Purpose 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. |
Purpose is one of the most powerful drivers of human experience.
The benefits of purpose
Scientific research shows purpose leads to a large number of positive outcomes for individuals.
Here is a summary of some of the benefits from Psychology Today:
Cross-sectional research has shown that possessing a sense of purpose in life is a powerful predictor of numerous positive outcomes. Purposeful people have stronger immune systems (Fredrickson et al., 2013), recover more quickly from surgery (Kim et al., 2013), and even live longer (Hill & Turiano, 2014). Possessing a sense of purpose has also been shown to correlate with economic success (Hill et al., 2019). Finally, people at every stage of life are happier when they possess a sense of purpose (Bronk et al., 2009).
The benefits of having a strong purpose aren’t just for individuals.
Here is a summary of the benefits of a company having a strong purpose (from Forbes):
A study published by Harvard Business Review found when companies had a clearly articulated purpose which was widely understood in the organization they had better growth as compared with companies which hadn’t developed or leveraged their purpose. Specifically, 52% of purpose-driven companies experienced over 10% growth compared with 42% of non-purpose-driven companies. Purpose-driven companies benefited from greater global expansion (66% compared with 48%), more product launches (56% compared with 33%) and success in major transformation efforts (52% compared with 16%).
Time vs. purpose
One not-so-great way of thinking about work anniversaries is as acknowledgement of the passing of time.
A much better way of thinking of a work anniversary is as a celebration of the sacred movement when a person became a part of something bigger than themself, that is, the moment when the person and the organization chose to join forces to work together towards a common purpose, mission, and vision.
If you want to improve how your organization celebrates work anniversaries and improve performance, think bigger than time.
How to celebrate more than time
Step 1
First, what is your organization’s purpose, mission, and/or vision? How is your organization making the world a better place in a way that your organization is uniquely positioned to do?
Whatever the answer, remind employees of it every work anniversary.
Don’t have a good answer?
Then, figure one out.
Step 2
Second, how has the person having the work anniversary contributed to that purpose, mission, and/or vision?
Maybe it’s really concrete and numerical. Maybe they’ve prevented untold illness by administering 1200 vaccines in the past year. Maybe they’ve been a part of assembling 12,000 high chairs that will help make it easier for tired parents to help their babies learn how to eat. Or maybe it’s a single major video game release. Or maybe it’s harder to quantify. Maybe it’s keeping the front desk area both efficient and compassionate so that people coming through are a little bit better positioned to help with the company’s purpose of finding a cure for lupus.
Whatever the answer, have a process by which each employee gets an individualized reminder of how they are contributing to the purpose, mission, and/or vision every work anniversary.
Step 3
Finally, put together the two ways of thinking bigger than time.
The ideal work anniversary celebration reminds an employee of the organization’s purpose, why it matters, and the employee’s contributions to that purpose.
Work anniversaries are society’s purpose holiday
As pointed out at the beginning, purpose leads to a lot of great organizational outcomes. But it’s especially important if your organization is working on solving a hard problem.
Work anniversaries celebrate employees belonging to something bigger than themselves with a bigger purpose.
That’s needed for people to set aside their petty self-interests.
And setting aside petty self-interests is what enables groups of people to accomplish great things together. Or, in the words of Aristotle (and the Google People Analytics team), for “the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts”.
Looking broadly to the collective celebration of work anniversaries as a society, work anniversaries are a celebration of how humanity is capable of accomplishing far more together than alone.
And, this is more important now than ever, as humanity’s easy problems have already been solved. Going forward, problems like climate change, space travel, misinformation, and protecting democracy are going to require increasingly larger groups of humans working together towards a common purpose.
Whether you’re solving a big problem or a small one, you’ll be more likely to succeed if you remember to talk about work anniversaries in terms of purpose and impact rather than just time passing.