January 2, 2008 1:12 PM

Flexible work in 2008 - and beyond
Posted by Douglas Eisenhartat 1:12 PM

Happy New Year from The Job Blog!

Your esteemed editor took a nice long break, in keeping with his British wife's everything-shuts-down for-Christmas-and-New-Year's dictum. I happily succumbed.

Which leads me directly to the latest Maggie Jackson "Balancing Acts" column that offers some encouraging news about the emerging flexible workplace of the future:

In brief, they [Deloitte-Touche] realized that workplaces still operate largely on Industrial Age models of uninterrupted, male careers and mom-based care giving. These days, Generation Y wants time off to volunteer and dual-earner parents struggle to do it all, and yet "flexible work" -now available to 65 percent of employees nationwide - is largely treated as an exception to the norm, granted if you have a willing manager.

Instead, Deloitte's "Mass Career Customization" program, despite its rather clunky name, assumes that flexibility is the new norm. Deloitte now talks of a "career lattice," not a ladder, with many paths leading to different kinds of success. Scale back to care for an elderly parent, for instance, then return to the fast track. By the end of next year, all 40,000 US-based Deloitte employees will be able to customize their careers by periodically adjusting their work pace, job setting and schedule, workload, and company role under the program.

Jackson says this trend will gradually emerge across the workplace, so that every worker will be able to manage his or her own career flexibility, according to their own personal needs, over the course of their working lives.

Read the full piece - and take heart in the New Year. Who knows, you might even get your life back.