participant survey

[Guest Chuck Herbik]

I would like to know if anyone has ever run accross a good survey to distribute to a group of participants to determine their satisfaction with 401(k) plan, services, investments, etc. Trying to get eligible employees not currently participating, to participate.

[Guest FREE401k]

Chuck: We don't have any kind of survey, but we get eligible employees into the plan by automatically enrolling them. We are a TPA and provide auto enrollment for ALL of our 401(k) Plans. We have used it for 5+ years on a 10,000 man Plan and it has worked beautifully. In addition to automatically enrolling new hires, this Plan recently automatically enrolled all existing employees (in other words, employees who had been hired before auto enrollment began and had never joined the Plan.) This particular Plan currently has a 95+% participation rate.

Some say you must be careful about the motivation for auto enrollment, and we know lots of practitioners and Plan sponsors who are nervous about it. Our general philosophy is that auto enrollment is simply a decision about what happens if the participant takes no action. If a new hire takes no action, is he in the Plan or out of the Plan? Since the Plan is a good thing, we think the response to no action on the part of the new hire should be that they are put into the Plan, not excluded from it.