Let’s play fantasy benefits!
Let’s create fantasy benefit modules inside our administration systems so employees are more fully engaged.
Millions of people play fantasy sports. In fact, many spend almost as much time curating their rosters and tracking stats as they do on their full-time jobs, taking a great deal of time to calculate the benefits of a particular player or defense.
Meanwhile, late last year while they were deep in the throes of trying to win a fantasy league, many of the same people took around 10 minutes to make their enrollment decisions for the employee benefit plans offered by their employer.
Related: 3 ways to help overcome open enrollment dread
Those who understand the enrollment process know a few sad facts about employee attitudes and actions:
- Employees rank the enrollment process among the more unpleasant things they need to do every year—about as painful as doing taxes.
- The minutes allocated by employees to the process are efficient but unsatisfying; employees say they wish they better understood their benefit options.
- Employees have little to no understanding of the amount of money they allocate during the process—between their employer contribution and their own, their health plan benefit expenditures are likely to represent around $1,000 a month for a family, while their total benefits expenditure for a comprehensive package adds another several hundred dollars per month.
An employee will spend dozens of hours a week for the chance to win a few hundred dollars in a fantasy league, then spend 10 minutes allocating $15,000 or $20,000 a year in benefit expenses—which could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in return. The fact is, fantasy sports is interesting, easy to understand and fun to play, but most do not consider employee benefits to be fascinating, easy to understand or fun.
We need to do something about this. Many other difficult areas have been turned into fun. For example, Duolingo makes it relatively easy and fun to begin learning a new language. Many financial wellness programs make it relatively easy to understand budgeting, debt management, and other basic financial disciplines.
The ben admin technology used in our business generally uses communication material and techniques that are descriptive, prescriptive, and very rarely fun. Descriptive material is generally considered boring and over-detailed. Prescriptive services include recommendation engines that tell employees what “people like them” often purchase or that point out lifestyle risks. They are little better than common sense at helping employees make good decisions. If you play soccer or ski on the weekend, you might consider that accident plan, and so on.
Let’s create a way of communicating the risks and rewards of employee benefits in a gamified structure. Let’s create fantasy benefit modules inside our administration systems and make games available throughout the year so employees are more fully engaged when they have to spend that 10 minutes away from things they’d rather be doing.
Meanwhile, I’m doing some research. Now that baseballs have apparently been deadened to reduce home runs, I have to think about my strategy for this year’s fantasy baseball league. It’s almost as exciting as fantasy benefits!
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