WORK LIFE HELP, INC. — Department of Health and Human Services STTR Phase II: NIA

Description

Project Summary/Abstract The aging workforce with rising personal health, family, and eldercare demands are the defining work-life and public health issues of the 21st century. The number of Americans over age 65 will double over the next 25 years, and half of working adults are eldercare and sandwich (elders and children) caregivers. Most U.S. employees rely on their employers, especially their supervisors’ support to be able to access and use work-life policies (flexible schedules, family care, sick leaves). This proposal is based on an occupational health science Total Worker Health approach, 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. 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. Yet, there are no evidence-based workplace supervisory training interventions to address this public health concern. In our STTR Phase I project, Work Life Help, our start-up company, developed the prototype workplace intervention, Family Supportive Supervisor Training (FSST), a 1-hour web-based training intervention with two weeks of learning transfer activities, based on cognitive-behavioral science. It is the only randomized control trial (RCT) tested work-life supportive supervisor training available with proven employee mental and physical health, family, and productivity benefits. Building on Phase I results showing a strong market need for FSST, in Phase II, we propose to enhance FSST by creating FSST 2.0, a workplace intervention package, that addresses two key areas: 1) enhancing supervisor motivation and compliance for improved implementation; and 2) developing one additional module focused on supervisor support for employee use of family care and sick leave, a critical unmet need. Phase II includes these aims: 1) develop FSST intervention implementation support products to enhance usability and adoption (Follow-up Supervisor Webinars, Trainer Certification); 2) develop an eLearning management system to enhance user experience, and delivery processes including an improved feedback report system to motivate behavior change and enhance change sustainability; 3) develop the Supervisor Support for Family Care and Sick Leave Use Module to augment the core FSST program to increase supervisor support for employee use of personal sick time and family leave policies; 4) deliver, test, and evaluate the enhanced FSST 2.0 for commercialization readiness. This project’s outcome will be the availability of FSST 2.0 with enhanced infrastructure to improve intervention implementation, augmented by a new module to target specific support for using family and sick leaves, resulting in improved employer work-life support for the aging workforce’s health and family care. After Phase II, FSST 2.0 will be ready for commercialization.Project Narrative The proposed Family Supportive Supervisor Training (FSST 2.0) package will fill a critical unmet need for employer interventions to improve implementation of work-life flexibility and sick and family leave policies. FSST 2.0 will contribute to public health by improving supervisor support for the aging workforce’s personal work-life, illness, and eldercare demands by decreasing daily work-life conflict, and increasing employees’ use of work-life flexible scheduling, and sick and family care leaves. Due to proven effectiveness across industries, low-cost, and ease of access, FSST 2.0 will be used by worldwide employer online supervisor training market.