Research: To Get Employees to Use a Benefit, Make Signing Up a Little Harder

This article was produced by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge and features the insights of faculty member Ashley V. Whillans. Let’s say your company offers a rewards program to encourage employees to carpool to work—but you notice that few workers participate. How can you motivate employees to reliably use this valuable company benefit? In some cases, you need to make it (ever-so-slightly) harder for people to sign up for the program to help them feel like it’s worth the effort, suggests research forthcoming in Management Science. “The target behavior feels more valuable when we’ve invested time in it,” explains Ashley Whillans, the Volpert Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School. Subscribe to the Working Knowledge newsletter to get their research coverage in your inbox every week. People often fail to follow through on actions they know are in their best interest, such as saving for retirement, eating healthy, and exercising regularly. As businesses invest heavily in programs designed to change behavior, whether it’s encouraging employees to take advantage of workplace wellness programs or nudging consumers to make sustainable choices, many companies are discovering that getting people to sign up is much easier than getting them to stick with a program that requires repeated behavior change. The research highlights the difference between intentions and follow-through as the “intention-action” gap, and Whillans says requiring a little extra effort upfront could help people follow through on their goals—and benefit businesses as well. For example, retailers could add intentional engagement steps to encourage repeat customers. Whillans worked on the article “The Buy-In Effect: When Increasing Initial Effort Motivates Behavioral Follow-Through” with Holly Dykstra, an assistant professor at the University of Konstanz, and Shibeal O’Flaherty, an evaluator at the U.S. Office of Evaluation Sciences. Can Employers Encourage More People to Carpool? The authors explain that the buy-in effect occurs when people invest a modest, goal-relevant amount of effort during an initial sign-up process, which increases the likelihood that they’ll follow through with a target behavior. They tested the idea in two large experiments, including one focused on carpooling to work. The authors manipulated the difficulty of signing up for a carpooling platform run by the Oregon Department of Transportation that local employers promote to their workers. They chose to study carpooling because it’s a behavior that people may say they want to adopt, often due to environmental and cost concerns, but, as Whillans has found in her past research, logistics often make follow-through challenging. “It is difficult to increase participation in carpooling,” says Whillans. “Are there any behavioral (non-financial) interventions that could change this behavior?” The authors studied 27,227 inactive online users during Oregon DOT’s 2019 platform transition. They randomly assigned users to either a high-effort account migration that required re-entering information or a low-effort migration that required only one click. The authors found: Requiring extra work discouraged overall participation. The high-effort sign-up reduced the number of employees who enrolled by 25% compared to the low-effort group. However, employees who put in more effort used the service more. Those in the high-effort group who went through the trouble of signing up logged 1.6 times more carpool trips per week, yielding 795 more trips total in the four months studied, compared to those who put in less effort to join. Can a Harder Sign-up Keep People Coming Back? To confirm the findings, the authors set up a second study that asked participants to complete a difficult, deliberately unpleasant transcription task—deciphering a row of 35 blurry Greek letters—and then choose whether to return for a second session. People were randomly assigned to either a high-effort sign-up process with a 15-question survey relevant to transcription or a low-effort sign-up that required a single click. The researchers found: More initial effort led to more work. Participants in the high-effort group were 37% more likely to come back for a second day. The high-effort group got more work done. The low-effort workers transcribed 5,598 letters, while those in the high-effort group transcribed 8,438. How Businesses Can Encourage Commitment The authors say the buy-in effect tends to occur under certain conditions, such as when: The target behavior requires follow-through. The initial effort and target behavior are voluntary. And the friction is modest and relevant to the goal. For businesses looking to leverage the research results to find ways to nudge both employees and customers to commit to certain behaviors over the long run, Whillans makes the following recommendations. Add friction when follow-through is the primary goal. Consider a small step at the outset that might help participants become more invested in a program. For example, requiring employees to attend a brief coaching call before beginning therapy, rather than merely clicking a button to schedule an appointment, might encourage people to pause, reflect, and demonstrate commitment before attending sessions. “We’re not telling people to jump through a big hoop, but maybe they do need to respond to an email or answer a few questions before they get matched to a service or participate in a program based on their interest,” Whillans says. “If you think about a digital app to manage stress, health, or fitness that is provided by an employer, they usually have a few questions at the beginning. Our research suggests that those questions may help to create psychological ownership over the behavior and promote follow-through.” Make the effort meaningful and connected to the behavior. Not all friction is helpful, so don’t simply waste people’s time by arbitrarily adding time-consuming administrative burdens. Extra steps should help people reflect on their goals, preferences, and otherwise help to increase their commitment to the activity. The most effective friction is likely to feel relevant to the behavior someone is about to undertake. Avoid adding barriers to behaviors if access is the main challenge. Friction is not a universal solution, the authors say. They are careful to couch the findings by noting that some sign-up processes—especially certain one-and-done transactions, such as automatic retirement contributions—still benefit from being as simple as possible. For these “set-and-forget” programs, where the biggest hurdle is simply getting people to enroll, reducing friction—such as by making enrollment the “default”—may remain the better approach. “Upfront friction might work better for behaviors that require follow-through like access to a company gym, where you have to think about the behavior in two parts—signing up for the benefit and actually attending company provided gym sessions,” Whillans says. “Getting people into the benefit and following through with the subsequent exercise that’s really going to move the needle are two separate behaviors, and our research suggests that follow-through may benefit from a bit of upfront friction.”

Research: To Get Employees to Use a Benefit, Make Signing Up a Little Harder

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