Not yet, anyway. But if big reforms – including the notion of mandatory savings – aren't in the cards any time soon, giants in the industry such as Fidelity and Vanguard are nonetheless doing what they can to strengthen 401(k) plans.

Help is undeniably needed.

A recent nationwide poll of more than 1,000 American workers who participate in a 401(k) plan by J.P. Morgan Asset Management found that the vast majority of savers don't have a clue how to manage their retirement planning and admit they need professional help.

Seventy-six percent of participants said they need professional assistance with key elements of retirement planning, including how much to save and how to allocate their investments. Despite this desire, roughly half (48 percent) don't have access to help through work or on their own.

Beth McHugh, Fidelity's vice president of market insights, says many changes in plan design in recent years have, in fact, helped employees increase their savings rates. Fidelity administers plans for 20,000 businesses with 12 million workers. In the majority of the plans, from small employer to large, new employees are automatically enrolled in plans.

"That's a great example of how plan design can help millions of Americans," McHugh said. "Auto features get people on the path to saving earlier and at higher levels."

That said, there are a number of changes that could make 401(k)s more robust:

• Auto-enrollment: McHugh says this feature can be expanded to include more than just new employees, as most plans currently do. Currently, longtime employees are often left to their own devices.

• Auto-escalation: This feature increases employee contributions each year, up to a certain threshold. It allows, McHugh says, for annual savings to reach the 10 percent to 15 percent figure considered necessary to adequately fund retirement. More employers should consider adopting this approach, she said.

• Company match: Many plans call for employee contributions to be matched up to the first 3 percent. McHugh says if the formula were tweaked to match at 50 percent up to 6 percent of deferrals, it would encourage more savings without costing employers additional money.

• Loans: Employers are beginning to look at restricting borrowing against 401(k)s to money put into them by employees. This approach preserves the employer match in the retirement account. (Although Vanguard's Jean Young sees a positive side to loans: "Loans have been shown to increase both plan participation and deferral rates. Over 90 percent of loans are repaid. Consider the eligible population who earns less than $30,000 per year; 54 percent of this demographic do not participate in their plan, 35 percent are participating with no loans outstanding, and 11 percent are participating with an outstanding loan. I would suggest the 11 percent of low-wage participants with some retirement savings are better off than the 54 percent of eligible low-wage workers with no retirement savings." 

• Education: In addition to the standard problem of increasing financial literacy, McHugh sees an opportunity to increase awareness of employees of how much they need to save and how well they are doing. Last year, Fidelity introduced the X Factor, a benchmarking tool that supplies such information at various points along an employee's career.

All of the steps above have been adopted to varying degrees. The question of how to maximize their benefits is a bit trickier.

"All the pieces to create a 'supercharged' 401(k) exist in a legal sense," Meigs said. "It's up to the vendor, a major player, to emphasize this and then the market will change."

Of course, all of these changes might not be right for every company. For smaller businesses, the costs of auto-enrollment can be an impediment, according to McHugh, because auto-enrollment creates higher costs for recordkeeping and for matching contributions.

And Young, a senior analyst with Vanguard's Center for Retirement Research and author of the company's annual report on participant trends, "How America Saves," said in an email interview that the need for auto-enrollment is more nuanced.

"Companies often offer retirement plans in order to be competitive with other potential employers. Automatic enrollment (AE) has grown dramatically over the past five years," he said. "However, not all plans 'need' AE. Some 401(k) plans are supplemental to a traditional DB plan. Some plans have higher participation rates without AE."

McHugh sees a growing interest by employers to drill down on the efficiency of their retirement plans they offer.

"We see employers really looking at the plan they offer, asking, 'Is it really helping employees get where they need to be?'" she said.

Sometimes, though, the simplest solution to solving the retirement "crisis" is overlooked.

"Actually offering a plan – and depending on the stat you choose – there's still a significant component of the private sector workforce that is not offered a plan," Young said.

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