Discoveries in the Making
Toward a better understanding of work-life balance
There is a great deal of commentary about the stresses of the modern, high-tech workplace, much of it focusing on the challenges many individuals confront in balancing their personal lives and their careers. As familiar and widely recognized as this issue may be, most of this discussion remains limited to anecdotal observation, with little in the way of objective, scientific analysis. Laurent Lapierre, an assistant professor in the School of Management, has been introducing a more rigorous approach to this issue. Working with carefully identified groups of people, he has taken specific measures of how frequently work activities interfere with family life and vice versa, linking these conflicts to particular forms of behaviour by employees and their families, to specific "family-friendly" organizational and managerial practices, and to symptoms of stress. Past and future results of his research will help to define with more accuracy the factors that can enrich the quality of employees’ lives, both at work and away from the office. In this way, he is developing strategies that should enable organizations to get the most out of the people who work for them, while enabling those same people to enjoy all aspects of their lives.
Laurent Lapierre, Assistant Professor, School of Management
Telephone: (613) 562-5800 x 4914
Email: lapierre@management.uOttawa.ca