Making benefits enrollment slightly harder — not easier — may be the key to getting employees to actually use those benefits, according to research highlighted by Harvard Business Review.

The finding cuts against a decade of HR practice. Employers have spent years streamlining signup flows: default enrollment, one-click activation and automatic opt-ins, all built on the behavioral-economics assumption that reducing friction raises take-up. The research summary, published under the title "Research: To Get Employees to Use a Benefit, Make Signing Up a Little Harder," points to a different mechanism: when employees must clear a small hurdle to enroll, they engage with the decision rather than skate past it.

For benefits leaders, the implication touches two concrete people-process decisions. First, default design: blanket auto-enrollment may inflate signup counts while leaving genuine usage flat, because employees who never made an active choice never form the intent to use the benefit. Second, communication strategy: a modest enrollment step — a short questionnaire, a deliberate confirmation, a brief explanation of the trade-offs — can function as a commitment device that carries through to utilization.

That distinction matters for measurement. HR teams routinely report benefit adoption at the point of enrollment. If signups driven by zero-friction defaults don't translate into use, the metric overstates the value of the benefit portfolio and understates the cost of wasted vendor spend.

The research also raises questions for the technology stack. Benefits platforms and enrollment vendors compete heavily on reducing clicks, and buyers often evaluate products on signup conversion rates. If a small amount of friction improves downstream engagement, HR purchasers may want to ask vendors a different set of questions: Can the platform support graduated enrollment steps? Can it measure usage after enrollment, not just enrollment itself? Can it distinguish an active choice from a passive default in reporting?

The logic aligns with what benefits professionals already observe anecdotally: employees who complete a deliberate enrollment process tend to know what they signed up for, remember that they have it, and use it. Employees swept in by defaults often discover the benefit months later, or never.

There is a balance to strike, and the research summary's emphasis is worth noting carefully: the friction should be "a little" harder, not a lot. High-friction enrollment remains a well-documented driver of non-participation — particularly for retirement savings, insurance elections and voluntary benefits, where complex forms have historically suppressed take-up among exactly the populations employers most want to reach. The design challenge is friction that prompts reflection without creating barriers.

For HR teams planning the next open enrollment cycle, the research suggests a testable proposition: compare usage rates between a frictionless default flow and a lightly effortful active-choice flow, and measure outcomes six to twelve months past enrollment rather than at signup. Vendors that can support that kind of A/B comparison will be better positioned to demonstrate real benefit value.

As employers face continued pressure to prove return on benefits spend, expect enrollment design — long treated as a pure usability problem — to become a more central behavioral question.