The EA guide to organization-wide work anniversary acknowledgement
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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. |
This post is most relevant for executive assistants to CEOs (or whatever title leads the entire organization) at organizations that aren’t big enough to have someone specifically in charge of internal communications. If you aren’t involved in organization-wide internal communications, then you’ll want to another executive assistant blog post.
All-hands meetings
Many executive assistants play a big role in organizing a weekly or monthly all-hands meeting for everyone in their executive’s organization. If you play this role, then making sure there is a standing topic of acknowledging work anniversaries will go over well. Many employees will very rarely get mentioned in the meeting, and the day their work anniversary is called out will be special. The other great thing is that by announcing work anniversaries, you set up lots of little ice-breaking small talk opportunities for the employees in the organization to connect with each other.
Here are some tips on making the most of acknowledging work anniversaries at all-hands meetings:
Announce upcoming work anniversaries, not recently past work anniversaries. This will facilitate inspired colleagues to perhaps do their own preparation for the day. It also subtly influences direct managers to be timely since they know that everyone knows the exact day. The one exception to this rule is if you have a monthly meeting that is generally early in the month. In that case, it really is more natural to announce the work anniversaries for the month, and for the majority of them, you will be announcing ahead. And one last tip here is that if you know you’ll be skipping a meeting, you’ll want to announce ahead to cover the time period of the two meetings. If you unexpectedly skip a meeting, then you can either mention the upcoming work anniversaries over email as part of acknowledging the meeting being canceled, or you can retroactively announce them at the next meeting. There’s also no harm in doing both these approaches.
Ask a designer for help designing the work anniversary announcement slides. Especially well-designed work anniversary slides will send a subtle message that the organization cares about the employees being celebrated, and a small amount of work once will keep delivering value week after week, month after month, year after year. To help them along, you can share a link to the graphic designers' guide to work anniversary design with them.
Have the highest ranking person at the meeting announce the work anniversaries. Even if someone else typically emcees the meeting, having the highest ranking executive announce the work anniversaries makes it a little more special. As part of this, you’ll want to provide them with phonetic spellings of any hard to pronounce names. While people with hard to pronounce names are used to things not going well, it can be especially awkward and alienating for it to be called out in front of the entire organization that their name is unrecognizably different. That they are continuously bracing for this sets up an opportunity for the executive to blow away expectations when they confidently get it right. This also subtly signals to everyone on the call that the executive and the organization truly value diversity and inclusivity.
The employee newsletter
Organizations that start to outgrow having all-hands meetings will often move to putting out a regular internal newsletter for employees, and like the all-hands meeting, an executive assistant will often be the driving force behind making it happen each week or each month. And, as you’re expecting, I’d highly recommend a standard section that announces upcoming work anniversaries.
The tip about the highest ranking person announcing doesn’t apply here, but the other two tips about all-hands meetings have matching newsletter-related tips:
Announce upcoming work anniversaries, not recently past work anniversaries. As with what was said with all-hands meetings, this will facilitate inspired colleagues to perhaps do their own preparation for the day, and it also subtly influences direct managers to be timely since they know that everyone knows the exact day. And again, the one exception to this rule is if you have a monthly newsletter that is generally early in the month. In that case, it really is more natural to announce the work anniversaries for the month, and for the majority of them, you will be announcing ahead. Newsletters are skipped less often than all-hands meetings, but if that does happen, be sure to find a way to not completely miss announcing the work anniversaries, even if you need to do it retroactively.
Try to add a little flourish to the section. For newsletters, involving a designer is typically too much, but if you can find a cute not-too-much animated gif with confetti, that makes the section feel a little more festive, that’s great. Also, using celebratory emojis can be a nice touch. And lastly, consider bolding the employee’s names, which again is subtle, but sends the message that they’re important.
Slack and organization-wide email
One last method of announcing that will often fall to an executive assistant if an organization doesn’t have a dedicated internal communications person is managing the organization-wide Slack channels and sending organization-wide emails.
If your organization uses Slack or another group chat tool with standing channels and reaction emojis, I highly recommend using it to announce work anniversaries.
Ideally, each manager will write up something thoughtful and post it the morning of the work anniversary, either in the #general channel or in a #celebrations channel (where babies, weddings, and birthdays will generally also be announced).
If your organization hasn’t reached the level where managers are doing that, then you scheduling generic announcements of work anniversaries is a big step up from it not happening at all. That can become the catalyst that leads some managers to start to write something thoughtful in a reply thread to your post, and then eventually that becomes the expectation and takes over. (This is of course yet another example of how your actions can lead to big long-lasting changes in an organization.)
If you don’t have a suitable group chat tool, sending work anniversary announcement emails to all employees may come up as an alternative. In general, I’d recommend against that, though.
The email format just doesn’t work well. Replying to everyone can get really messy and distracting fast, especially for employees where a lot of their daily workload goes through email. Also, the appropriate reaction to a work anniversary for most not-that-close work relationships is a simple emoji reaction, not a sentence or even a word as would be expected in an email. If you don’t have Slack and really want to do something, then start a newsletter and send out a link to it over email.
All-hands meeting, the newsletter, and Slack, oh my!
One last note on announcing is that you shouldn’t worry about redundancy. If an employee’s work anniversary gets announced at an all-hands meeting, and in a newsletter, and in the #celebrations Slack channel, then that’s a clear message it matters. The goal in this case is not efficiency.
👉 Check out more work anniversary blog posts for executive assistants! 👈
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