The Little Italy of Open Enrollment
October 01, 2010If you are hungry for Italian food and you happen to be in New York City, a trip to Little Italy sounds logical, right? I’m a tourist in NYC, not a local, so I figured the best Italian food must be in Little Italy. When I got there, I walked along a street that was closed to traffic and on either side of the street there were restaurants filled to capacity. They all looked fabulous. As far as the eye could see there were pastas, meats, wines, lasagna, cannoli, and the smell of the food was heavenly. What happened to me in this land of abundant choice? My brain shut down. I couldn’t think. I became paralyzed by having too many choices and not enough information to process all of the choices. Suddenly, I wished I was in a small town with only 1 restaurant.
That reminded me of a book called The Paradox of Choice where research was done to show what happens to the human brain when confronted with too many choices. And, my trip to Little Italy was a perfect illustration of that concept. I was overwhelmed. The best visual I can come up with is a dog chasing his tail.
How is this relevant? Why am I writing about it? Because it is open enrollment season and so many people are looking at an enormous package from H.R. and trying to decide which health care plan to use, whether or not to add voluntary life insurance coverage, should I do the pre-tax or post-tax disability insurance?, we have a new Roth 401(k) option – what’s that about?, and once the decision has been made about which version of the 401(k) to use, the next set of choices involves how to invest the contributions, and oh yeah, if I change my future contributions what should I do about my existing money?
This is a season of seemingly unending decisions. Employees can be overwhelmed. An open enrollment packet in front of an employee can be like a restaurant filled street in front of a hungry guy. We both know we want something inside, but we aren’t always sure how to go about deciding and can be rendered helpless by an excess of choices.
For the record: I was disappointed by my eventual choice of restaurant and the food there. I’m hoping employees end up feeling better about their decisions than I do about mine.