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From
July 2009 Resource
People
Power:
Mass career customization restructures both the
expectations and the mechanics of how careers are built.
By
Jennifer Rankin
Conventional wisdom holds that career success takes the shape of a ladder.
Narrow, sequential and unidirectional, it offers evenly spaced, clearly defined
rungs. Climb carefully and there’s a reward for each step taken—a promotion
from assistant vice president to second vice president, from a cubicle to an
office with a door (but no window), from lunch in a brown bag to lunch at the
club. Step sideways and you either drop down a few rungs or fall off the ladder
entirely.
This model, which emerged during the Industrial Age and took off during the
post-World War II business boom, has definite military underpinnings. It rewards
careful, incremental progress and conformity and values the group more than the
individual.
Inward-looking and hierarchical, the model proved to be highly effective and
efficient in an environment where a handful of executives had access to
information unavailable to either employees or customers and the market place
rewarded one-size-fits-all products. It also meshed well with the traditional
family structure, which is rare today. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, only 17 percent of U.S. households today are traditional with a
husband who works outside the home and a wife who does not, compared to 63
percent of households in earlier generations.
This model also rested upon an employer-employee covenant: You put the company
first and we’ll take care of you. Enter Jack Welch, who many say was the first
American CEO to weaken that agreement by jettisoning 100,000 GE employees
between 1981 and 1985, a move that earned him the moniker Neutron Jack. Dozens
of his peers swiftly followed suit.
Although Welch was a man ahead of his time, it wasn’t too long before his
fellow CEOs began to face tremendous pressure to deliver results in the face of
skyrocketing benefits costs, international competitors wielding cheap labor,
green mailers who could buy them out of business, investors who insisted on
quick returns for their stocks, and customers who demanded top drawer products
at rock bottom prices. These and other pressures compelled them to unleash lean
and mean operating structures that further undermined the old covenant.
So how have employees reacted to two decades of disappearing job security and
increased workloads? On the upside, most have toughened up and gotten with the
new program. On the downside, many have embraced the Me, Inc. philosophy of
looking out for No. 1, which has had an unexpected consequence for corporations:
employee disengagement.
According to extensive studies conducted by Gallup, only 29 percent of employees
are engaged in their work. Some 54 percent are disengaged (mentally checked out)
and 17 percent are actively disengaged (sabotaging the efforts of their
co-workers). This means that every US$ 1 million a company spends on payroll
delivers US$ 290,000 worth of effort.
Also driving employee disengagement is the herculean task of trying to balance a
demanding job with family commitments, community service and spiritual growth.
So is the inability to grow professionally on the job. Gallup found, however,
that the biggest driver of employee disengagement is poor management, which is a
direct reflection of corporate culture.
"The greatest advantage any business could have over the competition is not
its products, but its engaged employees," writes Renee Cormier, president
and owner of Powerhouse Conferences, in an April article for Training
Magazine. "Through its studies Gallup found that more than half of
disengaged employees would never recommend their employers’ product or service
to others, but most of the engaged employees would. Engaging employees is the
only way to have lasting success in business."
There has been one constant throughout these work place changes: the career
ladder. Career ladders are not going away any time soon. Companies are
comfortable with them. They serve a structural purpose, Type-A personalities
need mountains to climb, and they are the linchpin of most over-the-counter
employee compensation systems. Nevertheless, some executives are starting to ask
if career ladders can meet the needs of today’s companies and employees and if
the model is capable of delivering the products and services customers demand
today. One company that’s questioning the status quo and exploring its options
is Thrivent Financial
for Lutherans.
Formed in 2002 with the merger of Appleton, Wis.-based Aid Association for
Lutherans and Minneapolis, Minn.-based Lutheran Brotherhood, two of America’s
oldest and most prominent fraternal benefit societies, Thrivent Financial now is
the nation’s largest fraternal insurer.
As of December 31, 2008, the company had 2.6 million members, US$ 162 billion of
life insurance in force, US$ 61.9 billion in assets under management, 2,926 home
office employees, and 2,694 financial representatives. Thrivent ranks 409 on the
Fortune 500 list.
A fraternal benefit society is a not-for-profit organization that provides
insurance to its members, who share a religious, ethnic, vocational or other
common bond. Like mutual insurers, fraternal societies are not publicly traded
and their policyholders are members who receive excess revenues in the form of
an annual dividend.
Despite their unique place in the financial services sector, fraternal societies
are still insurance companies grappling with most of the same business pressures
as mutual and stock companies. For starters, their members can and do buy
insurance, annuities, mutual funds and bank products from non-fraternal
organizations, so their products must be competitive. And while they may not
issue stock, their investment portfolios have taken the same hit as their
non-fraternal competitors during the current recession, as have the securities
underpinning their products. They also face the same human resources issues,
among them recruiting talent, rewarding performance, offering a competitive
benefits package, developing a clear employee value proposition and so on.
Value Proposition
Thrivent is in an excellent position to meet those challenges. For starters, it
has a compelling and clear mission as a faith-based organization called to
improve the quality of life of its members, who are Lutherans, their families
and their communities.
To do just that, Thrivent adheres to five core values: stewardship (what is best
for members drives every decision); accountability (employees own the results of
their individual actions); growth (required of both individuals and the company
in order to be a vibrant resource for members); integrity (we do what is right
and treat each other with honesty, respect and dignity in order to forge caring
and trusting relationships with members and each other); and community (we are a
community that demonstrates genuine concern for the whole person and all
employees work together to balance the demands of personal and professional
life).
A number of environmental factors compelled Thrivent Financial to re-invent its
approach to career management (see Business Drivers) and to tap Barbara
Foote, FLMI, vice president of its Enterprise Effectiveness and Talent Office,
and her team to spearhead the effort. "Our goal," says Foote, "is
to build a career culture that drives stronger business results by engaging the
workforce in building a long-term career with Thrivent Financial that is in
alignment with their aspirations and life needs," and she gives several
reasons why:
*
We are in the business of building long-term relationships with our members.
Having talent that can deliver on this long-term proposition is critical to our
ability to compete.
*
The workforce is changing. It’s more diverse and people have different
expectations. If we are to attract and retain talent in the future, prospective
and current employees need to see opportunities to develop themselves over time
as well as the flexibility to make career pivots throughout life’s cycles.
*
We’re committed to building a diverse workforce and a diverse workforce has
different needs. Family structures are different, there are more women in the
workforce, and the workforce has become multigenerational. All of this has an
impact on why we need to think differently about how careers
are built.
*We
need to be able to pivot through faster market changes and cycles and to do so
we will need an
adaptable workforce.
*
Financial services organizations are always challenged with retention of field
financial representatives. While Thrivent Financial has traditionally done
better than the industry, there is substantial room for improvement.
"We take the Thrivent values
very seriously," she says. "To demonstrate our commitment to the core
value of community, we want to excel at helping people make intentional
decisions and choices about their careers to fit their lives. That’s what this
is about—having ongoing conversations about what is important to people and
how they can best make a difference in the business."
In 2007, Foote learned about
something called mass career customization at a thought leadership conference,
where she bumped into a team from Deloitte, which pioneered the concept at their
own firm. Intrigued, she brought the idea back to Thrivent and engaged a
Deloitte team of consultants briefly to kick-start the process. At the same
time, a handful of executives had expressed interest in improving workforce
engagement in the area of
career satisfaction.
Mass career customization
restructures both the expectations and the mechanics of how careers are built.
It is based on the view that the career journey of knowledge workers
increasingly looks like sine waves of work, with climbing and falling levels of
engagement with work over time. What’s so new about that? In a word, lots.
When you work for a company that embraces the philosophy, your career, your
professional development and your chance to continue making meaningful
contributions are not sidelined as you dial in, out and around the organization.
Proponents replace the corporate
ladder model for career progression with a lattice ladder model. According to
Deloitte, the corporate lattice model of career progression allows for multiple
paths upward, taking into account the changing needs of both the individual and
the organization across various intervals of time. Employees can move faster,
slower or change direction. Career lattices foster transparency and shared
responsibility for career planning. And they can result in increased loyalty,
decreased acquisition and retention costs, and increased productivity through
greater employee satisfaction and career-life fit.
Industry First
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans was the first company to implement mass career
customization into its career planning approach. Its first step was developing a
pilot prototype. "We took a rapid-cycle design approach," says Foote.
"We assembled representatives from Thrivent’s major divisions,
deliberately choosing a mix of managers, individual contributors and creatives.
Then we gave the 15-member team a fact pack that contained analytical data such
as employee engagement data, human capital data, stakeholder interview data and
external talent marketplace trends. We told them the pilot prototype they
created had to work for the entire organization. We also asked them to design a
prototype that embraced our corporate culture."
The team delivered the prototype in two days. A key outcome is the Career GPS,
an original and innovative navigational toolkit that helps individuals assess
what is important in a career, how work fits into their life needs and how they
can fit their strengths and interests with Thrivent’s needs.
Instead of doing a full-blown, company-wide rollout of the prototype, Thrivent
is taking it one division at a time. Marketing was the first key sponsor. The
division’s workforce engagement data showed its employees were highly engaged,
but they wanted more career development.
So what steps does an interested employee take to customize his/her career at
Thrivent? First, the person completes the Career GPS. The career GPS takes the
employee through four areas:
*Goals/Values:
Setting career goals and clarifying what is important to the individual.
*
Life/Work Profile: Clarifying the life/work
choices the individual is seeking (based on the mass career customization
model).
*Sweet
Spot: Bringing together how the employee can best bring strengths and passions
to make a difference at Thrivent not only in the work of the business, but
also in volunteerism.
When the GPS is complete, the
employee schedules a career conversation with his/her manager. Together, they
discuss the GPS and discuss potential areas of development, which takes the
shape of a lattice, not a ladder, based upon Thrivent’s 70-20-10 model for
career development:
*Seventy
percent of the employee’s development will come from on-the-job experiences
that are relevant, demanding and meaningful. Employees are encouraged to build
a broad base of experiences in their "lattice" around different
experiences rather than focusing on specific jobs. For example, an employee
who aspires to a broad management role seeks experiences such as fix-it or
turn-it-around; strategic role; start-up; line-to-staff switch; staff-to-line
switch; cross moves; scale (size) shift; scope (complexity) shift; crisis
management; change management; influence without authority; significant people
demands; project/task force membership; and project/task
force leadership.
*Twenty
percent will come from coaches, mentors and peer networks.
*
Ten percent will come from formal education, training programs and licensing
tracks.
This shifts the development
conversation from "What class should I sign up for this year?" to
"How can I use my job or a project to gain experiences I need?" It
places career ownership with the employee and development support with
the manager.
"Organizations are different
and employees are different," says Foote. "As a result, the
traditional corporate ladder is a much less effective route to individual
success and to organizational success. The career ladder rewards an employee for
developing one deep skill over time. In a business climate that demands
adaptability and agility, ladders hurt the workforce and hurt the organization.
What is required are broad, on-the-job, in-the-trenches opportunities to make a
difference."
This does not mean that core HR
systems for, say, compensation, education and training, or performance reviews
go away. What it does mean, however, is those functions, typically veiled in
quasi-secrecy, take a back seat to employees having fully transparent career
conversations with their managers and that all employees, not just the fast
trackers, can tackle meaningful, developmental work that advances their
prospects
at Thrivent.
"We don’t view career
customization as a function or a program," adds Foote. "We see it as a
cultural shift and as a philosophy/process for building a career. The process is
supported by the Employee and Career Development area in Human Resources. We
call the initiative Building a Career Culture.
At this point, Thrivent is
primarily measuring the impact of the initiative in terms of employee
engagement. Foote reports good early results, with a definite uptick in employee
engagement. In addition, employees who have participated in the pilots and
engaged in the process have found it to be helpful in thinking more holistically
about their careers and giving them the tools to do so. Finally, the first
sponsoring executives have been encouraging their employees to get experience in
other areas of the company or to volunteer for special assignments. They also
are talking up the initiative around the company.
"I firmly believe that the
most important thing a manager can do is help team members find roles where
their passion intersects with the needs of the business," says Bill
McKinney, vice president, Distribution Development, who implemented the process
last year in the first pilot group. "I believe that in many cases people
work at only 75 to 80 percent of their potential when they are just ‘doing
their job’. When you help them align their work with something they are truly
passionate about, you will often see people dedicate 120 percent of their
energy, taking on new opportunities at higher levels of engagement. That’s a
50 percent improvement in their
individual productivity."
Kirsten Spreck, director of
Corporate Real Estate, is currently in the process of implementing career
customization. "Introducing the career culture process to our team has been
a rewarding journey for us. One of the most important things a leader can do is
to build a culture where individuals can match their personal aspirations and
passions with organizational needs and opportunities. Our team has really
enjoyed the open conversations and the possibilities that have been identified.
I expect greater levels of engagement and productivity as we start transforming
these conversations
into actions."
Mass career customization, then, is a structural response to workforce changes
that are already well underway. Thrivent Financial is embracing those changes
and expects to reap great rewards from its new career culture. Will you be
next?
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