The society takes a holistic strategy to retirement benefits. “I’ve realized that financial planning is for everyone. It just becomes a question of when they realize they need to do it,” he said. “The whole life concept is important as employees make decisions from factors you haven’t even thought about.”

Still, he said, some employees feel that an employer offering help or oversight with finances is “a conflict of interest, ‘why does my employer care about my retirement?’”

Hands-off. Drayo’s 8,000-employee beverage retailing company has moved in a more hands-off direction. “We have stopped auto-enroll and auto-increase. Our philosophy is, we’ll tell you what to do but you have to do it.”

Paternalistic. McCamley’s nonprofit nursing association is hiring a big chunk of its workforce from for-profit companies, “so we have to make benefits top notch.” The association “didn’t want to have a paternalistic view” at first. But it has moved in that direction, setting goals to increase participation and deferral rates, and adding auto-enrollment and a monthly deferral change period. “Our committee had a hard time taking 3 percent out of someone’s paycheck who’s making 12 dollars an hour. But I’ve been working with our investment advisor and they’ve been instrumental in convincing the committee that we need to do this,” she said, adding that the advisor’s persistence over a period of two years finally resulted in the committee deciding to do that. And of course, employee opt-out is still an option.

Financial literacy is key

Another thing all three plan sponsors have in common is their organizations offer financial literacy programs to employees.

Related: 8 money problems financial education could have avoided

“Our biggest struggle is we have employees who have to choose between retirement savings or gas in the car,” Drayo said. Her employer realized employees needed tools to help them figure out their finances.

Still, there are missing pieces of information, she says. “Do our associates understand finances? I don’t know. We don’t have the data. I have 401(k) data, I know what the balances are, but I don’t know if it’s all of one person’s savings or just a part of it.”

Financial literacy is a way “to help our employees balance the need to plan for retirement with the way they want to live,” Gertzog said. “You help them understand that there are very few choices in life that are either A or B. There’s a gradation.”

Offering a financial literacy program seemed a bit too paternalistic at first, McCamley said. “But we’ve come around. In fact we just launched a smart dollar program through Dave Ramsey. It’s been widely received.” The organization offers small monetary incentives to employees for such things as logging on to the program. “We are going to continue to give incentives for engagement in that program. We feel it rounds out retirement. It helps them create a budget, they can look at it on their smartphones.”