When it comes to the decisions we make, it can sometimes feel like we are strangers in a strange land. Our motivations are often a mystery to us. But researchers in the world of behavioral economics are able to give us some insight into what informs our decision-making and why it often defies logic.
Over the years, there have been some incredibly useful TED Talks that can help us better understand the human mind and the motivations that drive our decisions. As an employer who must consider the decision-making process of your employees, you too can gain some important insights that can help guide you in creating more effective employee benefits packages.
Here are five TED Talks which we consider to be some of the very best on this subject:
1. “What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work” by Dan Ariely
Viewing money as the single important motivation to produce good work is a simplistic view of the working world and the motivations of people to contribute their best efforts. As humans, we care about the work we do, about completing a project, about seeing things through to the end. We care about work itself—any kind of work—and many of us thrive on overcoming challenges and the motivation needed to do so.
What crushes that motivation is not having one’s work appreciated or put to use. When working within a large, complex system, it can sometimes feel that our contributions are simply dropped into a black hole. No one knows or sees what we've contributed. When we lose the sense that our work has meaning and is important, we lose the motivation to give our best effort.
The motivation to work hard and work well is closely tied to how appreciated and valuable someone feels. Employee benefits packages should be one way employers show how much they value their employees. By providing your team with benefits that are meaningful and important to them, you show them that you’re listening, that you appreciate the work they do for the organization, and that you value their well-being outside of the office.
His work suggests the counterintuitive notion that too much choice and too much freedom to choose can be more stressful than being in control of every decision, especially in situations with life or death meaning and complexity.
Employee benefits packages should be flexible enough to give your employees the options they need to adequately cover themselves and their families. However, you should also work to make benefit plans as simple and straightforward as possible. Don’t offer so much freedom and flexibility that employees feel overwhelmed or unable to make an informed decision.
Her work suggests that there are complex cultural, social, and biological forces that impact our decision-making. When we understand that our choices impact others or a community of which we're a part, we tend to make decisions that work toward harmony in the community. While individual choice is a cornerstone of American cultural identity, not everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing independent of a community. She also finds that too much choice, especially when the differences are opaque or not clearly understood, make choosing harder, and can foster feelings of being overwhelmed.
Communication is key when it comes to helping employees make the best decisions about their employee benefits packages as well as their general health. Don’t simply send an information packet about benefits options and leave the rest to your employees. Take the time to walk them through their options, explain what different benefits include, and field questions.
This can also be a great opportunity to discuss how health and well-being fits into your company culture. Talk about healthy best practices and steps people can take to encourage better health and happiness throughout the office community.
This optimism, in which we have unrealistic understandings of the nature of our health, future, and the economic health of our families, can cause us to make poor decisions. The belief, for instance, that it will not happen to us or that we can always get another job may cause us to take reckless chances with our futures. Most people do not believe that the worst-case scenario will happen to them.
As this TED talk demonstrates, humans are naturally bad at anticipating the future and creating realistic expectations about their health and finances. By presenting your employees with facts and statistics about their employee benefits packages, illness and injury, and the financial burdens of health-related costs, you can convey to them more clearly the importance and value of the benefits you offer.
He describes the two ways we experience and perceive our lives: the “experiencing self” lives in the present, and the “remembering self” owns the memories and tells the stories of our lives. A key point of his work is that the ending has an enormous influence over how people remember an experience and can change the entire perception of an event.
Our memories of events and our actual real-time experiences during those events don’t always match up. However, the outcome and the impression it leaves us with can alter the way we remember something. For employers, this means delivering a great employee benefits package, both upon entry and exit from a company. It means ensuring high-quality and accessible health benefits to your employees on the front end, as well as stellar communications and education during open enrollment. But it also means that if your benefit providers don’t hold up their end of the bargain on the back end, none of that will matter.
It also means that employers should do their very best to make an employee's exit from the company as smooth as possible, be that through a good severance package, a thoughtful exit interview, a robust explanation of how Cobra works, and detailed overview of how they can transition their retirement savings, etc.
Understanding our cognitive illusions with decision-making does not mean we'll all begin to make smarter decisions. But careful, thoughtful, and intuitive thinking about pressure-free decisions, control over the complexity of decisions, and workplaces that prize collective and individual efforts will reduce the impact cognitive bias has on our choices, our decision-making and our recollection of events.
For more information on the best TED talks on decision-making, and how they relate to employee benefits, please contact us.