Set up your work anniversary budget for success
It’s easy to make pennywise, pound-foolish decisions.
If the work anniversary budget is cut to the point where it no longer makes sense, then it can do more harm than good. Doing something less good than last year may be taken really poorly.
Eventually getting to the point that what you’re doing shows you obviously don’t care will also go poorly.
The myth of the missing sesame seeds
It’s like the apocryphal story of the young MBAs who join the hamburger bun manufacturer. Every year, a newly hired MBA has the brilliant idea that the company can save millions by removing four sesame seeds from the sesame seed bun, and they have the research backing up that customers don’t notice. But the research only compares the company’s buns to the company’s buns. It doesn’t take long before the company’s buns aren’t as good as their competitors.
You need to guard against your organization’s work anniversaries befalling the same fate. In the work anniversary case, the dreaded but more-common-than-you-might-expect end state is giving just a simple certificate printed on standard printer paper for 25th work anniversaries. This is almost universally taken as an insult.
So how do you avoid this?
The best way to avoid damaging cuts to the work anniversary budget is to have it allocated per capita across all departments, like information technology and office space.
That is, don’t make it a line item in the human resources budget. That way HR won’t feel pressure to quietly cut it when trying to make the HR budget work.
Instead, the pressure will be healthy. It will be clear to all of the senior leaders what they’re paying for work anniversaries, and they can weigh in on whether they’re getting good value for their money, which should strengthen the program over time, which will then also strengthen support for the program.
What if you aren’t allowed to make this change?
Note that if other departments object to it being tracked this way, then consider not having HR do anything at all for work anniversaries.
You won’t have the support you need anyway, which is the opposite of being set up for success. If it doesn’t matter enough to be allocated across all of the departments, then it doesn’t matter to your organization. Spend your time and energy some other way.