Worldwide research shows that gender bias in the workplace is improving, but there’s still a long way to go. Although perceptions of gender roles naturally change over time, many organizations and individuals want to do their part to make current conditions as fair as possible for everyone at work.

 2A Consulting is just one example of a company doing what it can to promote equality in the workplace. The marketing agency focuses on storytelling for business, striving to blend strategic and creative efforts to create assets that captivate customers. From the top down, the leadership team at 2A Consulting puts best practices in place that help improve gender equality across the company.

Using All the Talent Available to You

Having diverse sources of talent and ideas can help a company take full advantage of significant changes happening in your market. Understanding this, Abby Breckenridge, partner at 2A Consulting, has made a point to recognize and advance women who do great work.

Two actions in particular have helped 2A Consulting nurture women as consultants and managers. The first: speaking up. Breckenridge realized that getting men and women alike to squelch gender inequality had to start with acknowledging unfair practices or mistreatment. Even a lack of information about women returning to work after pregnancy can lead to unintended bias.  

The second: being open to doing things differently. The flip side of speaking up, this best practice is all about listening and observing. Breckenridge leads by example at 2A Consulting. She shows her team how to acknowledge and accept when something isn’t working, and models a mature, collaborative path to a solution.

With advances in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, IT infrastructure, and more, companies across the globe are constantly seeking to modernize their ways of doing business. One of the best ways to ensure your company thrives during change, however, is to consider and nurture the talent at your disposal without bias. To maximize resources, a company must avoid preferential treatment and advance employees regardless of gender.

Sending the Right Message

Valuing team members has been one source of 2A Consulting’s success, while another has been the company’s approach to marketing. Many times, marketing agencies immediately jump to crafting campaigns with impactful words, but these efforts often lack broader context and, ultimately, fall flat for customers. A cohesive story, after all, is a strong framework for effective marketing.

Figuring out the best way to broadcast your core value to customers is no minor task. In competitive markets, something as simple as sending the right message can be the deciding factor in whether a customer chooses your business or someone else’s.

“We help businesses lock onto the stories they're trying to tell—whether it's for a product launch or a keynote presentation,” said Abby Breckenridge, partner at 2A Consulting. “Our consultants work with clients to formulate the message, distill it down, and then build it into assets in a way that resonates. This way, companies can make lasting connections with customers.”

As good marketers know, there’s often a large difference between what a company sells (the product) and what customers are really buying (the solution to their problem). That’s why it’s important to be as clear as possible with your messaging and to think about your audience when crafting that story.

Consider what you can do within your organization to encourage an environment that’s more inclusive, makes use of all its untapped talent, and, ultimately, brings in more successful prospects.

2A Consulting recently earned a Bronze Stevie® Award for being one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.

The Stevie® Awards has opened entries for The 16th Annual International Business Awards, the world's premier business awards competition, which attracts nominations from organizations in more than 70 nations and territories each year.

All individuals and organizations worldwide—public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small—may submit nominations to The International Business Awards. The early-bird entry deadline, with reduced entry fees, is 10 April. The final entry deadline is 8 May, but late entries will be accepted through 12 June with payment of a late fee. Entry details are available at www.StevieAwards.com/IBA.

Juries featuring more than 150 executives will determine the Stevie Award winners. The Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be announced pm 13 August. Stevie Award winners will be presented their awards at a gala banquet in Vienna, Austria on 19 October.

The International Business Awards recognize achievement in every facet of the workplace. Categories include:

• Management Awards 
• Entrepreneur of the Year Awards
• Company of the Year Awards
• Customer Service Awards 
• Human Resources Awards 
• Information Technology Awards
• Marketing Awards 
• New Product Awards 
• Public Relations Awards 
• Web Site Awards, Smartphone and Tablet App, and other media awards

There are many new and revised features of the IBAs for 2019:

• A variety of new categories, including the IT categories Best Technical Support Strategy and Implementation and Best Technical Support Solution. In categories for business-related media, there are many new Live Event, Publication, and Video categories.
• Entry fees have been eliminated for nominations to the Company of the Year categories. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie winners in these these 35 by-industry categories will again be included in the worldwide public vote called the People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite Companies.
• In the Marketing, New Product & Service, and Public Relations categories, nominees may now submit a video of up to five minutes in length, instead of the traditional written Stevie Awards essay or case study.

Stevie Award winners in the 2018 IBAs included DHL Express (worldwide), Dubai Health Authority (United Arab Emirates), GXEVER (China), iFinance Canada, Kia Motors Corporation (South Korea), LLORENTE & CUENCA (Spain), Megaworld Foundation (Philippines), NBCUniversal (USA), Net World Sports (Wales), Shinhan Bank (South Korea), Telkom Indonesia, and many more.

Much has been written about the rise of the gig economy, i.e., the hiring of workers on short-notice, short-duration contracts or freelance jobs. Part of this narrative is how noticeably different it is from the labor market models of old. In the past, people either focused on: a) the miraculous rise of start-ups based entirely on gig economy business models, such as Uber, or b) how the gig economy is, for workers, often characterized by a lack of job security, pension, health care contributions, and other employment benefits once considered standard.

Either view misses the wider picture, though.

To start, job security and benefits were never as widespread or culturally ingrained in the United States as they were in Europe. And even there, they applied only to the working population, which in the most unionized industries was predominantly, if not exclusively, male.

Not only have workforce demographics since changed, but many of the industries in question began to decline or even to die out long before the rise of the gig economy. The perks afforded to the workers declined along with them. In the United States, a blue-collar job that included both health care and pension benefits was a rare thing, even in the last few years leading up to the financial crisis.

Furthermore, the gig economy, particularly when it involves jobs conducted entirely online, has enabled competition among a wider variety of qualified service providers in a huge range of sectors.

Increased competition holds especially true for international organizations, who can now easily hire, for example, translators or legal experts to process documents. These workers can be local to the company, or they can be specialized experts halfway across the world. It simply depends on the priorities and needs of the business – but an over-looked benefit of the gig economy is its lack of dependence on a shared geography.

It might surprise you then that the gig economy also benefits domestic labor market access – particularly professional women.

Online-only work relationships inherently favor white-collar work. That’s because in the gig economy, work that involves the processing and editing of data or documents is easier. These projects can be worked on and transferred between people, even those who have never met face to face.

As a result, gig economy work favors workers with at least secondary, preferably tertiary, levels of education who can self-organize, hold themselves accountable, and who are dedicated to advancing their skills.

In fact, such online professional work largely benefits women who have historically been excluded from the workforce, both in Western countries and in the developing world. There are at least two reasons for this:

1. Women still make up the majority of stay-at-home parents in developed countries;
2. Women also account for the majority of college-level qualifications achieved in developed countries and in developing countries with reputable education systems. This trend is seen even in countries where there is no expectation of women becoming a significant part of the workforce, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

By working online, women who have desirable qualifications but are constrained by social or family circumstances can find gainful employment with clients who require their expertise.

Their clients might not be looking for full-time employees who receive full benefits, but neither are these workers looking for the additional constraints of regular hours and physical attendance.

Instead, a working relationship can be formed around necessities and priorities, with both parties still inherently interested in a long-term working relationship on a good-pay-for-good-work basis.

Alysha Dominico and Vicky Marrack, co-founders of the inbound marketing agency Tangible Words, explain that they discovered the virtues of a long-term but flexible working relationship thanks to their first external copywriter. Her family responsibilities necessitated she stay at home, but allowed for remote work, and this win-win relationship became the blueprint for nine more subcontractors, most of them women. This model has even gained the company independent acclaim. Tangible Words was awarded a 2018 Gold Stevie® Award in the category of Achievement in Promoting Work-Life Balance for Women in Business.

“We feel good about being an office that offers flexibility and skills development to keep parents sharp for whatever kind of lives they want to lead—now or later,” said Marrack.

“The people we employ might not otherwise have access to the labor market. Our distributed office model, virtual work, and flexible work schedules are great for them and us. Creating a positive work culture focused on our staff leading healthy lives that balanced work and life priorities equally was always mission-critical to the success of Tangible Words,” said Dominico.

“We stumbled into the work limitations – yet incredible experience and expertise parents have at that stage of life. So we decided to empower parents. Helping them create the life they choose has become a real source of pride.”

Dominico points out that it’s also a strategy other companies will need to utilize  - particularly when employee availability is low. A 2017 briefing by McKinsey Global Institute called “Technology, Jobs, and the Future of Work” documented that “Almost 75 million youth are officially unemployed. Women represent one of the largest pools of untapped labour: globally, 655 million fewer women are economically active than men.”

“You read this and compare it with other things you see, like research from RBC which urges people to start to talk about the future prediction that 2.4 million jobs will be added to the Canadian economy by 2021, and you wonder how long we can afford to not focus on prioritizing youth and women.”

Indeed RBC’s research team published in their 2018 report “Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption” that  “Despite projected heavy job displacement in many sectors and occupations, the Canadian economy is expected to add 2.4 million jobs over the next four years, all of which will require this new mix of skills...…an increasing demand for foundational skills such as critical thinking, co-ordination, social perceptiveness, active listening and complex problem solving.”  

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of The American Business Awards®, announced today that the final entry deadline for the 17^th annual ABA competition has been extended to Wednesday, April 17.   Nominations submitted after the original final deadline of March 13 will not incur any additional late fees, and will not be penalized in the judging process in any way.

 “We’ve received so many requests for individual deadline extensions that we’ve decided to extend the deadline for everyone,” said Stevie Awards president Michael Gallagher. The original final deadline was March 13.

GET THE ENTRY KIT HERE

The American Business Awards are widely considered to be the premier business awards program in the U.S.A. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations— public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large, and small. The 2019 awards will honor achievements since the beginning of 2018. Entry details are available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

The American Business Awards recognize achievement in every facet of the workplace. Categories include:

• Entrepreneur Awards
• Management Awards
• Company of the Year Awards
• Customer Service Awards
• Human Resources Awards
• Information Technology Awards
• Marketing Awards
• New Product Awards
• Public Relations Awards
• Website Awards, Smartphone and Tablet Apps, and other Media Awards

In the Marketing, New Product & Service, and Public Relations categories, nominees may now submit a video of up to five minutes in length, instead of the traditional written Stevie Awards essay or case study.  In categories for business-related media, there are many new Live Event, Publication, and Video categories.

More than 200 executives on 13 juries have already begun the process of rating nominations to determine the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners.

Stevie winners will be announced on May 1, and the awards will be presented at a gala banquet on June 11 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. Attendance is not required to win.

The list of past Stevie Award winners in The American Business Awards reads like a who’s who of innovation and business success in the U.S.A. Explore the list of last year’s winners.

With day-to-day economic demands rapidly increasing, many households can simply no longer afford to have a stay-at-home parent. Many people, however, find childcare options either of uncertain quality or prohibitively expensive. To compound the problem, women today consistently find their earning potential exceeds that of their partners, but they are forced to choose between securing childcare they do not trust 100 percent or attempting to get by on a single salary—and foregoing their careers.

This problem is widely recognized in countries across the developed world, and many nations have state-run daycare or centers or subsidize private childcare. However, these measures continue to fall short. Even the most generous analysis of gender employment and income gaps must concede that while there is no outright discrimination, there is a persistent, discernible, and significant structural difference in employment rates and remuneration. This is almost entirely attributable to time women spend out of work because of the exclusive prioritization of childcare.

With that said, it’s evident that improving access to top-level quality childcare would have significant, indirect economic effects. As things stand, the slow but steady march toward income and employment equality will likely result in more men becoming stay-at-home parents, and the number of women almost exclusively dedicated to their careers will rise as well.

While the push toward equity is desirable, having one stay-at-home parent—of either gender—is far from the optimal outcome. It’s not ideal for the household itself or for the economy as one parent continues to all but give up a career, while the other misses out on a considerable part of family life.

The professionalization of childcare necessitates moving away from the existing model, where families secure childcare primarily based on personal, informal relationships. With no current standardized means of formalizing these relationships with service providers, such as nannies and au pairs, it’s clear that a certified, standardized, widely available service provider model would be a significant step toward optimizing the childcare situation.

Qualifications and a college-level education have traditionally only been required for high-level childcare positions. Elizabeth Malson is a single mother, entrepreneur, and founder of the Amslee Institute, which specializes in the certification of childcare professionals. She helps explain this model.

“Traditionally, nannies in the United States have been trained by other nannies and nanny agency owners through workshops because there are no government regulations or standards,” she says. “To qualify for top jobs, a nanny had to invest in an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. These options require a significant commitment to and investment in a two- or four-year college program, and because of the time and expense involved, college-level training for future childcare professionals, in many cases, is simply inaccessible.”

Through her company, based out of Sarasota, Florida, United States, Malson proposed to do something about this. A 2018 Gold Stevie® Award winner in the category of Best New Consumer Service, the Amslee Institute provides affordable online college-level classes. Despite adhering to high standards, the classes require a lower financial investment than traditional college courses, and they take no more than 12 weeks to complete. Malson acknowledges the economic necessity of two working parents in many households and adds that childcare can be made more affordable in several ways, such as by families sharing the expense of a childcare professional.

Professionalizing childcare and introducing certifications and standards can help boost workforce participation, create a thriving new market, and give parents peace of mind. Malson also points to a broader effect. Childcare professionals from all over the world aspire to come to the United States (Some even go into childcare merely for the opportunity to come to the country.) This means U.S. childcare standards will eventually be exported across the globe by the childcare professionals who return home, says Malson. Raising childcare standards in the United States, therefore, will mean raising childcare standards across the world.

Ask executives about their biggest priorities, and you might hear plans to grow sales, to generate efficient systems, or to develop new product lines.

Jillian Hamilton’s mission is to remind corporate leaders they should also focus on threats that seemingly come out of nowhere: an expensive fine from regulators, a large-scale cyberattack, or a costly workplace accident.

For Hamilton, founder and managing director of Australian risk advisory firm Manage Damage, organizations tend to be under-invested in certain areas. The reason? It’s hard to put a dollar amount on the potential damage an incident will produce.

A corporate safety officer and risk manager by background, Hamilton decided to change that dynamic. She launched Manage Damage in 2016 with what she calls a “risk dollarization” approach, in which nonfinancial risk is translated into a financial cost.

“Our method provides senior management members with risk information in language they understand,” says Hamilton. “It enables businesses to see where issues lie and where true associated costs are located.”

Monetizing Risk

By putting a dollar value on risk, she says leaders are more likely to act on the threats most likely to cripple a business. As an example, she points to a client whose workers’ compensation premiums were so high the entire business was on the brink of shutting down. In an industry where workers’ insurance normally accounts for 6.5 percent of an operating budget, the company was paying more than 16 percent.

After working with Manage Damage, which is based in Brisbane, Australia, the company was able to significantly curtail its expenses and improve profit margins.

“We often find the businesses we help are not even aware of how much they are paying,” Hamilton says. “More importantly, they are not aware that what they are paying is far too much.”

Hamilton will sometimes hear people object to putting a monetary value on a human life, but for her, there’s a simple way to think about this dilemma.

“Each person who works at a business is valued,” she says. “Today, you are costed at your business, and you are part of a line item in a budget.”

That number, she says, includes salary, taxes, retirement contributions, and insurance payments made on your behalf. However, she believes monetizing a potential accident only makes the workplace safer for workers.

“It’s vital we create this financially savvy safety approach precisely because I care deeply about minimizing work-induced harm,” she says. “A pragmatic approach that effectively translates safety risk into terms business and financial people can understand has the best possible chance of delivering that outcome.”

Though it only launched a couple of years ago, the company is quickly winning converts, and Manage Damage now has clients in five continents. At the 2018 Asia-Pacific Stevie® Awards, the company won a Gold award for Innovation in Human Resources Management, Planning, and Practice. They also won a Gold in The 2018 International Business Awards®.

The company is certainly benefiting from a rising tide concerning risk awareness. A 2017 survey by risk management association RIMS found that nearly three-quarters of businesses have either a complete or partially integrated enterprise risk management solution in place, up from about half in 2013. Hamilton, though, sees her company’s approach as a particularly effective solution.

“Money talks,” she says. “When you start talking about the costs of safety, people listen. They listen when it is in the newspaper—that is, when it's far too late. We aim to capture people’s attention before incidents and workplace disasters. Follow the money, and listen to where business risk truly lies.”

Winners in the 13th annual Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service, recognized as the world's top customer service awards and sales awards, were unveiled on Friday night at a gala ceremony in Las Vegas, NV, attended by more than 700 executives from around the world.

The complete list of Stevie Winners by category is available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/Sales.

DP DHL, with Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award wins for activities in Canada, Ecuador, Kenya, the U.S., Vietnam, and other nations, was the most honored organization this year, earning the top Grand Stevie Award trophy for the sixth consecutive year. Other Grand Stevie Award winners, in descending order, include IBM, HomeServe USA, Sales Partnerships, Inc., VIZIO Inc., Delta Vacations, ValueSelling Associates, Dell Technologies, GuideWell Connect, and Cvent.

DP DHL won 11 Gold Stevie Awards, the most in the 2019 competition among Stevie Award winners. Among other winners, winners of three Stevie Awards include: American Airlines, EFG Companies, Teleperformance D.I.B.S, and Holiday Inn Vacations. Winners of two Gold Stevie Awards are: Birevim, Bose, CarrefourSA, Chorus.ai, Comcast, Delta Defense, Employment Background Investigations, Inc., MarketBridge, Nextiva, Qurate Retail Group, RAIN Group, VXI Global Soluations, and WNS (Holdings) Limited.

Leaders among multiple winners of Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevies include: Allianz Global Assistance, Autosoft, Inc, Cross Country Home Services, Delta Defense, Druva, Inc., Electronic Arts, First American Database Solutions, FIS, GoDaddy, iHeartMedia, Inc., John Hancock Financial Services, KT, Liveops, Mailchimp, Michael Kors, MRO Corp, Municipality and Planning Department, Nextiva, Nuance Communications, Offerpad, Overstock.com, Periscope Data, Pushpay, QNB Finansbank, Response, Rimini Street, TCL USA, TTEC, UPMC Health Plan, Visualize, Vivint Solar, VIZIO, VXI Global, Wells Fargo Treasury Management Client Delivery, and Wyndham Destinations.

Winners in the People’s Choice Stevie® Awards for Favorite Customer Service, as determined by more than 76,000 public votes were also presented at the event.

The presentations were broadcast live via Livestream and are available to watch online.

The awards are presented by the Stevie Awards, which organizes several of the world’s leading business award shows including the prestigious International Business Awards® and The American Business Awards®.

More than 2,700 nominations from organizations in 45 nations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Winners were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals worldwide in seven specialized judging committees. Entries were considered in 93 categories for customer service and contact center achievements, including Contact Center of the Year, Award for Innovation in Customer Service, and Customer Service Department of the Year; 60 categories for sales and business development achievements, ranging from Senior Sales Executive of the Year to Sales Training or Business Development Executive of the Year to Sales Department of the Year; and categories to recognize new products and services and solution providers.

About the Stevie Awards
Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.

Sponsors and supporters of the 13th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service include HCL Financial Services, Sales Partnerships, Inc. and ValueSelling Associates, Inc.

The last few years have seen a spread of digitalization and a subsequent disruption of nearly every corner of the economy. However, vintage clothes and consumer products have been on the rise. As Western economies and professional mind-sets became increasingly future oriented, popular culture and trends simultaneously became more concerned with the styles of bygone eras. Furthermore, some consumer products that embodied this age of rapidly accelerating digitalization—arguably, Apple devices—were seemingly inspired by the simple elegance of consumer products from past eras.

In a time of rapid progress, simplicity is at the heart of this attraction to all things vintage. Professional lives are growing ever more demanding; industries are becoming more complex and are changing at an increasing pace; and the same is true of the skill sets required of workers, as well as the tools available to them. Even as the tech-driven post-crisis recovery saw unemployment eventually decline dramatically across the West, fears about job security were exacerbated, not alleviated.

While politicians grabbed the headlines, this nostalgia for simpler days was expressed in a primarily aesthetic manner. Individual items of retro clothing, including fedoras, were imbued in their day with controversial political meaning. Today, however, most consumers simply associate those bygone eras with personal style and culture, and they prefer to think of items from the past as culturally (rather than politically or socioeconomically) historical. Widespread interest in the social upheavals of the 1960s, for example, continues, but that interest is still mainly manifested through a fascination with the era’s music and fashion.

Adapting to this trend was easy even for the makers of high-tech consumer products, who simply had to cover their innovative technologies in vintage-looking cases. For service providers, such as marketing specialists, marrying a tech-based, innovative approach to vintage style proved more difficult. After all, advertising and marketing characters are more difficult to dissociate from their broader historical contexts than consumer products.

For these service providers, they soon found choosing an era to focus on was a delicate balancing act. A vintage approach to marketing events and campaigns required careful, detailed deliberation. As with consumer products, the idea is to use an appealing vintage look and feel that harks back to an earlier age but conceals the decades of development and insights gained under that veneer.

Such a concept has to be created from the ground up, as exemplified by the vintage “Lady Betty” brand from Chili Concept. Chili Concept is a blue-chip marketing company with an eye on digitalization and innovation, which was demonstrated by their 2018 Gold Stevie® Award for Best Product Launch Event and 2018 Bronze Stevie Award and Best Brand Experience Event in the German Stevie Awards. The company won for its work with celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal and the launch of his Shriro Everdure barbecue grill in Australia.

The company is future-oriented, and founder Christine Clemenz is aware of the significance of digitalization. Chili Concept is also evidently capable of contemporary direction and program management at the highest level. This makes their unique Lady Betty brand all the more noteworthy.

The brand places a heavy emphasis on sound, using primarily German swing and German-language pop music to evoke that country’s economic miracle era from the late 1940s and 1950s. The era is expertly chosen.

While the 1950s are remembered in the Anglosphere as the pre-60s era of social repression, those years are mostly remembered in Germany for a rapid ascendance from the country’s bleakest political and socioeconomic phase. Lady Betty encapsulates both the era’s style and entertainment while it conducts complex, tailored events, such as “Lady Betty’s Evening of Dance.” This included casino-like events and tastings of different foods considered treats during that time, including the obvious candidates, cheese and wine, as well as beer and lemonade.

All these items were recently marketed by their industries as fresh and interesting rather than staid and boring. With small-batch craft beers becoming increasingly popular in recent years, this approach exemplifies how marketing events can be both vintage in outlook and perfectly attuned to contemporary trends, as well as high-level corporate expectations and standards.

 By all outward appearances, Jeanne Allert had everything going for her in the mid-2000s: a successful career as an internet consultant, an elegant home, and a sizable income. Inside, however, she remembers feeling an emptiness.

“I reached a point in my life where I said, ‘Is this all there is?’” Allert recalls in an online video.

Little did the American businesswomen know her life would forever change when she met a group of volunteers who were performing outreach to women caught up in prostitution. It was there, on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, United States, that Allert saw the magnitude of the sexual exploitation crisis—and the power of a helping hand.

One particular victim moved Allert so deeply that, in 2007, Allert decided to launch the Samaritan Women, the mid-Atlantic region’s first residential care program for females ensnared in the domestic sex trafficking industry. It meant selling her lucrative business, putting her home on the market, and dipping into her savings to buy an abandoned 23-acre estate in Baltimore, Maryland, United States.

The organization started providing around-the-clock shelter, counseling, and medical care to women and girls who had been coerced into prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation. As a Christian-based entity, it also began fostering spiritual healing in its residents, many of whom were suffering emotional trauma as a result of their experiences on the street.

Allert says the people who work at the homes often serve as the positive role models who have been lacking in the residents’ lives.

“When we show forgiveness, grace, and compassion, the women are observing our behavior,” says Allert.

According to Shared Hope International, girls as young as 14 to 16 are among the most commonly exploited. Traffickers prey on the most vulnerable, including those who have suffered child abuse or grew up in broken homes. They often find their victims through social media platforms and internet sites, as well as at schools and local hangouts.

Traffickers then offer the girls false promises of shelter and protection; instead, these girls face a cycle of physical and emotional abuse. By one estimate, roughly 100,000 American children are exploited in this manner every year. While getting accurate data is always difficult, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime makes it clear that sex trafficking is very much a global problem.

“People in all walks of life know that freedom is a basic human right, and human trafficking is modern-day slavery,” says Linda Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Samaritan Women.

Addressing a Shortage in Care

Despite the enormity of the problem in the United States, Thomas says 17 states don’t have a single shelter program to serve this population. Another 11 states have only one residence. Allert, who earned the 2018 Silver Stevie® Award for Most Innovative Woman of the Year in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, is trying to fill that vacuum.

She and her team opened up two more homes for trafficking victims, enabling the group to create a full continuum of care for young women. Though limits exist to how many people the organization can impact directly, it’s trying to help other nonprofits meet this need across the country.

Toward that end, the group created the National Trafficking Sheltered Alliance, which serves as a trade association for shelter programs across the country. Its goal is to improve the effectiveness of shelter care nationally through advocacy, networking, agency accreditation, and an annual conference.

Another new initiative, the Institute for Shelter Care, serves as a research, training, and equipping entity to help establish new shelter programs, to stabilize and to improve current programs, and to facilitate qualified research in order to advance national standards of care and best practices.

“Human trafficking is a problem both internationally and domestically,” says Thomas. “We have only scratched the surface of providing care and healing for victims across the world.”

Winners of the 2019 People's Choice Stevie® Awards for Favorite Customer Service, a worldwide public vote, were announced today.  Voting was conducted from January 17 through February 8, with the highest number of votes deciding the winners in 12 industry categories. More than 76,000 votes were cast this year.

All organizations honored in the Customer Service Department of the Year categories of this year’s Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service were eligible to be included in voting for the people’s choice awards.  The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, now in their 13^th year, are the world’s top honors for customer service, contact center, business development, and sales professionals.

More than 2,700 nominations from organizations of all sizes, in virtually every industry, in 45 nations were evaluated in this year’s competition. Finalists were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals worldwide in seven specialized judging committees and were announced last month.

This year’s people’s choice winners, who will each receive the coveted crystal People’s Choice Stevie Award, are:

• Computer Hardware: Dell Technologies | APJ Consumer - Premium Tech Support
• Computer Services: Linode
• Consumer Products/Services: Birevim
• Distribution & Transportation: DHL Express Bangladesh
• Financial Services: ReSource Pro
• Healthcare & Pharma: TSI Healthcare
• Other Industries: CubeSmart
• Public Services & Education: Curriculum Associates
• Retail: Qurate Retail Group
• Software < 100 Employees: Bonfire
• Software 100+ Employees: Periscope Data
• Telecommunications: Comcast
  
  Nicknamed the Stevie® for the Greek word “crowned,” the awards will be presented to winners at the 13^th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service awards banquet on Friday, February 22 at Caesar’s Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tickets for the event are now on sale. More than 600 executives from around the world are expected to attend.  The presentations will be broadcast live via Livestream

About the Stevie Awards
Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards®, The International Business Awards®, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at www.StevieAwards.com.

Sponsors of the 13th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service include Sales Partnerships, Inc. and ValueSelling Associates, Inc.