What are your current priorities in terms of work-life issues, from both a policy and research perspective?

The Vanier Institute's focus is the health and well being of families, so we study patterns of family functioning. This obviously directs our attention to the emergence of the dual earner family, now statistically and culturally normative. This carries major consequences for individuals and their families, as well as for the employers who rely and depend very much on the energy, commitment and motivation of the individuals who arrive at the workplace each morning. On the basis of the appreciation of that dramatic change, the Institute has looked at work and family for a number of years, trying to understand what kinds of stresses, tensions, and strains are experienced by individual members of families as they try to juggle the competing demands of their families and jobs.

We understand that the decisions that get made at the kitchen table have an influence and an effect on what happens at work. This effect is seen in terms of loyalty, absenteeism, and turnover.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing employers today, and what might be keeping them from effectively supporting their employees?

I think the first one is this notion that all employees have to be visible all the time and supervised very closely, the attitude that employees are there to take advantage of them. If they started from a different premise - that there is a sense of loyalty and a sense of willingness to contribute to the maximum - then policy directions would be quite different. I think that's an old pattern that just refuses to budge.

The second is we know that employers with the means to do research and willingness to make investments in their people can find advantage by making changes, creating an innovative set of working conditions that actually attracts and retains employees. Unfortunately, the majority of employers do not fall into this group.

The other side of the coin is that the employees who are trying to balance their family and work responsibilities need to do it with integrity, with the interests of the employer as well as their own interests at heart. It's a reciprocal arrangement. And that's not something we're used to doing as a culture. We usually think of advantage for self, or entitlement for self. We're at a point where we're asking employees to consider not only their own needs but also the needs of the employer, as well as vice versa.

What arguments are there for employers to move away from the face-time model?

There are pragmatic challenges that any employer is going to face when confronted by the reality of the family responsibilities of their labour force. It's challenging, for example, to figure out how to introduce part-time work with pro-rated benefits, it's challenging to figure out job sharing. That it's a challenge to make these changes reflects an underlying cultural assumption, this notion of the firm division of family and job, which was always an illusion. The woman in the 50's and early 60's who stayed at home subsidized the productivity of the man in the labour force. We have to be cautious about a naïve historical perspective that says there was this period of time when employers could simply ignore family obligations and responsibilities. They might have ignored them, but they were paying for them, through what was known as a family wage. That has evaporated.

How do you think the current economy affects how employers handle work-life balance?

The labour pool isn't what it used to be, so the assumption that I can always replace whoever chooses to leave is no longer valid. As the labour pool shrinks, we have to compete more and more to attract and retain. When we start to compete on how we treat our staff and the conditions under which we work, suddenly we become attractive as an employer. In a sense we're being asked and invited to innovate by virtue of what it takes in order to hire somebody.

There are ups and downs of the economic cycle, but employers who make an investment in their labour force, especially in a knowledge-based economy, don't squander that investment…you don't let him or her walk out the door. There are not many managers who are going to let somebody steal the Xerox machine, which is worth $30,000 to 35,000 nowadays. And to be unresponsive to the family circumstances of an employee is exactly the same as letting a valuable piece of equipment leave the building.

Do you think that the Nexus generation is impacting the way employers view work-life issues?

The first premise is that they want a life, because they've observed the 60-hour weeks of their parents, and they know what a non-life looks like. To a certain extent, the price that was paid by that way of working was paid by them. The second premise is that, money, by itself, does not produce happiness. It produced a big hassle, it produced a lot of worldly possessions, but it did not produce happiness. Thirdly, they watched their parents get fired or downsized as soon as things got rough, and all of the investment that the parents made within the company wasn't taken into account, so why would you be loyal? In the end they've had good teachers, good mentors, in saying the first thing is to recognise what one needs. One needs balance. And this generation is not going to commit to an employer that's not going to commit to them.

However, if you simply say that the young cohort has different expectations and therefore will carry those expectations into the future, you're assuming that it is simply the demographic change that's going to affect and shape the future. It suggests that we do not in fact need to fundamentally question cultural values and really take a hard, critical look at the kinds of assumptions that have driven our corporate cultures, within a context of industrial, modernized, economies, and an economy that is now becoming perhaps even more family-unfriendly than was the traditional industrial economy, because of globalization, because of technological innovation, and because of knowledge-based technologies that seem to demand more of us for more hours each day and more hours each week.

How should the debate be broadened?

There are many models available to us, but we tend to look primarily south of the border, to the one nation who does the least. It's difficult to get people to look at Europe, which has had significant work-family policies, vacation policies, childcare policies. Everybody points to the high cost, but ironically, during the last recession it's those very countries, the companies within those countries, that did very well. We haven't learnt that lesson, that in attending to the human side of the equation they stabilize, from a corporate and economic point of view, some of the ups and downs that they're battling with now. But we keep looking at it and saying we can't afford it. We choose not to look at them at our own expense and our own peril.

One of the dilemmas is that we make our decisions in the present tense. Most of the time we try to redress problems from the past. And yet, one of the important things about doing the trends analysis is that we and others do it to try to invite people to take a longer range historical perspective, and to think further ahead. You've got 50 percent of senior civil servants retiring in the next 10 to 12 years. You've got 50 percent of teachers retiring. There is a major shortage in nursing already. Those are consequences of short-term decision-making. Employers from all sectors don't have a long timeframe in mind very often, and neither do governments. They think in terms of the next quarterly report or the next business cycle, or the next annual budget or the next election. I think somebody has got to do some serious work to understand that these time frames are no longer sufficient to lead us to wise decisions.

How would you describe an ideal working environment?

The ideal working environment offers challenge. It offers opportunity to exercise that challenge with integrity, where you don't have to lie to your boss, you can acknowledge your limitations, ask for assistance when you need it, where if you own up to something, you're not damned. Secondly, it's an organisation that focuses on the outcome and not on the means. An ideal place is where the boss leads by example, and does not say, "I don't take holidays." He's the first one to say, "I'm booking August off because I'm taking the month off to be with my wife." So it's an organisation that's led by example. It's not that complicated. It's really about where I can exercise my functions with integrity, and have an expectation that I will be treated with integrity. Where I'm treated like a human being.