Learn about the top five low-effort and low-expense ways to acknowledge work anniversaries.

As a manager, whatever you do for your employees’ work anniversaries, here are some general tips to help your interactions have the most value.

Inspiring Work Anniversaries is now available everywhere books are sold — as a hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and ebook!

If you’re a manager, then your employees believing you care about them as people is important to your team working at its full potential. How do you show you care? Prepare! You can ask about your employees’ preferences and then use those preferences to tailor what you do on their work anniversary.

Managers are uniquely positioned to eliminate the #1 work anniversary complaint for all of their direct reports — learn how to eliminate it, and how to easily be amazing at it. ✨

If your team communicates using a physical bulletin board to post notices in a well-trafficked area — like near the time clock or in the break room — then you can use that space to improve how your organization acknowledges work anniversaries!

If your organization has “increased competency” promotions, then you should be aware of the many benefits of delivering the promotion news on an employee’s work anniversary! 🎉

A heartwarming paragraph from an employee’s manager is perhaps the most meaningful thing an employee can receive on their work anniversary.

If you’re a manager and your team is in person at least once a week, then work anniversary lunches can be a powerful way to do something meaningful for your employees, boost a sense of belonging, and even increase interdepartmental cooperation!

Some organizations have a formal process for having conversations with employees about their careers, but many don’t. If yours doesn’t, setting up your own personal tradition of having a career-focused one-on-one conversation on each employee’s work anniversary can be really special.

Do you want amazing work anniversaries at your organization? Get more people involved!

Effectively communicating to employees when to expect performance reviews and pay raises is foundational to the success of any work anniversary program. Further, at the organizations with the best work anniversary programs, performance reviews and pay raises will not happen on or near work anniversaries.

What makes your organization special to employees? How do you communicate that on your careers page, in your job posts, and as part of your hiring process? Work anniversaries can help!

Use work anniversaries to reinforce a reciprocal relationship of trusting support rather than a cold economic relationship where each side is trying to get by with minimal contribution

Work anniversaries solve all of the skip-level conversation challenges — How do you choose who to talk to? How do you explain why? How do you bridge the divide in your roles? How do you resist the pull to postpone or cancel? How do you avoid that going-to-the-principal vibe?

After talking to hundreds of employees in dozens of countries, we have assembled the top 10 work anniversary mistakes. Avoid pain by learning from others’ mistakes!

The ideal work anniversary celebration reminds an employee of the organization’s purpose, why it matters, and the employee’s contributions to that purpose. A work anniversary can be a celebration of the sacred movement when a person became a part of something bigger than themself.

Belonging is one of the most powerful drivers of human experience. Work anniversaries provide a crucial boost to the two elements needed for belonging to flourish.

Your company is the tree. The employee you’re parting ways with is the fish. There’s a lot of water out there. Don't be the tree in the way of them finding it.

Work anniversaries play a powerful role in boosting psychological safety, which is the most important dynamic of high-performing teams.