NSF Award
2346233
Organizations in the United States spend nearly a trillion dollars per year to provide employees with access to health and wellbeing benefits, yet many employees are unaware of, or do not understand, what health and wellbeing benefits they have access to. This lack of awareness and understanding reduces benefit use, reduces the positive impact of benefits on employees’ health and wellbeing, and limits the useful of benefits as signals that employers support their employees. This project explores how and when employees discover and react to the health and wellbeing benefits their organizations offer, including the role of technology in this process. This project directly and positively impacts the overall health and wellbeing of the workforce by creating clear suggestions on how organizations can better foster employees’ understanding of their health and wellbeing benefits.<br/><br/>This project lays the groundwork for understanding the role of the employee as an active agent in searching for information regarding their health and wellbeing benefits. The study includes two waves. The first wave is a quantitative survey, using a stratified random sample of participants from the four most populated states. Questions capture what health and wellbeing benefits employees are aware of their organizations providing, as well as how, when, and from whom they became aware of these benefits, and perceptions of organizational support. The second wave is a qualitative study in which a subset of participants from Wave 1 are interviewed and asked to provide benefit communication artifacts from their organization. This approach allows for deep dive into the process of becoming aware of one’s health and wellbeing benefits, including the role of cyberinfrastructure. Overall, this project has the potential for novel theoretical and practical insights regarding benefit awareness and communication.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
