnover costs the average nursing home $150,000, while absenteeism adds another $75,000, Baker writes. Nationally this waste in the system totals an estimated $4.1 billion, of which $2.5 billion is paid by taxpayers through Medicare and Medicaid.
Nursing home aides have said in previous studies that the working conditions that are most important to them are having enough staff to care for residents, being treated with respect, working as a team and having a good relationship with supervisors. For reasons that have to do with regulation, economics and entrenched interests, nursing homes have been slow to change, let alone transform themselves. But, as Baker writes, it is transformation that is necessary if nursing homes are to attract and retain workers who, in turn, feel empowered to care for and contribute to the lives of residents.
Enter the Green House. In 2004, Baker visited a transformational nursing home, one of Bill Thomas’ Green Houses, in Tupelo, Mississippi. Here nursing aides are called shahbazim. Thomas borrowed the word from the Farsi word shahbaz, meaning “royal falcon,” an image that evokes courage, loyalty and strength. He likens them to “midwives of elderhood.”
Interestingly, the word shahbaz, however foreign, has helped give new life to the job. Baker wrote to me in an e-mail: “When the first Green House opened in Tupelo, they ran an ad for a CNA [aide] to work in an innovative setting. They got 2 responses. When they ran an ad for a Shahbaz they got 70 responses. Such is the power of language!”
Rather than being the bottom rung in a hierarchy, shahbazim are in put in charge to “protect, sustain and nurture” the elders for whom they care. They are the head of a household of 10 to 12 residents, far fewer than the 20 or more residents nursing aides normally care for. They are trained to be both caregivers who help residents dress and wash and homemakers. The shahbazim cook three meals a day for the residents and deal with their everyday needs, desires and problems. For their domestic efforts, the aides are paid more. They have more responsibility and feel better about themselves and their employer, Baker writes. Nurses, doctors, therapists and social workers make house calls, and in doing so, they become members of a team who bring their services to people, rather than being the top of a social hierarchy in which nursing aides are at the bottom. Baker describes meeting one shahbaz, Rena, an 11-year veteran of nursing homes:
“As we talked, she puttered around the kitchen with a proprietary air. On the counter were bowls of fruit, chips, a layer cake, and a cookie jar. Part of her training includes cooking; many of the young women grew up on fast food and had few culinary skills before becoming shahbazim. Rena kept a watchful eye on Mrs. Adams, who was finishing her meal at her own slow pace.”
Baker shows other examples of nursing homes combating turnover by giving workers career advancement opportunities, a strategy similar to Workforce Management Optimas Award winner Sun Healthcare.
But the transformation of work and place is most evident in Thomas’ Green Houses. The power to make decisions and to care for residents is in the hands of aides who no longer feel mistreated, disrespected or unable to do their job.
HR executives and other business-minded readers, of course, want to know the return on such an investment. Does it reduce turnover and eliminate wasteful costs? Baker reports that turnover at the Green House in Tupelo dropped by 10 percent. Another nursing home in Rochester, New York, saved $4 million a year in temporary worker costs by including certain principles advocated by Thomas. A shortage of extensive data on Green Houses should change. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Thomas recently received a $15 million investment from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to build Green Houses throughout the country and study their impact. Perhaps only then will we know whether these nursing homes are as transformational as they seem.
= Member Only
I’m a sucker for management books. I read a lot of them—a habit I picked up in business school—and over the course of time I’ve developed a pretty good eye for what is truly great management thinking, as well as what is just run-of-the-mill management chatter. 
by the late, great Peter Drucker, 
by Michael Porter, 
by Collins and his partner Jerry Porras, or maybe even something more current, like Bob Sutton’s 
or 
by Malcolm Gladwell. Now that would have made for a great book.
, and that certainly belongs in this volume. You can also make a case for the excerpts from 
. I don’t know Jeffrey Krames, but why would you possibly have someone like him writing about the management wisdom of Jack Welch instead of simply publishing an excerpt from one of the many management books written by the great Jack himself? It’s like traveling to China and seeing a movie about the Great Wall instead of walking on it yourself.
Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.
The June 24 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article introducing readers to the radical idea that a nursing home could be a place where you or a loved one might want to live, not just a place in which to die. The story followed one of the industry pioneers, physician Bill Thomas, who developed an elder care model called Green Houses. Step into a Green House and you step into a small, tight knit community of 10 to 12 residents and their caregivers, where people live together in a ranch-style home in an atmosphere that’s more like a family than a facility.
