Erin Kelly Wins Award from the Work and Family Researchers Network

MIT Sloan Professor Erin L. Kelly, who is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies and Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER), has received the 2024 Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award. The award, given by the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN), recognizes “a work-family researcher or research team who have/has contributed breakthrough thinking to the work-family field via theory, measures, and/or data sets.”

In nominating Kelly for the award, Professor Melissa Milkie, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and a past president of WFRN, wrote that Kelly has  “had a profound impact on the work and family field through her influential work on schedule control, diversity and equity, and work redesign, and her commitment to bridging the boundaries across research, policy and practice.”

Milkie further elaborated:

 “One stellar contribution of Dr. Kelly’s work is the generative concept of schedule control, dating back from about her time with the Work-Family Health Network. The concept of schedule control includes not only the time of day, but where people work and how much work they do. Moving the idea of flexibility forward to the importance of control for workers’ work and family wellbeing, Dr. Kelly and her collaborators have been pivotal in elevating the concept as a critical topic within the field….Dr. Kelly’s research on work redesign has played a vital role in advancing the discourse on workplace policies and practices, demonstrating through rigorous experimental and multi-method studies that it is indeed feasible to enact meaningful changes to address work-life challenges, reduce overload and burnout, and support overall worker well-being. Her work within the Work-Family Health Network and the award-winning 2020 book “Overload” stand as a testament to her commitment to building guiding work redesign studies, setting a standard for future research in the field….As part of the WFRN, Dr. Kelly has made important data sets, protocols, and measures available to other scholars: https://workfamilyhealthnetwork.org/data....

Dr. Kelly has actively contributed to the generativity of work-family research into the public policy and practitioner setting. She has actively engaged with corporate and policy audiences, influencing workplace mental health and well-being frameworks. Dr. Kelly has a stellar research-for-action or research-to-practice project, which was cited repeatedly within the US Surgeon General’s framework for Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing. The Employer Toolkit tries to provide inspiration and guidance for employers of all sizes that want to consider work redesign approaches, including profiling research-based workplace changes focused on scheduling flexibility, scheduling predictability or stability, streamlining work to reduce the risk of burnout and work-family time strain, and increasing supervisors’ support for family and personal life.”  

The award was presented to Kelly at a June 2024 WFRN conference that took place in in Montreal, Canada.