What, really? New survey has some surprising results
Nearly one in four employers say fewer than 20% of eligible staff actually use their well-being programs, according to Gallagher's 2026 Workforce Trends Report. HR teams have spent years responding to that gap the same way: cut the enrollment form down to one click, remove every question that isn't strictly necessary, make joining as easy as physically possible. New research out of Harvard Business School suggests that approach may be solving the wrong problem for a specific category of benefit: the ones that only work if people keep using them.
The study, forthcoming in the journal Management Science, comes from Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans, Holly Dykstra of the University of Konstanz, and Shibeal O'Flaherty of the U.S. Office of Evaluation Sciences. The team ran a field experiment with a state department of transportation's carpool platform, covering more than 27,000 people. One group signed up with a single click. The other had to re-enter their commute information, a modest extra step. The harder version cut sign-ups by 25%, exactly what a simplify-everything strategy would predict.
What it didn't predict: the people who pushed through the harder sign-up went on to carpool 1.6 times more often per week, adding up to nearly 800 more total trips over four months than the easier version produced.
A second study, run separately with an unrelated online task, found the same shape of result. People who completed a 15-question survey before starting were 37% more likely to return for a second day than people who signed up in one click, and finished about half again as much work. The researchers describe this as the "buy-in effect": a small, relevant amount of effort at the outset appears to build ownership over a behavior in a way a frictionless click does not.
"The target behavior feels more valuable when we've invested time in it," Whillans says of the underlying mechanism.
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The distinction the authors draw matters for how HR teams design a benefits calendar. The buy-in effect shows up when a benefit needs repeat use rather than a single action, when both the sign-up and the ongoing use are voluntary, and when the extra step is actually relevant to the behavior rather than bureaucratic filler. That description fits a large share of what sits inside a typical well-being budget: an EAP, a financial coaching subscription, a diabetes or chronic-condition management app, a mental health platform. Employees opt into these once and the value only shows up if they open the app, book the session, or make the call more than once.
That's a different design problem than a one-time election. A retirement auto-enrollment default, a life insurance beneficiary form, an ACA plan election: none of these need a second visit to deliver their value, so cutting friction there remains the right call. Layering a survey onto those steps would likely just add to a decision employees already find confusing, and simplicity is still the right answer for anything that only has to happen once.Read next: Can AI cure employees' benefits regrets?
For the habit-dependent benefits, the practical version of this research looks less like a longer form and more like a short, relevant onboarding step: a two-minute intake before a wellness app unlocks its full dashboard, a scheduled intro call before a coaching subscription activates, three questions about what an employee wants from an EAP before they're routed to a provider. Several employer-sponsored digital health platforms already work this way, opening with a handful of onboarding questions rather than dropping a new user straight into content. This research offers a reason that design choice might be doing more for engagement than it gets credit for.
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None of this argues for adding friction across the board. The authors are explicit that friction only helps when access, not follow-through, is the real barrier it's addressing. If employees aren't using a benefit because they don't know it exists or can't find the enrollment link, a harder sign-up will only shrink the pool further with nothing gained. The research is a case for being deliberate about where in a benefits program the real problem sits: at the door, or after it.
Ahead of the next enrollment cycle, that's a useful lens for auditing a benefits package: which line items need a single decision, and which need a habit. For the first group, HR's job is still to clear the path. For the second, one small, well-placed step at the start may be what gets utilization numbers to finally match enrollment numbers.
