If employees won’t do it themselves, some employers are doing itfor them — rebalancing their retirement plan portfolios, thatis.

And it’s not as complex as it might sound. The Wall StreetJournal reported that some employers are going beyondauto enrollment to conduct a blanketauto enrollment of all their employees in target-date funds —unless the employees opt out.

And that’s bringing employees better diversification than mostof them have when left to their own devices.

One example cited by the Journal is the deferredcompensation plan of the State of Illinois, which has 56,000 publicemployees and is the state’s largest defined contribution plan. InDecember, the plan notified all participants that, barring themchoosing to opt out, it would automatically move everyone on April22 to a target-date fund.

Before the move was made, up to 29 percent of the plan’s assetswere in a single, and relatively risky, asset class, according toWilliam Atwood, executive director of the Illinois State Board ofInvestment, which oversees the plan.

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Everyone overweighted small-cap value stocks, he said in thereport, because for a while the small-cap value manager had a longstretch of good performance. But then things hit a lull, andperformance wasn’t so great.

After the reenrollment, however, all that changed. Not only didthe small-cap value allocation in the plan fall to 5.2 percent, thetarget-date fund allocation zoomed up from 11.9 percent to 60percent. Atwood was quoted saying, “We see that as a very favorableoutcome. This was an aggressive strategy we employed to move theplan’s allocations.”

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Usually a mass move of employees into default investmentshappens when a sponsor changes plan providers.

What’s not common is the drastic approach used by the State ofIllinois — but sponsors might want to consider it if they seeemployees’ allocations as a threat to their retirement futures.