Family Supportive Supervisor and Leaders and Leaves Trainings

Background

Rising demands for working caregivers of children and adults who comprise three-fourths of the U.S. workforce an aging global population, and increasing employee and family health and mental health challenges are converging trends highlighting the need for the measurement of new constructs and the development, delivery and evaluation of evidence-based organizational interventions designed to increase family supportive workplaces Supportive workplaces for family and nonwork roles have been referred to “as engines of psychological health and well-being  especially for caregivers such as parents who the U.S. Surgeon General has identified at their breaking point. Such work is also important for gender equality, workforce burnout and family well-being.

Given the U.S. is lagging in research and practice to enhance employer implementation of work-family policies and supportive cultures  Professor Ellen Ernst Kossek was principal investigator on an NIH grant that included an intervention to improve supervisor support for using paid sick and family leave policies in one of the first randomized clinical trial in the U.S.. Recognizing that even if and when federal mandates are passed in the U.S. to require paid sick and family leave, serious gaps exist in employee perceptions of support for the paid family and sick leave policies currently available offered voluntarily by employers or due to state or city mandates. Receiving an NIH Start Up Technology Transfer grant, she led a national research team to validate and develop new software to train supervisors to support family and sick leave policies . The software will publicly available. The study showed that a majority of all employees regardless of family demands, in organizations where supervisor were randomly assigned to the intervention, reported higher job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Women with childcare responsibilities reported improved physical health; and sandwiched care workers reported higher job satisfaction. 

The Research

The Family Supportive Supervisor Training and Workplace Assessment Tool study was 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.)