Promising Practice 1: Fostering Supportive Supervisor Relationships
Many studies have documented the beneficial effects of manager support on employee well-being, productivity, and retention.7 Research shows that both emotional and practical support can be highly effective.8 This section highlights promising practices for fostering supervisor support in two important areas of employee need: 1) integrating work with family and personal life, and 2) mental health on the job.
Supervisor Supports for Family and Personal Life
Growing numbers of American workers are primary caregivers to young children or elderly parents, which has led to an increase in work-life conflict, where work demands and expectations interfere with family responsibilities.9 According to recent national surveys, work-family conflict is now one of the top stressors for workers, and this source of stress has been consistently linked to negative effects on employee health and well-being.
Employers are increasingly aware of the need to address work-family conflict in their workforce, but may be unsure how best to do so. Teaching supervisors to be more supportive of the work-life challenges their employees face can be a simple and effective way to improve both employee well-being and workplace outcomes.
Three studies8,10,11 tested a similar training method to increase family-supportive supervisor behaviors in three industries and very different workforces: nursing home employees, grocery store workers, and white-collar IT professionals. The training was designed to enhance supervisors’ skills and motivation to support employees’ work-life needs by focusing on four kinds of supervisor behaviors:
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Providing Emotional Support—expressing empathy and understanding about employees’ work-family demands
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Providing Practical Support—working with employees to resolve daily problems on the job, such as adjusting a shift due to a family emergency, or providing concrete supports for employees’ work and family needs such as access to company resources
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Modeling Work-Family Balance—demonstrating how to integrate work and family through modeling these behaviors on the job (for example, leaving the office to attend a child’s school program or staying off email on the weekend)
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Creative Work-Family Management—reorganizing work to support employee effectiveness both on and off the job (for instance, giving workers more input into their schedules or finding ways to minimize travel for a short period).
Supervisors learned these new behaviors through a one-hour, self-paced computer tutorial, a one-time facilitated discussion about the topic, and a multi-week self-monitoring exercise designed to encourage supervisors to put these behaviors into practice in their own workplace. The training technique proved to be highly effective in each of the three different occupational settings. Collectively, these studies demonstrated that training supervisors to increase their family-supportive behavior with direct reports had significant benefits for employee well-being including:
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Reduced work-family conflict
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Improved physical health, sleep quality, and sleep quantity
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Increased parental time with children
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Improved job satisfaction and engagement.
The intervention also had beneficial business outcomes including:
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Reduction in employee intentions to leave the organization
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Improved employee organizational commitment
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Improved employee job performance, according to supervisors’ ratings.
You can find a detailed employer guide for implementing this training strategy (the Family Supportive Supervisor Behavior Training Manual) along with other relevant materials, in the Helpful Resources section at the end of this module.
Supervisor Supports for Mental Health
One in five Americans lives with a mental illness.12 Mental health problems are a leading cause of workplace disability and lead to more lost work days than chronic physical health conditions like diabetes, arthritis, or asthma.
Often, employers’ efforts to help workers improve their mental health (such as mindfulness or stress reduction classes or employee assistance programs) place the responsibility for seeking care on the individual.13 However, employees already struggling with mental health problems may be ill-equipped to engage in proactive help-seeking behaviors or may encounter workplace barriers to accessing such resources.
The good news is that managers can play a key role in establishing a work culture supportive of mental health. When properly informed about mental health issues in the workplace, supervisors may be able to provide support through:
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Early detection
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Help connecting employees with mental health resources
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A culture of mental health awareness that recognizes the importance of employee emotional well-being.
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Identification through workplace conditions that may trigger mental health problems.
With these goals in mind, some employers have adopted mental health training programs for managers. Although scarce in number, studies examining these programs show promising results, including improved mental health and job performance and reduced employer costs related to mental health problems.13–18 These programs focus on improving supervisor’s mental health literacy, communication skills, efficacy in addressing mental health matters in the workplace, and recognition of workplace conditions that may themselves produce increased risk for psychological distress. The most effective programs are more highly interactive and go beyond passive online learning formats.
In one study, supervisors in a major Canadian telecommunications company who received a three-hour mental health awareness training program reported improved knowledge, attitudes, and intent to promote mental health at work. The findings also suggest that the program resulted in a significant cost saving to the company by reducing short-term mental health disability claims. The three-hour training program included interactive case studies intended to help managers practice the skills they were taught. They included topics such as early identification and recognition of employee mental health problems and effective actions to promote worker mental health (e.g., reducing workplace stressors, assisting employees displaying warning signs of excessive stress, and communicating openly about stress management resources).
A similar training program used with managers in a large Australian fire and rescue service also significantly reduced rates of work-related sick leave among employees, producing a major return on program investment for the company.