The Work, Family & Health Network is providing scientific evidence about how workplace changes can have concrete effects on the health of workers and their families. Launched by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 2005, the Network has been conducting inter-related studies on how company policies and work-life affects the health of their employees and family members. To do this, research teams from across the country worked closely with a wide array of businesses, such as long-term health care facilities, national retail chains and hotels.

The first phase of the research is wrapping up right now. Research teams worked with industry business partners to implement pilot workplace interventions. These studies tested both the interventions themselves and the outcome measures to document and improve employee retention, engagement, and the health and well-being of workers and their families. In the pilot research, three things helped improve employee health and benefited organizations by decreasing employee turnover and increasing productivity:
• Increasing employees’ sense of control over the time and timing of their work.
• Improving supervisor support for work and family balance.
• Changing the culture to focus on the results of the work that matter most for business.

Now the Network is taking these initial results and launching a collaborative, multi-site research project, anticipated to begin in December 2008. The project aims to reduce work-family conflict and improve the health of workers and their families. Both employees and supervisors will receive face-to-face, participatory sessions and web-based training. The workplace interventions will be customized with employers as partners so that they target the key needs of that workforce. A random half of the organization’s work sites will implement the initiative during the study period; the other half will serve as comparison work sites and may or may not adopt the initiative later.

The Work, Family & Health Network is composed of interdisciplinary research teams from the University of Minnesota, Penn State University, Harvard University, Portland State University, Michigan State University, Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research, RTI International and the University of Southern California. You can read about the Network’s findings on their website at www.WorkFamilyHealthNetwork.org. This research is funded by a cooperative agreement through the NIH and the CDC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant # U01HD051217, U01HD051218, U01HD051256, U01HD051276), National Institute on Aging (Grant # U01AG027669), Office of Behavioral and Science Sciences Research, and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Grant # U010H008788).