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Welcome to Local Leaders of Boston featuring Alexandra Howley - Program Manager AAUW Work Smart in Boston. Our goal is to highlight local leaders and influencers who are making a positive impact on our Top Rep Boston community.
Alexandra Howley - Program Manager
So, Alex, what is AAUW Work Smart in Boston?
Work Smart is a program of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) that provides women the tools for successful salary negotiation.
In 2015, AAUW partnered with Mayor Walsh through the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement to pilot ‘Work Smart in Boston’ as a large- scale grassroots initiative to provide free salary negotiation workshops to women that live and work throughout the city.
How does this program fit into the bigger picture….?
The Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement is doing some really forward-thinking work to address the wage gap. They have deployed a multi-pronged approach that addresses both policy and culture. The Boston model focuses on three categories; Employers (culture & policy), Individuals (culture), and Legislation (policy). You can read more about their work here.
Work Smart in Boston is one of the ways that the city is supporting individuals. Educating women directly in salary negotiation is a really innovative new approach for cities and states. The MA Treasurer’s Office also recently announced the expansion of these workshops throughout the state. In addressing solutions to the gender-based salary gap, Evelyn Murphy, the former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and co-chair of the Boston Women’s Workforce Council argues that these issues can not be addressed through legislation alone. “It’s actions by all of us. Women have to act for employers to react. Employers have to act to make this change.”
What is your new role there?
I recently took over as the Program Manager for the AAUW Work Smart in Boston program, working out of the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement. My key focus since joining this amazing team has been to bring this program to scale. We have built a great foundation these first two years, and now we are increasing the volume of workshops and expanding to more neighborhoods across Boston.
I am also investing a great deal of energy into increasing awareness and accessibility for more women to be able to take advantage of these trainings. We have set really high goals for this program and my job is to do everything we can to get us there.
Can you tell us about some of your goals for the program?
Our primary goal set by Mayor Walsh & AAUW in 2015 is to train 85,000 women living and working in Boston by 2021. To help break that down, 85,000 is half of Boston’s working women.
In the first two years, we’ve held more than 250 workshops and trained over 6,000 women. Coming from General Assembly (a growing education company), it has been really fun applying some of the strategies we deployed scaling in the startup space to this work with the city. With the continued support from the Boston community, I am confident that we will reach this goal.
The other underlying goal of this program is to create a model for other cities and states to support women and increase pay equity.
Who should be utilizing these services?
The program is designed for anyone that identifies as a woman, but we do welcome men. We recognize that men of color and other groups also experience a wage gap, so we try to be as inclusive as possible. Knowing how to negotiate for yourself and feeling empowered to do so is a necessary life skill.
The Boston Women's Workforce Council, a public-private partnership between Mayor Walsh and the Greater Boston business community, released a new report in January 2018, which dug into the Greater Boston area gender wage gap. The model uses employer-reported wage data to measure the localized wage gap, a first-in-the-nation approach, which is seen to be more accurate than the commonly referenced analyses that use U.S. Census data.The sample that represented 16% of the city’s workforce revealed that women working full-time in the Boston area are paid, on average, $0.76 to a white male's $1.00. Even worse, black women are making $0.52 and Latina women $0.49.
The two-hour workshop is broken down into the following four key pieces to help guide participants through the process:
Understanding the gender wage gap, including its long-term consequences
How to identify and articulate your personal value
How to conduct objective market research to benchmark a target salary and benefits
How to develop an arsenal of persuasive responses and other negotiation strategies, including how to get a raise or promotion
These workshops are FREE and we’re hosting them in locations across all 23 of Boston’s neighborhoods!
If you would like to register to attend a workshop, visit boston.gov/women
If you want to get involved:
Sign up to become a workshop facilitator, visit salary.aauw.org/facilitate
(we are always looking for more women to get involved)
Or if you have the space to host a workshop, contact Alex at Howleya@aauw.org
About the American Association of University Women
The American Association of University Women (AAUW) is a national nonprofit committed to advancing equity for women through advocacy, education, and research and has been around since 1881.
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Welcome to Boston Company Spotlight featuring David Vencis - Program Director at Startup Institute Our goal is to highlight local influencers, resources, and opportunities for our Top Rep Boston Community!
A few weeks ago, a member of the Drift Customer Success team and a member of the Sales team both approached me to share that they felt the customer handoff process was broken. So we grabbed a whiteboard and started talking about the steps in the process...
“There are details we tell the customer they’ll review with the CSM, but they’re not consistently addressed in every kick off call.”
“There are notes that are supposed to be filled out in Salesforce from a rep that doesn't always get filled out.”
The back and forth discussion on process precision would certainly make any operations employee smile, but we had to take a step back and put someone else’s sentiment into focus: Our customer’s.
“Forget OUR process and how we’ve architected the way WE think things should be. What would our customer say?”
The conversation changed.
The whiteboard was erased.
We started over, with the customer at the center of the conversation, and landed someplace completely different.
A few weeks prior, we had Lisa Rubino, Program Manager of Patient Experience at Boston Children’s Hospital, come in to run a lunch and learn with the entire Drift team about patient experience. We were stunned by the number of similarities between patient care in health services and customer care in SaaS services, and how dependent they were on partnerships, much like the relationship between sales and services.
Lisa mentioned the tough feedback they’d received from patients about the transfer from nurses between shifts, and how they wanted the exchange of patient information to feel more human. It resulted in a change they now call “the warm handoff,” where both nurses -- as well as the patient -- are present to review important patient details. This required a change to their process, training for employees to get onboard, and follow-through to make sure it was happening. And it was the right thing for their patients.
It taught us to challenge ourselves to throw process in the trash if it didn’t solve for the needs of the customer and to also look in the mirror when it came to how important our Sales and Customer Success partnership is in the eyes of our customers.
Our Drift customer handoffs are now “warm” (thanks to the change-agent nurses at Children’s for inspiring us), have far fewer steps, and more immediate tool-driven automation. The updates reflect what our customers want and need when they first buy our product, instead of the process steps we’ve trained on and predefined internally.
At Drift, we continue to find that over-dependence on the internal business process is where Customer Experience dies, and alignment between Customer Success and Sales falls apart. Alignment works when customers are at the center of what we build, across every part of the business.
IF INTERESTED IN A CAREER AT DRIFT
VISIT HERE
About the Author - Julie Hogan
Julie Hogan has been on the front lines of the customer experience her entire career. She began her career in the Human Capital practice of Deloitte Consulting servicing customers across multiple industries, and then spent 7 1/2 years at HubSpot in multiple customer-facing roles, most recently as the VP of Customer Success and International Services. She was responsible for the retention of HubSpot's global customer base, global services strategy, and for building, developing and leading HubSpot's Services organizations in Dublin, Sydney, Singapore, Latin America, Japan, and Germany. She spent the first half of 2017 living in both Singapore and Dublin. In October, Julie joined Drift as their first female executive as their VP of Customer Success and Services.
Julie is a member of the Board of Directors for the International Institute of New England, a nonprofit supporting the refugee and immigrant communities of the Greater Boston area, and is a Team Captain for Cycle for Survival, a nonprofit supporting the research of rare cancers. Julie is a proud Woburn native, Penn State grad, and mom of two boys ages 3 and 1.
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Welcome to Boston Company Spotlight featuring Alex Mackenzie - Director of Sales at Allego. Our goal is to highlight great local sales opportunities for our Top Rep Boston Community!
Congratulations to the Winners of the 2017 Pong Tournament and all those who participated. It was a night to remember and we hope to see everyone again very soon!
1st Place - Boris Revsin & Michael Kelly
2nd Place - Griffin Meehan & Zach Rothschild
3rd Place - Dan Dionne & Justin Williams
&
$2300 was raised for
Pete Frates Home Health Initiative
*If you missed the event, but would like to donate, please visit: HERE
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Welcome to Boston Company Spotlight featuring Brett Samuels - Senior Sales Manager, Enterprise at InVision App. Our goal is to highlight great local sales opportunities for our Top Rep Boston Community!