It isn’t because they don’t care, or aren’t trying, but plan sponsors could be doing more to help workers save for retirement and often don’t see eye-to-eye with their employees on just how best to do that.

That’s according to “Assumptions, Assessments and Actions: Plan Sponsor Views of Participant Support and Advisor Partnership,” a national survey of plan sponsors conducted by American Century Investment Services of Kanas City, Missouri.

The study took the answers from 310 sponsors (representing plan assets of up to $100 million) to questions about plan priorities, strategies to win employee participation and the value of advisors, and compared some of those answers to employee responses.

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The results indicate that sponsors sometimes try to achieve goals in ways that employees feel are less effective — while dismissing some of the strategies that employees would prefer.

One of the perhaps more surprising findings: sponsors underestimate the amount of intervention participants want and expect from them.

Sponsors also may be wrong in focusing on the company match as the most important indicator of how successful employees are in preparing for retirement (38 percent consider it extremely important and 48 percent say it is very important).

Meanwhile, a more important indicator of preparedness – the percentage of employees who contribute the maximum to the plan – ranks quite a bit farther down the list (17 percent of sponsors rank it as extremely important and 48 percent say it is very important; 8 percent say it is not important).

Sponsors also think they’re doing a “solid job” in maintaining plan participation, but only 28 percent actually measure how ready their employees are to retire. They’re far more concerned with the actual overall participation rate (83 percent measure for that) and the percentage of employees who take full advantage of the company match (81 percent measure for that).

Only 16 percent say they are “extremely concerned” that employees might not be saving enough for retirement. While seven out of 10 sponsors see education and communication programs as extremely or very important, they’re not so sanguine about how well they work. Just two out of five say they’re effective.

More troubling, employers assume that 30 percent of their employees prefer to be left alone, when in fact only about 16 percent of their employees actually feel this way, American Century said.

There’s another disconnect regarding automatic enrollment. Only 20 percent of sponsors said it is “extremely important” vs. 31 percent of participants aged 55-65 who thought so.

Moreover, while more than 60 percent of employees favored an auto enrollment option that took 6 percent of their pay for saving, 57 percent of companies still don’t offer auto enrollment at all.

Employers cited several reasons for not using auto enrollment, from fear of employee backlash (39 percent) to having to deal with additional administration (16 percent) or the cost of a company match (6 percent). The good news is that 38 percent said they just hadn’t considered it yet.

The same holds true for annual automatic increases in the amount vested, with 21 percent of 55-to-65-year-old participants saying increases were “extremely important” vs. only 13 percent of plan sponsors.

Then there’s the issue of plan advisors. Employees didn’t weigh in on this one, of course, but three out of four employers use advisors — and among those who don’t, 30 percent said they were likely to in the future.

Commentary: What's really feasting on America's retirement readiness

Instant Insights /

On retirement, sponsors and employees disagree, a lot

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