Hello! We're jump-starting this week — and this year — with lots of data and helpful benefits tips for employers. Whether it's financial wellness ideas, improving healthcare quality for all, or making the workplace inviting for all, we've got you covered. And speaking of financial wellness, we're featuring some insights from the man who changed the way we save, Richard Thaler! Read on!

📚 Weekly Benefits Digest

​The Pandemic is Redefining Company Perks​
A new study finds that employee benefits expectations and preferences are shifting — they would rather have financial support like 401(k) matching and student loan assistance than other perks. Read the full study here. (2 minute read)

​Improving Equity in Employee Health Benefits​
Less than half of low-wage workers have employer-sponsored healthcare, while the top 25% of earners overwhelmingly have this benefit. How can employers bridge the gap? (6 minute read)

​5 Ways Managers Can Support Pregnant Employees​
Helping pregnant employees doesn't stop at negotiating parental benefits. Employers need to commit to a flexible and supportive work culture through remote work options, time off to see doctors, and more. (6 minute read)

💡 Spotlight on Retirement

He's been called the Father of Behavioral Economics, and his work explores "the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control." He's got both a Nobel Peace Prize and a minor role in The Big Short. Richard Thaler has changed the way Americans save, and the way we think, without us really noticing at all. And that's by design.

Thaler's work has been defined not by his focus on economics, but his focus on us, the people that make up economic systems. Early in his career, this was to Thaler's detriment — there was talk of him getting passed up for tenure at the University of Chicago because "he wasn’t doing anything that they considered to be economic research," fellow Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman told The New Yorker. "He wasn’t doing anything that was mathematical. [But] that's the success story of behavioral economics."

Indeed, only by moving beyond the numbers was Thaler able to see what many economists before him couldn't: that "many consumers act in ways that are inconsistent with economic theory."​

When consumers make disadvantageous economic choices, what can be done? They need to be nudged in the right direction. In Nudge, coauthors Cass R. Sunstein and Richard Thaler posit that small, often mindless forms of choice architecture, or nudges, can point individuals and groups in the "right direction" without limiting their options.

One famous example of the nudge in action is auto-enrollment for retirement accounts. Thaler was a vocal proponent of auto-enrollment, an automatic action that asks new 401(k) participants to opt OUT of their employer's retirement plan instead of opting IN. Auto-enrollment has made all the difference: it's helped individuals add $29.6 BILLION to their retirement accounts over the last decade alone.

While Thaler was one of auto-enrollment's biggest champions, he didn't invent that savings tactic. However, auto-escalation — a parallel innovation — was all his idea. Working with Shlomo Benartzi, a behavioral economist at UCLA, the strategy nudged workers to agree to future increases in their retirement savings rates, usually around 1% more every year. Auto-escalation is now a common feature in most plans (although, unlike auto-enrollment, employees have to opt in).

By making good savings habits easy and invisible, Richard Thaler has helped us to save more while thinking less about it. So next time your retirement savings rate increases or your new 401(k) is all ready for you at a new job, you know who to thank.