Reducing Work-Life Conflict: What Works? What Doesn't?

6.0 Conclusions and Recommendations

At the beginning of this report, we posed the following five questions:

1. How do Canadian employees cope with competing work and family demands? Specifically:
   • What resources do Canadian organizations provide to help employees cope with work and family conflict?
   • What personal coping strategies are used by Canadian employees?
   • What strategies are used within families?
2. What advice can we offer organizations interested in reducing the levels of role overload, work-to-family interference, family-to-work interference and caregiver strain in their workforce?
3. What advice can we provide to individual employees about how best to cope with role overload, work-to-family interference, family-to-work interference and caregiver strain?
4. What advice can we offer to Canadian families about how best to cope with role overload, work-to-family interference, family-to-work interference and caregiver strain?
5. How do gender, job type and dependent care status affect:
   • the use of these different coping strategies
   • the type of advice we would offer (i.e. what coping strategies are more effective for women? for men? for employees with dependent care? for employees without dependent care? for managers and professionals? for those in other positions?)

The following steps were followed to address these questions. A literature review was conducted first to identify potential moderators of work-life conflict. These moderators were then categorized into three main groups: those that operate at the organizational level, those that work at the individual level, and those that are used within the family. Analysis of means using ANOVAs was then used to determine how effective the different moderators were at helping employees cope with the four different forms of work-life conflict examined in this study.

This chapter summarizes the key findings with respect to each of the five research questions posed above and offers some recommendations about how each form of work-life conflict can be addressed, given what we know from this research. The chapter is organized into four sections. Section 1 outlines key findings with respect to the availability of various supportive organizational policies and practices and the relationship between the use of these supports and employee work-life conflict. Section 2 summarizes the main findings concerning the relationship between the use of personal coping strategies and work-life conflict. Section 3 delineates the connection between the use of various coping strategies that can be used within the family unit and work-life conflict. The chapter concludes in section 4 with a list of key recommendations to organizations, individual employees and families on how to cope with the various forms of work-life conflict.