Promote employees on their work anniversary

by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries.

Does your organization have “increased competency” promotions?

That is, in addition to job titles that indicate who manages who, do you also have job titles for individual contributors that denote how skilled each employee is? (Examples include the progression from Junior Engineer to Engineer to Senior Engineer or Analyst I to Analyst II to Analyst III.)

If you do, you should strongly consider using upcoming work anniversaries as a trigger for assessing whether an employee should be promoted to the next level of competency.

Then, if the answer is yes, deliver the good news on their work anniversary! 🎉

The benefits of this approach

Promotions on work anniversaries are just more powerful than promotions on random Tuesdays.

The promotion and the work anniversary multiply each other to create a really meaningful and memorable day.

It also creates a rhythm for assessing whether a promotion is in order so that they don’t get lost, because this kind of promotion can be hard. There is generally not one magical triggering event when you notice a junior engineer suddenly isn’t junior any more, and so you might miss it.

You really don’t want to lose an employee who starts to feel unseen and unappreciated simply because you haven’t given them a title appropriate to their increased contributions.

How to implement it

This can be done as an HR policy. HR can reach out four weeks before every work anniversary to ask the employee’s manager to indicate whether the employee should be promoted or not and to make the case if they think they should.

But it doesn’t have to be an HR policy. If you’re a well-intentioned manager reading this, there’s nothing getting in the way of you making this just your own personal approach to handling promotions of your people. Simply put reminders on your calendar.

Considering promotions is something you need to put time into at some point anyway, and doing it together with work anniversaries makes the time spent more impactful.