Book Excerpt August 20, 2010, 2:27PM EST

Book Excerpt: The Corporate Lattice

In an edited excerpt from their new book, Cathleen Benko and Molly Anderson contrast the traditional corporate ladder with the new, less structured workplace

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…Workplaces aren't what they used to be. Organizational structures are flatter, challenging traditional talent development models that rely primarily on upward progression. Knowledge and service work dominate the economy. As a result of technological advances and globalization, workers are less tethered to traditional offices and set hours. And the makeup of work is changing, too. Companies use forty times as many projects now as they used twenty years ago, heightening the need for teamwork. Work is changing so fast that the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 60 percent of all new jobs in the twenty-first century will require skills that only 20 percent of current employees possess.

The workforce isn't what it used to be either. Family structures have changed markedly, with profound implications for a corporate ladder model predicated on a household arrangement that, by and large, no longer exists to support it. Until the 1960s, two-thirds of U.S. households were traditional, defined as Dad going to work while Mom stayed at home. That number now is down to 17 percent.

Women constitute half of the U.S. workforce and are the primary breadwinners for nearly 40 percent of families. Men in dual-career, dual-caregiver couples now cite more work-life conflict than women do. What's more, younger generations are bringing different attitudes to work at the same time that older workers are looking for options to stay in the labor market. Almost two-thirds (70 percent) of baby boomers and 92 percent of Millennials cite career-life fit as a top priority. And along almost every dimension, employees are more diverse.

These seismic shifts leave companies struggling to meet the challenges of the changing world of work. They signal the end of traditional assumptions about what it takes to achieve and sustain a high-performance workplace.

LATTICE WAYS TO WORK, PARTICIPATE AND BUILD CAREERS

In mathematics, a lattice is a three-dimensional structure that extends infinitely in any direction. In the corporate world, the lattice model organizes and advances a company's existing incremental efforts into a comprehensive, strategic response to the altered corporate landscape. The [lattice] metaphor also describes the changes in work as virtual, dynamic, and project-based. Its grid resembles nodes on a network, each with the possibility of connecting "anywhere, anytime" to the others to form teams and communities.

This trend is fueled by a combination of globalization, cost cutting, and technology advances that provide radically different options for when, where, and how work gets done. Tanya Clemons, senior vice president and chief talent officer at Pfizer, sums it up this way: "In the era of the knowledge worker, it's just a totally new game now in terms of how work gets done and even what constitutes work these days."

Companies that do invest in improved work options to meet employee demands are finding that the company also benefits through improved performance. This is what Frontier Communications, one of the largest rural local exchange carriers in the United States, learned when it implemented a comprehensive remote work program.

While consolidating the operations of several call centers, Frontier negotiated with its union a provision that displaced call center workers could work from home. "We took a 'Let's try it and see' attitude and were very surprised with how well things worked out," says Frontier chairman and CEO Maggie Wilderotter. "What was intended as a concession in a union negotiation turned out to deliver significant productivity improvement."

Indeed, 30 percent of Frontier's customer service agents now work from home, and, on average, these workers are 25 percent more productive than those who work in call centers. Retention of work-at-home agents is also 100 percent better than retention of agents who work at the center.

With its strong horizontal as well as diagonal and vertical supports, the visual picture of a lattice describes organizational relationships, interactions, and communication unconstrained by top-down hierarchy.