Three reasons why employees are participating, but not on track for retirement

Our latest research found that 92 percent of employees were saving in their employer’s retirement plan in the first quarter of 2012. Yes, 40-50 percent of private sector employers are auto-enrolling employees into their retirement plans these days, but with this high a percentage of employees participating, shouldn’t it mean employees are better prepared for retirement?  Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In the same quarter we found that only 14 percent of employees felt confident they were on track to retire with 80 percent of their income (or their goal) in retirement.

There’s another side of things we have to consider to determine if employees are really on track to retire: whether employees are making the right choices about their retirement. Employers are generally doing a much better job (and kudos for that) of informing employees about their retirement benefits, but some of what employers think they’re doing right might actually not be effective. If your company is seeing high participation rates, but not enough employees better prepared for retirement, here are three things that might be wrong with your company’s strategy: