The majority of Americans haven’t socked away enough savings to weather even a short-term emergency like car or home repairs, according to new research from the AARP that found dismal savings rates across income levels.

The AARP, which represents some 38 million Americans age 50 or older, said the savings shortfall should be addressed through workplace emergency savings plans.

“We find that workplace emergency savings accounts are an underutilized and potentially powerful tool for financial resilience,” said Catherine Harvey, a senior policy advisor at the AARP's Public Policy Institute and author of the AARP policy paper, entitled, “Unlocking Potential Emerging Savings Accounts."

As part of her study, Harvey looked at savings rates and found that a substantial portion of American workers across all income and levels would face a financial emergency if they were hit with sudden, unforeseen expenses, such as a major medical bill.

Research shows that employer-based interventions are effective in combatting the savings deficit and that plans should be designed to maximize participation by being easy to use, said Harvey.

"There's a lot of evidence from behavioral science about what makes employer-based interventions effective, and not surprisingly, one aspect of an effective program to maximize participation in an employee benefit is to make participation really easy," Harvey said.

To find out what would entice Americans to save in an emergency savings plan, AARP surveyed workers of a variety of income and age ranges about the types of features that would entice them to contribute to an emergency savings plan.

"Not surprisingly," Harvey said, survey respondents cited "the power of the employer match, which speaks to the incentive behind savings as being a very important feature—one that basically blows all of the other features out of the water."

That held true across the board, as even workers who reported strong savings rates independent of an employer plan said they would welcome matching funds.

"If there's a match ... people don't want to leave dollars on the table," Harvey said.

In addition to a matching feature, workers AARP surveyed indicated strong preferences for programs that would protect their privacy, give them complete control over access to their funds and generally limit complicating red tape that would make the programs less functional.

"The idea here behind an employer-based emergency savings program is let the employee define the emergency," Harvey said. "Putting up rules and barriers, eligibility criteria, is just going to frustrate people and they won't use the money when it's needed at that moment."

Workplace emergency savings plans should give more Americans access to safe and affordable financial products that could be maximized through the use of automatic transfers like those used in workplace defined contribution plans, Harvey added.

Some employers have offered a feature that allows workers to split their paychecks through direct deposit into separate accounts, one being set aside for emergency savings. But the early analysis of those programs, which tend to rely on the employee proactively opting to set up and contribute to the emergency account via direct deposit rather than use auto-enrollment, has found the results to be underwhelming, according to the report.

Increasing Americans' emergency savings also have a direct correlation to their overall financial confidence, Harvey reported.  In fact, Americans with rainy day funds are more than twice as likely than those without a fund to feel confident about their long-term financial prospects than those who do not, the group found.

As employers increasingly come to view emergency savings as a crucial element of their employees' financial well-being, more have been exploring a separate benefit to help encourage workers to put away money for some unforeseen contingency, Harvey said.

Emergency savings programs could become a key component of employers' expanding financial wellness benefits packages, but many are still grappling with the best way to drive engagement.

"We know that information for employees on a website is not going to cut it," Harvey said. "Education alone just doesn't work, and so employers over the years have gotten really savvy and have taken up the behavioral finance tools and concepts to make participation the default."