As more and more studies show that employees just aren’t saving enoughfor retirement, it’s incumbent upon plan sponsors to makea little extra effort to help them do so.

Business Insider reports on seven ways that employerscan help their employees to up their savings rates that can berelatively painless—some are steps that employers might have toincorporate into their plans, while others could be subtle nudgesor part of financial wellness plans that can improve employees’savings behavior.

It can be tough to set money aside on a regular basis, even whenyou know you need to. And despite the roaring results on WallStreet, that doesn’t mean that people are making enough to saveenough for various goals—not that they’re all that well trained infiguring out the best way to manage their pay.

According to the report, the average American managed to stashjust a little over 3% of disposable personal income inOctober, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Ndthat’s really pitiful, compared with, say, Japan’s savings rates of19.3%; even the U.K. does almost twice as well, according to globaleconomic data provider Trading Economics.

The psychological factor plays a big role in how, and howmuch—even whether—employees save, not just for emergencies like caror home repairs but also for the much more distant goal ofretirement.

In fact, the report points out that research points toforethought, self-control and willpower are required in substantialmeasure to save money—something that runs counter to our tendenciestoward immediate gratification.

In the report, Nobel Prize laureate and renowned behavioraleconomist Richard Thaler is quoted saying in a WallStreet Journal interview that saving forretirement is “cognitively hard” and that it's “obviouslypreposterous” to assume that everybody will figure out how muchthey have to save and actually carry out the plan.

To help improve results, sometimes it’s necessary to play mindgames—and there are ways to help employees play those games to win.Here are seven ways that employers can do just that:

7. Think present. Act now.

When you view a goal as immediate instead of distant, it can beeasier to achieve it, because of a little thing called timeorientation.

According to the report, “the way we think about time inrelation to our goals plays a major role in people’s ability tosave.”

Look at it this way. If you think of retirement as 30 years off,it’s all too easy to postpone saving. If, however, we think of theimmediate contribution as the objective instead of keeping our eyeon the end goal of retiring, meeting the goal of the immediatecontribution is more likely to get done.

Says the report, “In a 2014 paper published in‘Psychological Science,’ scholars Leona Tam and Utpal Dholakiaconcluded that individuals who think about savingscyclically—seeing life events as a series of repeatingexperiments—are estimated to save 74% more than those who thinklinearly. People with linear time-orientation view life in past,present and future terms.”

So if your financial wellness program or some other effort, suchas coaching, can make people focus on those repetitious goals ofcontributions, instead of the end result that’s so distant in time,they’re more likely to stick with the program.

And the repetitious nature of recurring contributions reinforcesthe likelihood that employees will keep contributing.

In addition, says the report, research shows that people withnegative past memories about money are more likely to “be in goodfinancial health. They are more conservative and likely to save fortheir future to avoid a repeat of previous negativeexperiences.”

Interestingly, those who are more focused on the future tend tobe more optimistic, thus postponing savings and thinking they’llcatch up later. Of course, that seldom happens.

6. Automate savings.

Automating the process of retirement—and othersavings—contributions takes away the need for people to actuallydecide about each action.

“If people have to actively think about saving, then theyprobably won't do it,” Shlomo Benartzi, a behavioral economist atthe University of California, Los Angeles, writes inthe Harvard Business Review, arguing that automated depositsare the most effective way to save for retirement.

When workers are automatically opted into a savings plan,whether for retirement or other savings, they don’t have to thinkabout it.

And if they have to opt out, that makes the choiceof not saving harder to carry out, thus reducingthe odds that they’ll do so.

5. Automate regular savings increases.

By implementing an auto-increase or auto-escalation figure inretirement and other savings plans, employers can raise the amountemployees save—something that is particularly important since mostinitial contribution rates set by retirement and other savingsplans are too low to ensure that employees will actually saveenough to see them through retirement.

And if employees don’t increase their savings percentages,they’ll come out the other end with far too little savings to getthem through retirement in comfort.

In one segment of Thaler and Benartzi’s three-part “Save MoreTomorrow” study, conducted during the late 1990s/early 2000s, theresearchers followed 315 workers at an unnamed manufacturingcompany.

About 160 workers elected to increase their 401(k) contributionseach year for four years and 32 of them opted out over the years,says the report.

But the people who agreed to raise contributions nearlyquadrupled their savings rates. According to the report, “Oncetheir savings strategy was set—increasing annually with theirraises—very few people ever got around to changing their savingsallocations again once they enrolled.” Easy, right?

4. Set an actionable plan with negative consequences.

People are more concerned with losing money than gaining it;thus, a plan that penalizes them for failing to achieve savingsgoals helps to keep them on the straight and narrow.

The idea is this, according to Dean Karlan, an economicsprofessor at Yale University, who created the “commitmentcontract” theory: The contract allows people to set a positivegoal to save more money, say, or to set a New Year’s resolution.Failing to meet the goal subjects them to some kind of penalty,according to the terms of their contract.

The report cites an example: “[A] die-hard animal rightsactivist might develop a commitment contract to save $2,000 in fivemonths for an international trip, with the stipulation that if thisperson violates the contract, he or she must buy a $70 ticket to aSeaWorld theme park.”

While at present there’s no app for this (Shocking! How can thisbe?), employees could be encouraged to team up to hold each otheraccountable for following their goals—or to make that arrangementwith a family member or friend.

Imagine the incentive to stick to your goals if you know that ifyou fail, a coworker will nag you to fulfill that negativeobligation….

3. Focus on smaller goals first.

In a similar manner to focusing on an individual retirementsavings contribution instead of the whole multi-decade plan, thisbreaks down a large objective into manageable sections and foolsthe mind into thinking that it’s more achievable.

Benartzi and his UCLA colleagues asked a group of participantsif they thought they could save $5 every day, another group if theycould manage $35 a week, and a third group whether they thoughtthey could save $150 a month.

Even though the end objectives were the same, nearly 30% of theparticipants said they could save $5 a day, while only 7% committedto save $150 a month.

Now there are apps for this type of mind game—some thatautomatically transfer spare change from your checking account toyour savings, or that automatically invest small amounts ofmoney—but employees could actually resort to manually dumpingchange into a jar or, say, all $5 bills from their wallets into asavings account.

And apps can be part of a financial wellness program.

2. Save a bonus or other lump-sum windfall.

People don’t see bonuses, tax refunds, inheritances and other“surprise” sums of money the same way they do regular income, andfind it easier to put it—or at least a major part of it—intosavings.

Employers might want to encourage this by offering the option ofa bonus being deposited into a savings account or other designatedsavings vehicle.

1. Track your spending.

There are plenty of apps for this, and employees can use them tosee how much they actually spend on lattes or lunches out with aneye toward seeing what those “little luxuries” actually cost them.And reality bites.

Benartzi and fellow researcher Yaron Levi report thatpeople who used a mobile app that tracked spending and investmentperformance cut back on their spending by 15.7%.

And even a 2016 Federal Reserve study found thatapproximately 62% of consumers with access to mobile bankingchecked their account balance on their phone before making a bigpurchase, and half of them decided not to buy that item becausethey were informed of their real-time account balance and creditlimit