Plan sponsors want to help their employees prepare for retirement, but they also want to recruit and retain great employees. To do this they have started fortifying their retirement plans to improve participants' retirement outcomes, according to a report by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

"What Plan Sponsors Want From Their DC Plans—And What They Are Doing About It" is based on the company's 2013 Defined Contribution Plan Sponsor Survey Findings. The company surveyed 800 plan sponsors from December 2012 through January 2013, representing retirement plans between $1 million to more than $1 billion in assets.

Larger plans lead the continued transformation of defined contribution plans, but the survey did find that changes are taking place at a modest rate among smaller ones. More than 75 percent of all plan sponsors and 85 percent of those with larger plans rate having their plan help make sure employees have a financially secure retirement as one of today's highly important goals.