In 2011, Peter Berg, Mary Hamman and Christopher Ruhm received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study gradual retirement and the effects of employment conditions on one's decision to extend working life beyond normal retirement age. This project uses a German matched employer-employee dataset (LIAB) to examine a variety of questions on retirement flexibiltiy.

This stream of research and practical tools first grew out of a national telework research project on whether using telework led to higher or lower work family conflict and productivity in a sample of professional employees and managers across the U.S. Ellen Kossek, Brenda Lautsch and Susan Eaton interviewed formal telework policy users and non teleworkers and their managers. We found that many people viewed as “nonteleworkers” were actually working in the evenings and weekends as overwork hours, sometimes as much as some nonteleworkers. We published several articles on boundary management and managing telework that can be found in the publications section of this website.

This project was conducted with Mary Dean Lee of McGill University. In recent years more employers have established policies and programs to support employees who want to work in different ways to accommodate shifting priorities in their personal and professional lives over the life span.

Dr. Kossek is a founding member of The Work, Family & Health Network., which is providing scientific evidence about how changes in the work environment can improve the health of workers and their families while benefiting organizations.