EAGER: Understanding How Employees Discover and React to Health and Wellbeing Benefits

美国的组织每年花费近一万亿美元为员工提供健康和福利福利，但许多员工不知道或不了解他们可以获得哪些健康和福利福利。缺乏认识和理解减少了福利的使用，减少了福利对雇员健康和福祉的积极影响，并限制了福利作为雇主支持其雇员的信号的作用。该项目探索员工如何以及何时发现并对其组织提供的健康和福利做出反应，包括技术在此过程中的作用。该项目就组织如何更好地促进员工对其健康和福利的理解提出了明确的建议，从而直接和积极地影响了员工的整体健康和福利。该项目为理解员工作为主动代理人在寻找有关其健康和福利的信息方面的作用奠定了基础。这项研究包括两波。第一波是定量调查，使用来自四个人口最多的州的分层随机样本。这些问题反映了员工意识到他们的组织提供哪些健康和福利福利，以及他们如何、何时、从谁那里意识到这些福利，以及对组织支持的看法。第二波是一个定性研究，其中来自第1波的参与者子集被采访，并被要求提供来自其组织的有益通信工件。这种方法允许深入了解一个人的健康和福祉益处的过程，包括网络基础设施的作用。总的来说，这个项目在利益意识和沟通方面具有新的理论和实践见解的潜力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.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.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.