If you're like most people, the bulk of your investment dollars is locked up in your company's retirement plan. Your employer offers investment choices, often mutual funds, and you pick the ones you want. Increasingly, companies are offering options that let some employees align their retirement portfolios with their values, according to a June report. Recently, the Monitor's Laurent Belsie sat down with three experts to discuss the trend: Cheryl Smith of the Social Investment Forum, which released the report; Reggie Stanley, chief marketing officer at Calvert, a mutual-fund family in Bethesda, Md.; and Amy Muska O'Brien, director of social investing at TIAA-CREF, a financial-services company in New York. Here's an edited transcript of their conversation. Click here to watch the video.

Why do people cheer this survey? Four in five company plans still don't offer an ethical-investment option.

Ms. Smith: It's progress compared with a few years ago. In addition, the finding that two out of five [companies] plan to offer [such an option] in the next three years means there's an incredible amount of growth coming in the industry – and a lot more options and choices for investors.

What kind of employers are leading the charge?

Smith: The leaders in the charge are organizations that have a mission affiliation. You see it in government. You see it in education with TIAA-CREF being a longtime leader in the offering of those kinds of funds. [You see it in] healthcare organizations. Companies where the employees feel that they are doing some positive good.

Why is it so hard to get employers, who sponsor these plans, to offer an ethical-investing option?

Mr. Stanley: There's an incredible number of plan sponsors who still don't know much about socially responsible investing [SRI].

How do you get your employer to offer some of these options?

Smith: I think a really good strategy is to find several like-minded employees who will individually and separately ask for [an SRI option]. Because one of the findings is that a number of plan sponsors say: "Well, no one's ever asked." So I think many separate askings would probably be a good strategy.

Are more people asking, Amy?

Ms. O'Brien: I think the interest has always been there, and the interest is growing in new places.... We've actually had an SRI option on the platform for our pension-plan participants since 1990. And we've found even with our constituency base, which is very inclined to be favorable toward the principles underlying SRI, we still don't see 100 percent participation among our 3.2 million participants. In fact, we see about 15 percent of our participants exercising the option.

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