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Family Supportive Supervisor Training (FSST) and Workplace Assessment Tool

Need for Study and Background

Aging Workforce and Caregiving Demands impact Public Health

The aging workforce with rising personal health, family, and caregiving demands are the defining work-life and public health issues of the 21st century (Kossek et al.,  2019). The failure to respond to employees’ growing work-life/family needs harms employees’ health, reduces productivity, and increases turnover (Hammer et al., 2011).

Many Employees Lack Access to Formal Work-Family-Life Support Policies

A barrier to addressing work-life/family demands is that most employees work for smaller and medium-sized firms that do not have formal work-life policies, leaving most work-life/family flexibility practices including family and sick leave to be influenced by direct supervisors (Kossek & Lautsch, 2018).

Covid -19 has Increased Work-Life Inequality in the Workforce

The COVID-19  pandemic has only exacerbated work life inequality between workers jobs that require face to face front line work and those that can be done by teleworking as well as by gender and race (Kossek & Lee, 2020).

Workplace is a Key Place to Intervene to Reduce Work-Family-Life Stress

To address this critical gap, this study is based on an occupational health science Total Worker Health approach (NIOSH, 2016), which assumes that the workplace is a key social determinant of work-life stress and aging workers’ abilities to jointly manage their job, personal health, and caregiving demands.

Supervisors’ Work-Family Support Matters

As supervisors are gatekeepers to implementing work-life policies, workplace interventions that train supervisors to have the knowledge, skills and motivation to support employees’ family, personal health, and caregiving needs is an effective way to foster societal health and well-being.

Workplace Interventions Are Needed

Lower- cost scalable workplace interventions are needed to increase leaders’ skills in supporting employees abilities in to access flexibility and use available paid sick and family leave policies. The latter often remain under-utilized or face implementation challenges.

The results of the project will advance the knowledge in occupational health, public health, family supportive supervision, and the workplace intervention fields.

Our project aims are:

Aim 1: Develop Family Supportive Supervisor Training (FSST) intervention implementation supports to enhance employer usability/adoption.

Aim 2. Develop an eLearning management system to enhance supervisor user experiences, feedback, and delivery processes to motivate behavior change and enhance change sustainability.

Aim 3:  Develop the Leaders and Leaves: Supervisor Support for Family and Sick Leave Module to augment the core FSST program focusing on 4 evidence based family supportive behaviors:

 

©Work Life Help, 2015; L. B. Hammer, & E. E. Kossek et al.  Multiple studies

 

Aim 4: Field test and evaluate the enhanced FSST 2.0 in a Randomized Clinical Trial for employer adoption readiness.

Our Team

Ellen Kossek
Ellen Ernst Kossek, PHD
Principal Investigator
Basil S. Turner Professor of Management
Purdue University
ekossek@purdue.edu
Leslie Hammer
Leslie B. Hammer, PhD
Co-Founder of Work Life Help
Professor of Psychology at Portland State University
& Oregon Health & Science University
hammerl@pdx.edu
Kristi Manseth
Kristi Manseth, PhD
Vice President, Director of Research
Pacific Research & Evaluation
kristi@pacific-research.org
Todd Bodner
Todd E. Bodner, PhD
Professor
Department of Psychology
Portland State University
tbodner@pdx.edu
Jiayun Xu
Jiayun Xu, PhD
Assistant Professor of Nursing
Purdue University
xu1115@purdue.edu
Katie Lawson
Katie M. Lawson, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Psychological Science
Ball State University
kmlawson4@bsu.edu
kelly-2021.png
Kelly Hannum, PhD
President, Aligned Impact
kelly@alignedimpact.com

This study is funded by the NIH (National Institute of Health Grant #2R42AG060347-02A1) through the STTR program and approved by Purdue University’s IRB Institutional Research Board (2020-1687.)