Aubrey left her life as a nanny to jump-start a career in tech as a customer support associate at MoveSpring. Now heading up the Program + Community Team, Aubrey explains her journey and what’s next for MoveSpring together with Reward Gateway.
Hi Aubrey! Tell us about the Program + Community team at MoveSpring — what does that involve?
So, we manage the typical day-to-day customer support tasks (like answering client and user questions, support chat, and maintaining our Help Center), but we’ve really expanded the team and our roles to what we now call Program & Community.
It means we’re also focused on a lot more supporting content, like giving our clients the resources to build their own wellness programs. We create blog posts to share ideas and inspiration with our clients, so they can get more from MoveSpring. We’ve also recently created a Challenge Library, which is internal right now but with the long-term vision for our clients, so that with just a few clicks, they can launch their own themed challenges especially for their employees.
So how did you end up at MoveSpring? Had you worked in tech before joining?
I started out with MoveSpring three years ago as a Customer Support Associate. I’d never worked at a tech startup before, and, believe it or not, I was a nanny before all of this. But I’d reached a point where I decided “you know what? I really want to get my foot in the door with a tech company, I think it’d be fun”.
So I found MoveSpring online. And I was really inspired, actually, because of how much they valued empathy. They actually put that word in the job description: empathy. And I thought that was incredible because not many companies will flat-out say that that’s something they look for and value.
Especially in the tech industry!
Yeah, and I see that it’s a huge parallel with Reward Gateway’s values. So I applied for the role and think we really connected on that aspect alone; despite coming from two very different paths, MoveSpring wanted someone who cared about helping people. It’s a value they champion throughout the entire company too. It was a cool way to start on this [tech industry] journey.
I think a product like MoveSpring is especially pertinent today; teams are working more remotely than ever, it can be harder to get employees to meaningfully connect with each other. Is that a challenge MoveSpring has been trying to address?
Absolutely. Especially since the lockdowns and the shift to more people working from home, we were hearing a lot from employers about how they were nervous their employees might be getting burnt out, tired of being at home all day. So it’s been really inspiring to be able to bring something that’s a bit more fun to people, regardless of where they are in the world.
And that’s an aspect that I really love about MoveSpring too: fun. Wellness isn’t meant to be this intimidating, serious, only-for-the-super-fittest kind of thing. Just being able to say “hey, let’s go for a walk together” and that gentle camaraderie makes it a really inclusive and welcoming product and place to work.
And how do you, especially when you work remotely, keep engaged with your team and stay motivated when you're apart?
We do a monthly huddle with the whole team. Getting that time to step back for a moment and look back at what we've done can be really fun and rewarding, and then together, we come up with ideas and inspiration for the future. It always fills my heart to see the team pumped about what they're working on, sharing their ideas or something they've found that might be valuable. That's always something we've welcomed, and it's good to see Reward Gateway do the same too. It's nice to have that freedom to share and work together.
Now you're an RGer as well, can you expand a little bit on whether you've been able to make use of any of the benefits?
One of the things that genuinely changed my summer here in Texas is Reward Gateway's Wellness Benefit. They trust you to spend a certain amount of money every year on anything related to wellness that you think might help. So I got myself a treadmill to keep going for walks and keeping well without having to endure the Texas heat.
I know someone who got a violin with the Wellness Benefit as she wanted to re-learn! And another colleague who wanted to get back to nature so bought camping gear with it — it's nice to see how people design a wellness plan that's just right for them.
I'm in a book club outside of work too, so I can use RG’s book benefit towards that, as well as being part of the RG book club on Slack. Seeing how they value learning & development has been really great.
Finally, what's coming up in the next 12 months for you & your team you can tell us about?
We really want MoveSpring, together with RG, to be able to offer our clients a complete, holistic wellness program for their employees. So we've been working on building out some really world-class content, experimenting with new features and resources, so my team is now working very closely with the Development team to help make that a reality.
I’m excited to be able to tell you more about it over the next few months!
If you'd like to learn more about joining our mission to make the world a better place to work, check out our current vacancies at rg.co/careers