Hodges Mace

Employee engagement is a top initiative in today’s businesses, and employers are turning towards solutions and tools that can increase employee retention, education and satisfaction. With benefit options becoming increasingly complex, employers are also utilizing these tools to help employees better understand and leverage their benefit packages. “Sometimes, the complexity of a benefit program, especially health insurance, can have a negative impact on employee engagement and trust,” says Greg Hodges, the Co-CEO of Hodges-Mace. “Businesses need to help employees connect the dots if they want to optimize their investment in benefits.”

The solution to reducing friction begins with educating employees about the selection and utilization of their benefits. Hodges-Mace facilitates the much-needed communication between employers and employees and provides the right delivery of benefits to the workforce through their smart platform. By using the company’s AI-enabled solution, SmartBen, businesses can administer complex benefits programs, while making sure employees are getting the education and guidance they need for enrollment.

Employers utilize SmartBen as a communication, education and enrollment platform where employees receive customized plan recommendations, work-life decision modeling tools, and healthcare calculators to encourage employee education and engagement within the platform. For delivering important messages, Hodges-Mace offers personalized avatars to interact with employees in 30 different languages, addressing employees by name and helping them navigate through the system. Additionally, SmartBen can aggregate and utilize information about employees to answer questions and help them make more informed benefit decisions.

To simplify the employer’s overall HR technology strategy, SmartBen allows integration with existing ERP, HCM and payroll systems. It also aggregates benefits data from multiple sources, delivering all information on one dashboard accessible by the employee’s PC or mobile device.

“We see a lot of extensions through the API ecosystem, involving HR and other functions of a business. SmartBen is a point solution that can be layered on top of an HCM system to bring more sophisticated benefit delivery tools to the workforce,” adds Kevin Andrews, president and CTO at Hodges-Mace. With numerous integrations and an aggregated data-set, businesses can verify eligibility, determine the compliance risks associated with employees, screen them, and reduce healthcare costs.

Hodges-Mace concentrates its efforts on designing positive and engaging employee experiences while it simplifying a gamut of tasks that include benefits administration and eligibility verification. The firm has helped numerous clients turn the corner with its cutting edge solutions. For instance, a regional bank recently hired Hodges-Mace to improve employee participation in consumer-directed health plans (CDHP). The bank had utilized conventional means of communication to engage its workforce, to no avail. After deploying SmartBen and its decision-support functionality, the bank improved employee engagement and increased participation from 15 percent to 44 percent in one year.

SmartBen is a point solution that can be layered on top of an HCM system to bring more sophisticated benefit delivery

Hodges-Mace continues to create similar success stories by leveraging the power of technology to innovate and improve the employee experience. The leadership team understands how “cloud embrace” has become the norm today, and how security concerns around the cloud are ever growing. Hodges-Mace is the only company of its kind to offer each client its own unique encryption key while still allowing for universal updates and enhancements. Hodges- Mace is committed to developing scalable and compliant solutions that meet growing customer requirements.