Announcing 2022's Excellence in Benefits Award winners
Employee Benefit News
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EXCELLENCE IN BENEFITS: EBN's 2022 Excellence in Benefits Awards celebrates 16 HR leaders, tech innovators and benefit advisers who are pushing employers and employees to think outside of the box. They're creating better benefits around healthcare and well-being, changing the cultural conversation around mental health, child care and financial wellness, and striving everyday to put people first.
Congratulations to all of this year's winners, from Equinix , SevenRooms , Ocean Spray Cranberries , Lyft , Dallas Independent School District , Arrow Benefits Group , Next Impact , Segal , MP Benefits Inc. , Kinside , AllVoices , Nava Benefits , Beam Benefits , Hinge Health and Betterment at Work . Check out the full list of winners!
CHILD CARE: Shadiah Sigala and her co-founder Brittney Barrett were already seasoned tech entrepreneurs when they started Kinside , a platform that helps working parents find and pay for child care. And they knew they could solve their own problem.
"We're parents and we feel the pain of child care every single day," Sigala says. "That was the impetus for Kinside, of combining our technology background with the fact that we're employers and we're parents." Since launching in 2020, Kinside serves more than 4,000 employers and their employees, who get access to a database of available child care providers, along with a tech-forward way to pay for it, using dependent FSA dollars and other employer-provided stipends.
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ADVISING: For Andrew D. McNeil and Rosario Avila , recognizing the unique needs of every human being has made their work as benefit advisers more fulfilling — and more successful.
That starts with their own differences. McNeil, a principal at Arrow Benefits Group, first met Avila when she joined the firm in 2016 as a consultant. On paper, they don't have much in common, but the duo hit it off and formed a close working relationship that, six years later, has led to the creation of BenefitsTV (a Youtube and social media channel for bite-size benefits content) as well as Alianza, the company's Spanish-language division.
WELLNESS: Bekki Early loves her job. As the global well-being program manager for Equinix , a platform that provides digital infrastructure for internet platforms like YouTube and Facebook, she's living, breathing and sharing the benefits of wellness and self-care each and every day.
"I care so deeply about this. I like to tell people, I found my dream job at 35," Early says. "I was reading the books and nudging my friends and my partner about all this health and wellness stuff, and now I have a willing audience — and more than that, people who appreciate it." Early shares how she revamped the company's wellness programs, boosted engagement in their EAP, and turned to her own employees to advocate for the benefits of a healthy workplace.