A client rolls out a new voluntary benefit, enrollment takes one click, and six months later almost nobody has touched it. The standard fix is to strip out friction: fewer questions, fewer clicks, a "just sign here" default. New academic research suggests that fix may not work for a specific slice of the benefits package, the ones that only pay off if an employee keeps coming back.
New research out of Harvard Business School, forthcoming in the journal Management Science and led by professor Ashley Whillans along with Holly Dykstra of the University of Konstanz and Shibeal O'Flaherty of the US Office of Evaluation Sciences, tracked more than 27,000 people signing up for a state-run carpool platform. Half were given a one-click registration. The other half had to re-enter their commute details, a small but deliberate extra step. The harder sign-up produced 25% fewer registrations overall. But among people who did register, the high-effort group went on to take 1.6 times as many carpool trips per week, and logged nearly 800 more total trips over the following four months than the low-effort group.
A second experiment tested the same idea with an online task rather than a real-world commute, and found the same pattern. Participants who filled out a 15-question survey before starting were 37% more likely to come back for a second day of work than those who signed up with a single click, and completed roughly 50% more work overall. The researchers call this the "buy-in effect": a small amount of goal-relevant effort at the start builds a sense of ownership that a frictionless click doesn't.
"The target behavior feels more valuable when we've invested time in it," is how Whillans frames the underlying mechanism.
For group benefits brokers, this lands at an awkward moment. A March 2026 survey of 170 brokers by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Lincoln Financial found that administrative complexity and gaps in employee education, not disinterest or cost, are the main things standing between a voluntary benefit and actual usage. The natural response to that finding is to simplify everything. This research suggests that response needs a caveat. Simplification helps get people in the door. It may do little for benefits that depend on employees showing up again and again, and in some cases could work against that goal.
The researchers are specific about when the effect applies: when the target behavior requires ongoing follow-through rather than a one-time action, when both the sign-up effort and the behavior itself are voluntary, and when the extra step feels connected to the benefit rather than arbitrary paperwork. Those three conditions describe a lot of the voluntary and wellbeing benefits brokers place today: an employee assistance program, a diabetes management app, a financial coaching subscription, a fitness or mental health benefit bundled into a group plan. Employees enroll in each of these once, and then the benefit only delivers value through repeated use, both to the employee and to the employer's utilization numbers.
In practice, that could mean asking an employee to schedule an intro call with a coach before their first therapy session, rather than handing them a login. Or building two or three short preference questions into the start of a wellness app instead of dropping users straight into a generic dashboard. Many employer-sponsored digital health tools already open with a handful of onboarding questions before granting access, a design choice this research suggests may be doing more engagement work than it gets credit for.
There's a clear boundary on where this doesn't apply, and the paper's authors are careful about it. Enrollment steps that are one-and-done, such as a plan election, a default retirement contribution or a life insurance beneficiary form, still benefit from being as frictionless as possible, because there's no ongoing behavior to sustain once the form is submitted. Forty-three percent of US workers say they're never confident they've picked the right benefits during enrollment, according to the Hartford's 2026 Future of Benefits Study. Piling extra steps onto that kind of one-time decision would likely add to the confusion rather than build commitment.
The takeaway for brokers heading into renewal and open enrollment season is narrow, not sweeping. Sort the benefits in a client's package by whether success looks like a single election or an ongoing habit, and treat the two differently. For the low-utilization, high-value benefits that HR teams keep asking how to get employees to actually use, consider building in one small, meaningful step at sign-up rather than stripping it down to a single click. For the one-and-done elections, the old advice still holds: get out of the way.
