Many retirement plan committees and corporate plan fiduciaries want assurances and validation that they are delivering the best 401(k) Plan in their own city or in their own industry. Plan sponsors regularly search for a method to support plans fees, services and service-provider performance. More than a one-to-one comparison, that will make a fiduciary feel good about their own processes and procedures, fiduciaries want a tool or measurement process that will stand up to the scrutiny of a DOL Audit or a protracted court proceeding.
Why not take a quick look at a few items that can quickly make big differences without consuming substantial resources?
The first two come from an idea of helping plan participants and plan sponsors to help themselves:
- Improving or Implementing Participant Investment Advice in the form of Education. Since we know that adults learn differently, plan sponsors should make the effort to implement at least 3 distinct types of education.
- Add online education modules which are targeted to each company’s diverse workforce.
- Auto-everything! Auto-enrollment and Auto-increase are just too powerful to ignore any longer.
- Stretching-the-match can be accomplished under a controlled environment which can insure that an updated match-structure does not increase an organization’s cost structure for the plan.
- Select a Qualified Default Investment Alternative – a true win-win scenario where participants benefit from the addition of a clear long-term investment strategy; while the plan sponsor benefits from a limited form of investment selection relief.
Employee Benefit News has recently written of these items above as well as other practices where plan sponsors can benchmark how their own plan is performing. Nothing is fail-safe, but it is always better to “know your own position” and the strengths and weaknesses that your plan possesses.
