Summer 2009
Sponsors List 2009 Priorities
As evidence of continuing employer efforts to ensure that employees take steps to achieve their retirement goals and needs, a recent Hewitt Associates' survey found that 55 percent of employer respondents ranked employees’ understanding of future retirement benefits as their highest priority for 2009.
Getting employees to accept accountability for retirement followed closely as the next highest priority (52 percent).
For 39 percent of those responding, finding ways to help employees retire with sufficient retirement assets was another high priority.
Just over half of the plan sponsors offer automatic enrollment, and another 10 percent were very likely to adopt it this year. About 40 percent said they would add automatic contribution escalation as a default under automatic enrollment. Automatic contribution increases was a feature offered by 53 percent of plans, and almost half made automatic rebalancing available.
A large majority of sponsors said they will emphasize communication to employees this year. Key topics they said they would address include protecting against market fluctuations through diversification and staying focused on investing for the long term.
Read Hewitt Associates’ Hot Topics in Retirement 2009.
