Game Plan
Ready, Set, Go
What a retirement readiness focus means for you
Practically speaking, what does
it mean for sponsors to get actively
involved in retirement readiness—espe-
cially in an era of heightened legal fears?
“Our mantra is, run the benchmarking
report to figure out how bad it is, then
use plan design to make it as good as
possible, so you are protected,” says Tom
Kmak, CEO and co-founder of Portland,
Oregon-based Fiduciary Benchmarks,
Inc., which provides plan benchmarking
services. “Diagnose and then prescribe,
but make sure that you are looking at the
right metrics.”
As focus shifts from participants’
accumulations to retirement-income
adequacy, sponsors need different ways
to gauge their plans’ success. “How do
you measure a healthy plan? We are
changing the vocabulary as we speak,”
says Elaine Sarsynski, Executive Vice
President at MassMutual. “The metrics
that we have used have been very static
metrics. We are trying to switch the
discussion from an activity-based metric
to an outcome-based metric.”
Of course, that requires having a clear
sense of what outcome a plan sponsor
wants. “The first question I often ask
sponsors is, ‘How do you as a committee
define success?’” says Joe Ready, Director
of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement
and Trust. “What is really interesting to
me is that, for a lot of plans with great
intentions, that is not even a question
committees have considered collectively.”
a Fear of lawsuits
Yet, as Ready says, these companies
spend a lot of time looking at metrics in
other areas of their business. When he
asks how they define plan success, spon-
