The start of a new year is a time when many people make beneficial changes to their diets and lifestyles. Plans are implemented to cease bad habits and replace them with better ones. People aspire to be healthier, happier, more efficient.
But what about focusing on some of the ways you can streamline and improve your company’s retirement plan for the coming year? Here are 5 steps you can take to make sure you have a cost-effective plan that runs like a well-oiled machine and helps your employees better prepare for their retirement.
1. Focus on automation.
Auto features are a great way of making sure employees are signing up, saving, and reevaluating and helps them to prepare more effectively than if they were responsible for handling everything on their own.
2. Consolidate.
Due to the high number of job changes today’s Americans make, most have multiple retirement accounts scattered across several employers’ various plans. Many neglect to make changes to their previous accounts or even lose track of them altogether. Helping employees consolidate their other balances into your company’s plan can help them better grow their account balances and avoid cashing out those other plans.
3. Get rid of small balances.
By offering employees an automatic rollover program when they leave your company, you can eliminate accounts with small balances that bog down your plan. You can also help former employees stay invested in retirement.
4. Use smart metrics.
It’s impossible to improve your plan’s performance without measuring its success. By measuring the average account balances, as well as individual participants’ retirement readiness, you can take steps to help keep plan costs low and improve the retirement security of your employees.
5. Eliminate administrative headaches.
Many benefits managers waste a lot of time on things like returned mail and uncashed checks from former participants. By tracking these people down (using social media and other tools), you can eliminate a lot of these unnecessary tasks.
For more ideas on improving the effectiveness of your company’s plan, you can check out the full article on Employee Benefit News.