A full quarter went so far as to say they didn't have a clue. Six percent said it didn't really matter to them, but that attitude brings to mind comments by MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber's about people's intelligence.

The good thing is that 66 percent of the respondents would like one-on-one advice sessions on retirement planning and investing. In other words, they've fully processed that there's a problem, which should help. Self-awareness, after all, is two-thirds of recovery.

But what about the other third? Most employers get the idea that leaving their workforce to starve in old age is no way to nurture capitalism. In other words, it's just not enough to set up a retirement plan and hope for the best. The people, after all, are prone to rise up.

Also read: Should 401(k) participants be tested for financial literacy?

The Plan Sponsor Council of America's latest survey offers reason for hope, finding, among other things, that 80 percent of plans have a matching contribution, half an auto-enrollment feature and 44 percent rely on auto-escalation. Also, companies contributed an average of 4.7 percent of pay to their plans last year, a decent bump over the 3.9 percent contributed in 2009.

Also encouraging is that about three-quarters of employers said they conduct a formal evaluation of plan fees either annually or even more frequently, which, obviously, helps keep the pressure on providers to bring fees down.

(For the record, the average expense ratio for plans with more than $1 billion in assets is 0.48 percent. That ratio climbs as assets fall.)

Does any of this mean workers might have to save less and could perhaps retire sooner? Probably not.

But it does suggest many employers are doing more to help and their policies are making a difference. Now if only everyone else would get that message.

Also read: New 401(k) plan features alone aren't enough