Retirement Plan Blog

Just because your company has a 401(k) plan in place doesn’t mean it’s working well for your company and employees.

If you’re seeing any of the following seven warning signs, it’s time to seek an outside opinion and analysis of your 401(k) plan:

When your employees are worried about health and financial issues, it has serious consequences for your business. If your employees can’t focus and suffer from stress and related problems, the result is a disengaged workforce and lost productivity.

An effective employee benefits plan plays a critical role in keeping your team engaged and focused on achieving work goals, and helps them see their work life as beneficial to their personal needs, instead of a detriment.

If your company is seeing a rise in sick days and requests for more time off, it’s time to rethink your employee benefits plan.

Improving your 401(k) plan and other seemingly minor aspects of your business is important if you’re determined to build an exceptional company, instead of one that’s merely average.

“An exceptional company is one that gets all the little details right,” Virgin founder Richard Branson said in an interview with Inc. That requires listening to your employees and acting on their feedback. “The people out on the frontlines know when things are not going right. If you listen to them, you can soon improve all those negative things.”

At the same time, it’s easy to have a mediocre 401(k) plan. Set up a plan, hold an annual trustee meeting and call it a day. In a mediocre plan, there’s no attention to detail: no ongoing monitoring or resolving the many issues that arise during the year, and no ongoing education for the plan’s participants to make sure they’re getting the most value from their retirement benefits.

If you’re not communicating well with employees about your 401(k) plan and providing the advice and guidance they need, they’ll end up seeking advice from other employees — who may not know what they are doing. Each person’s financial situation is different, so what’s right for one employee could be disastrous for another.

A construction company provides a sobering example of what could happen if you don’t make employee communication a key element of your company’s retirement plan.