Executive assistants and work anniversaries
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by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries. |
As an executive assistant, you work with your executive every day and see their flaws, their quirks, and their humanness up close.
But for many front-line employees, the executive is a larger-than-life figure. Because of that, how the executive handles work anniversaries has a larger impact on employee perception of their work anniversary than they might naturally suspect.
And thus, your efforts to help the executive with work anniversaries can have a much bigger impact than you might suspect.
Every executive is different, of course. The series of blog posts linked below contain a variety of ideas, not all of which will make sense for working with all executives. As you read, keep your executive’s style in mind and choose the ones that you think will work best, and ignore the rest.
The EA guide to finding work anniversary dates – It all starts with first knowing when the work anniversaries are!
The EA guide to helping your executive with their direct reports’ work anniversaries – As an executive assistant, you can improve the work anniversary experiences of dozens if not hundreds of employees by helping your executive to be a great example to the managers under them.
The EA guide to just-in-time work anniversary reminders – As an executive assistant, you can be the cause of some really special moments by scanning both the work anniversaries for the day and the people who will be in the executive’s meetings for the day and then giving the executive a heads up right before the meeting.
The EA guide to organization-wide work anniversary acknowledgement – If you’re an executive assistant at a smaller organization, and part of your role is being in charge of internal communications, then this blog post is for you!
The EA guide to how work anniversaries help with skip-level one-on-ones – The more people in an executive’s organization, the more valuable skip-level one-on-ones can be. This blog post shows you how work anniversaries help solve the tactical obstacles.
The EA guide to work anniversary breakfasts – Many executives love hosting breakfasts for employee’s celebrating milestone work anniversaries that month, that quarter, or that year.
The EA guide to systematizing work anniversary communication – Missing work anniversaries can be really awkward, and so coming up with a repeatable system for your work with work anniversaries is especially valuable.
The EA guide to being a work anniversary champion – Work anniversaries provide a lot of opportunity for an executive assistant to have a huge impact on an organization.
Note that just because there’s something your executive wouldn’t naturally be good at doesn’t mean that wouldn’t be a great idea to pursue. It may be a great opportunity for you to use your role to increase their effectiveness and improve perception of them.
For example, if they’re terrible at remembering dates, you can prompt them before every meeting if someone in the meeting has a major work anniversary that day. Or, if they’re not especially good at regularly being thankful, you can craft thankful emails to employees on their work anniversaries on behalf of the executive.
Another thing to keep in mind is that work anniversaries are very far from being your executive’s top priority at any given moment. You may not want to hit them with all of the work anniversary ideas in these blog posts all at once. It can keep your one-on-ones with your executive interesting if you just toss out a creative work anniversary idea every now and then. It will mix up their day, and yours, too.
(If on the other hand, your executive is really into the idea of celebrating work anniversaries better, then you might want to direct them to the CEOs and work anniversaries blog post. If you support an executive other than the CEO, then note that the content in that chapter applies to any executive with a lot of indirect reports. And, you can point out that it’s good practice for the day when they get promoted to CEO. 😉)
And as a last note, if you're an executive assistant at a very small company, then you probably take on responsibilities that would fall to human resources at a larger organization. If that’s the case, then you may want to check out our blog posts for human resources.