The EA guide to systematizing work anniversary communication
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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. |
Missing work anniversaries can be really awkward, and so coming up with a repeatable system for your work with work anniversaries is especially valuable.
Batch process next month’s work anniversaries
Everyone has their own preferences, but most EAs will want to batch a lot of the work together as well as get a head start so that they’re ready no matter what, even if unexpected events pull them away.
With that in mind, a very common approach is to pull the following month’s list of work anniversaries on the 15th of the month. Then for each anniversary, figure out if there’s anything that needs to be done in preparation. Many EAs will have figured out a way to add calendar reminders in bulk for the full year, but if you don’t have reminders set up for you or your executive, then this is a great time to do that.
Then, a common approach is to send your executive a list of whose anniversaries are coming up in the next month, what is going to happen for each of them, and clearly call out if there’s anything that they are going to need to do for any of them. If there is a step that they can do for everyone at once, like signing cards that will be mailed out, then you can review the upcoming list while they sign.
Check in to make sure the plan is coming together
After that, the two things left to do are to check in to make sure anything scheduled or planned is going as expected. This will be the same as any other non-work-anniversary activity you coordinate.
Remind on the day of each work anniversary
And lastly, you need to remind the executive, typically on the day of the work anniversary, unless they need to do something that requires some time up front, which ideally they don’t. Ideally you’ve done everything for them and any communications are scheduled. If there is something public they need to do that you don’t schedule to happen automatically, like maybe post a thoughtful message to Slack, you’ll want to check in to make sure it was done and remind them if it hasn’t been.
Depending on your executive, you may want to provide your reminders in writing either in Slack or email so that it’s clear they received them and weren’t absent-mindedly thinking about something else while you were talking.
👉 Check out more work anniversary blog posts for executive assistants! 👈
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