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International Women’s Day: Celebrating Women Who've Made an Impact

Ciara Appelbaum
|
June 16, 2021

Here at Snappy, we believe achieving gender equality in the workplace starts with creating a company culture that encourages diversity and inclusion. Statistically, women are much less likely than men to be in workplace leadership positions, so a cultural change is essential in creating more female corporate leaders.

While it’s been a particularly newsworthy year in the gender equality movement, what often doesn’t make headlines is the work that ordinary women are doing to drive major change. We’d love for you to meet these 3 amazing women who have made an impact in their company culture and here’s what they have to say about their work over the last year:


Lisa Chaboudy

Senior Director of People & Culture, REI Systems 

“Building and sustaining a company culture that celebrates the diverse backgrounds and talents of the REI Systems’ workforce has always been an important focus. However, this past year has made that focus more critical than ever.  With our entire workforce moving to remote work overnight due to the pandemic, our people teams immediately responded to ensure our employees felt engaged and appreciated while working in the virtual world.

This past year, our employees worked very hard to meet our customer's needs while simultaneously juggling their own personal situations, pandemic concerns, and missing in-person interactions with their co-workers. In response, we have modified some recognition methods that have worked well in the past and implemented new and creative ways to reward and appreciate employees. Prior to the pandemic, we used Snappy Gifts for our On-the-Spot awards to immediately recognize employees demonstrating excellence on a particular task or event. At the start of the pandemic, we increased the dollar value of the Snappy awards and substantially increased the number of awards distributed. In addition, we have sent employee care packages, UberEats meal vouchers, company branded items, continued our corporate social responsibility campaigns through virtual fundraisers and corporate donations, held virtual happy hours, team building events, trivia games, scavenger hunts, wellness events, fireside chats with our leadership team, virtual townhalls, and we just concluded our first ever virtual All Hands meeting with record attendance.

While adapting our employee recognition methods to the virtual world hasn’t been without its challenges, recognizing our employee accomplishments and contributions is vital to increase engagement and maintain overall well-being.  We will continue our proven recognition and engagement methods and experiment with new ones as we further cultivate our amazing culture.”

Kendra Silberman
Executive Assistant Business Partner, Uber

“Our organization has been working remotely for a year and counting. Snappy is a lifesaver during a time when you can't walk over to a coworker's desk and congratulate them, take them to lunch or even be within six feet of them. With Snappy's automated e-gifting I know that their milestones won't be forgotten. 

Personally, I use Snappy gifts to recognize work anniversaries. My team has over 200 anniversaries a year so I couldn't be more thankful that the process is automated. My coworkers are always excited to pick their gift and they can even send thank you notes through the platform. Snappy is truly a spectacular service where the sender and the receiver both win." 


Neha Dange
Human Resources Lead, Clairvoyant LLC

 “2020 has been nothing but a tumultuous year for all of us at Clairvoyant, throwing on our way newer challenges and opening up paths hardly explored. Juggling with what the year kept on our hands, we at Clairvoyant continued to maintain our focus and work towards our goal of "Employer of Choice” by enhancing the employee experience. Changing times did not waiver us from our prime goal and in fact, we laid extra emphasis to ensure our employees continue to have an awesome experience even while working from home.

Did our company culture take a hit because of the sudden complete remote work scenario? No. Partly because our culture is built around being dynamic, reacting to situations (with our customers and technology), and being nimble. So while COVID threw some unexpected challenges, in reality, our culture continued to develop and blossom beautifully as ever, with the guidance of our amazing and ever-involved leadership and the support of our employees. All of whom played a vital role in maintaining a positive environment, and walking ahead looking at the bright side. It's the core values we swear by and the right mindset of folks on the team that has helped our culture stay unaffected in tough times.

To add some delightful elements and give folks little moments of happiness we sent their way some surprise packages over intervals. Surprises such as snack boxes, sweet treats, and care packages with some amazing company-branded merchandise.

In 2020, we also introduced our teams to Snappy, who came in bearing some wonderful gifts for them. We were amazed to see how quickly our folks fell in love with Snappy - it was the ease of use, the nice UI, and the host of gift options available that they loved. For us on the HR side, in addition to all this we also liked the automation bit, and how we could pre-set gift campaigns. I must say that in no time we moved all of our gift campaigns to Snappy - whether it was work anniversary gifts, one-off gifts or life-event recognition gifts. It was definitely a game-changer for us, saving us a lot of time and effort. Surely a wonderful product to land upon.”

Striving for success

Let’s face it: 2020 was rough, to say the least. But we’ve all learned to adapt to sudden change. The women we’ve celebrated in this piece have proven that they’ve risen to the challenge in the face of a global event and found the right tools for success. Stories like these make us proud to push for gender equality and diversity & inclusion.

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