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Gregg Geller & Jonathan Weiss, CBS 2 HD News
NEW YORK (CBS) ― Cathy Benko, co-author of "Mass Career Customization: Aligning The Workplace With Today's Nontraditional Workforce," spoke with WCBSTV.com about how the changing personal and workplace needs of employees are helping to spur great changes in American companies today.

Q: What changes are taking place in the workplace?

A: There are six trends that make this an extraordinary time. First, there are changing demographics, with more workers retiring than joining the workforce.

Second, there is a shift in family structure. In the past, two-thirds were traditional -- one spouse in the workforce, usually the husband, and the other spouse at home. However, today a mere 17 percent of U.S. family structures fit that model. Instead there are single parents, blended families, singles, dual working households, etc.

Third, is the role of women. Today, women make up the majority of the available entry-level workforce. They are also the majority of undergraduate and graduate school graduates. If you look at women's career paths relative to men, you'll find they are dissimilar, in that women are much more likely to exit the workplace, for an average two years. It has profound implications on the workplace.

Fourth, the changing attitudes of "Boomer" men. Today, they find themselves entering their 50s and 60s, and 86 percent of them do not want to make the personal sacrifices they have made in the past for their companies. Today, they are not the majority of the workforce, but they disproportionately hold positions of authority, the majority of the executive suites.

Fifth, the younger generations are pretty clear with what they want in the workplace. By and large, they are not willing to make the sacrifices their predecessors did. They want time for family, to give back to their community, so they can enjoy all of these aspects in life. The division of work at home and childrearing seem to also be more evenly balanced, between men and women.

And sixth, is technology. In the past, there was no enabling tool. We argue it is the trend that has helped allow for a time and place to respond to the changes. Technology is so pervasive that it enables a way to rethink how work is done.

Q: How are the more traditional companies responding to these changes?

If you look at Boomer men, their attitudes are reshaping, partially because they now have children in the workplace -- daughters often, and they would say they "get it" now. If you look at Boomer men who came up in the traditional model, that's all they know. They think, of course there's someone home, of course the dog is walked, dinner is on the table and the kids are taken care of. As time goes on, 83 percent of workers do not have that structure.

These business leaders are the target market for "Mass Career Customization." Leaders need to accept and implement this structural shift. Even within this population, we think of younger workers trying to balance family and home life. But there is another application of worker, which is the Boomer. What we're hearing from Boomers is they'd like to mix it up in terms of their level of engagement. They also want to have opportunities to dial up and calibrate what they can give to their organization and even ratchet down on the way out so as not to stop working abruptly upon retirement.

There's a pocket of workers that are underused, empty-nesters. They previously didn't have a way to engage at a higher level. One of the things we're saying is you have to find a way to re-calibrate how to grow your career in different ways at various points in your career. "You want to send me on an international assignment? That's great. When I was in my childrearing years that might have been a hardship. But I now can be re-energized." That's mass career customization.

Q: As the Chief Talent Office at Deloitte & Touche, how have you implemented this program in your workplace?

A: Let's acknowledge the workplace has dramatically changed. One way we proved that to our own people is to go through an exercise, basically handing everyone a worksheet and had them plot their own career. We put 20 percent of our people on this model this fiscal year. The remainder will be added in the next fiscal year.

Q: How are these changes beneficial to companies? It seems that giving employees the option to dial down could be tough if too many employees take advantage of it at the same time.

A: At some point the laws of scarcity are going to take hold. Remember more employees are retiring than entering the workforce. We are all going to be looking to acquire new talent and retain the talent we have. The workforce has fundamentally changed, and now is the time for the workplace to catch up with the changes.

For companies, it's not just what you can do for me in the moment, but the relationship we can garner in the course of a lifetime. Individuals have often made this decision by changing jobs. This is an opportunity to pair the employee and employers at a whole new level.

Just look at how mass product customization works. It's the notion of one size doesn't fit all. In the world of mass career customization, we are finding increased employee satisfaction, loyalty, referrals, and our costs of acquisition have gone down. We're redesigning the workplace, creating innovative programs to give our people more control over how, when and where they work, as well as more career options.

Q: What should an employee do if they don't work at a company that offers these opportunities?

A: Bring to the attention of management that these shifts are underway. There's a new expression in our company: "Everyone who has a career also has a life."

Companies should not be afraid to implement these changes. In fact, we realized there are more people who used the opportunity to dial up and use the opportunity to share that they wanted to take on more responsibility. I would say 95 percent of the people just want to stay in their current level of engagement. Of the 5 percent who do want to change, most wanted to dial up, by a ratio of 4 to 1.

We learned there's more capacity in our organization, pent up capacity, and we see that this saves us money.

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