The graphic designers’ guide to work anniversary design
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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. |
Work anniversaries are a great opportunity for a graphic designer or experience designer to have a direct and lasting impact on their fellow coworkers.
Work anniversaries are “ownable moments”. That is, they are moments in an employee’s lifecycle journey with the organization that are prone to a change or escalation in the employee’s positive or negative emotion. One concrete manifestation of this is that employees are twice as likely to leave their job the month after their work anniversary than at any other time of the year.
Your designs will become a part of this key moment of potentially heightened emotion, and the work you do once will continue to impact every employee every year.
The goal 🎯
Work anniversaries are a time of reassessment. How has the last year gone? Does the organization appreciate me? Do I respect the organization? Is continuing with the organization a good use of my potential?
For some employees, it really is a good time to move on. They’re no longer a good fit for the organization, or maybe they never were. That’s okay, and those employees are not your target audience. Instead, your target audience is the set of employees who remain a good fit for the organization.
The goal of your design work is to create cues that will support the employee deepening both their sense of belonging to a unique organization and also their sense that they are noticeably helping the organization do something that matters.
With anything you’re designing, these are a few key questions to ask yourself:
How can I better emphasize the uniqueness of the organization? To start with, you’ll want to lean into the brand’s colors and logo. If there are other visual elements that make your organization unique, you’ll want to look for opportunities to include them, too.
How can I reinforce the meaningfulness of what the organization does? What’s your organization’s purpose or mission? What about core values? Are there any slogans that are unique to your organization? If not any of those things, are there any goals that could be inspiring? If what you’re designing has room, figure out how to include the best of these.
How can I make the connection between the work anniversary and the employee contributing towards the common purpose? First, in the wording, don’t emphasize the number of years passing. Instead emphasize the number of years that the employee and organization have been joined together working towards a common purpose. Secondly, is there anything concrete that can be said about the progress over the past year or over the entire time period? Are their metrics either of what the employee contributed or what the organization achieved during that time?
There are a variety of different work anniversary items that you might be called upon to design, and depending on the constraints inherent in the item, you might have more or less flexibility in how you answer the questions above.
Printed certificates 🖨️
The objective of the printed certificate is to serve as a completely personalized, tangible gift which can be displayed in the employee’s workspace to remind them and others of their tenure at the organization.
Depending on the work anniversary and your organization, it might be the only gift they receive, or it might be the only physical gift they receive. It will likely also be the only gift they receive that is personalized with their name.
Printed certificates are by far the most fun of the work anniversary design tasks. You get lots of real estate, you can work in full-color, and you get to play with many size scales and visual hierarchy with both an audience who will look at it at a distance and an audience who will look at it up close.
You also get a lot of elements to include in the design:
The employee’s name
The number of years being commemorated
The employee’s start date and date of the work anniversary that’s being commemorated
The organization’s name
The organization’s purpose, mission, and/or tagline
The organization’s logo
The organization’s colors
A message of thankfulness and/or appreciation for their contributions to the organization and its purpose or mission over the years
Signatures of one or more leaders (the CEO, or the CEO and the head of HR, or the CEO and the direct manager)
Frilly stuff that evokes the feeling of being a certificate, usually in the organization’s colors, and ideally in a way that it doesn’t distract from the core message of the certificate
You can create one template that’s used for all of the years, but another fun design challenge is to create a series of templates that are used as the number of years increase with the certificates getting nicer and nicer as the number of years being celebrated increases.
As you design the certificate template, you’ll want to keep the three questions from the previous section front of mind.
And lastly here, if you want to go one level further than the template, you can help out with choosing appropriately higher quality paper and/or a good frame to go with the design.
All-hands slides 🛝
At organizations that have regular “all hands” meetings, it’s common to announce and acknowledge the upcoming work anniversaries. By default, a non-designer will whip up a quick slide with a list of names on it, and it won’t be great.
The objective of the all-hands design is to embrace the organization’s uniqueness, look professionally done such that it conveys that work anniversaries matter, and list employee names in an easily readable font size. If you can also include employee photos, then that can make a big difference in helping employees learn each other's names, which increases trust and improves interdepartmental cooperation.
Depending on the size of your organization, and whether they do all work anniversaries or just “the fives” (5, 10, 15, etc.), you may need multiple slides. A nice touch is to make the slides get nicer and nicer as they increase in tenure.
A variation to consider is a “workiversary zero” slide which lists new hires. Since this is a bit of a different purpose, it will generally need some design tweaks. The most common tweak is to work in the word “welcome”.
Another variation to consider is doing a special single-employee spotlight variation for when the longest of tenured employees hit big numbers like 25. You’d show the lists first and then end on the slide showing the one employee hitting the big milestone, and generally someone would congratulate and thank them a bit more and perhaps share a little about them while the slide is up.
And one last fun thing to consider, but not overdo, is that all-hands slides are the one item in this chapter that supports animation. You won’t want to do something that’s cheesy and distracting, but be open to opportunities to put some flourish in that communicates that this is about something special.
Numbered gifts 🔢
A numbered gift is a gift that an employee gets with the number of years they’ve worked prominently printed on it. The three most common are pins, stickers, and blocks. For these gifts to be meaningful they are typically custom printed or engraved with design elements indicating what organization they are from.
Each different type of numbered gift has its own purpose and design constraints.
Stickers
Work anniversary stickers are most commonly given out at organizations where employees carry identical or similar equipment, like laptops or toolboxes. What happens naturally is that employees start putting stickers on their equipment so it doesn’t get mixed up. In an environment like that, the organization giving out a work anniversary sticker is generally well received.
The first design goal is to create something that fits on the equipment in a natural way like other stickers being used. This will make it more likely that the sticker will be used.
The second design goal is to create something that from a distance is readily recognizable to other employees as a work anniversary sticker with the number of years easily read. This supports interactions where an employee might say to another, “Wow, Jen, I had no idea you’d been here for 15 years!” So, while it might be fun to make every different number a completely different size, font, and color, that’s probably not a good idea.
From the experience side, you’ll also want to encourage the actual stickers to be strong enough to withstand typical use. That is, a toolbox sticker will generally need to be stronger than a sticker intended for laptops.
Pins
Work anniversary pins are most commonly given out at organizations where many employees are customer-facing (or patient-facing). The intent is that the people the employee is interacting with will feel an extra level of comfort and convey a little more respect when they see that the employee is long-tenured. And then further, the hope is the employee will live up to the expectations that a customer might have of a long-tenured employee.
By far, the primary design goal in this case is to make sure that people can quickly tell at a glance that the pin is indicating the number of years the employee has worked there and how many. Pins are generally small, so you mostly dedicate all of the real estate to the number and the word “years”.
If you can get the pin to reflect the uniqueness of the organization, perhaps with color, then that’s great, but that’s a distant second in terms of goals.
This may be hard on your design sensitivities, but in terms of effectiveness, an ugly, generic, uncustomized gold pin that just says “5 years” in the largest font that fits is lots better than a beautifully complex full-color pin with an abstract overlay of the number five on top of the logo that customers either can’t read or don’t understand.
Blocks
Blocks with the work anniversary number of years printed on them are most commonly given out at creative organizations where many of the employees have created all their life and look back fondly at playing with blocks. The intent is to give something simple and fun that tangibly represents time in physical form. Most creative types always wanted “more blocks”, and so this ever so subtly increases their desire to stay with the organization.
The two dominant variations are square wooden blocks and Lego bricks.
For square wooden blocks, you have six sides to work with and are generally working in monochrome with dark engraving on a light block. One side needs to be the number of years as big as is reasonable. A second side is generally always the organization’s logo. There’s also generally a tray that can be engraved. The best thing to do there is engrave your organization’s purpose or mission. If your organization doesn’t have a purpose or mission, then you can use the organization’s name.
The other four sides of the individual blocks can be left blank, or they can be printed with elements from your culture. The challenge is getting the number four to make sense. If you have four, eight, or twelve core values, then you can do one, two, or three core values per side and it makes a lot of sense. You can also use one or two sides for your purpose and/or mission, which then might make the core values multiple work out better. You can also write “happy workiversary” or the equivalent with whatever unique word you use for workiversary on one side.
A nice touch when doing wooden blocks is to do a “welcome” block that represents their start date, also known as work anniversary zero. The word welcome is written on the side that would have had the number. The employee then gets their tray with the purpose and the welcome block on their first day rather than waiting until their first work anniversary to get their first block.
For Lego bricks, you pick the colors of the bricks, what auxiliary blocks will be included, and what will be on the auxiliary blocks. For some organizations, the brand colors will lend themselves well to the bricks, and for others, the brand colors will be so unique that you’re better off going gray or generically multi-color. The most common auxiliary blocks are a base platform and a Lego minifigure customized to represent the employee’s appearance.
As with the wooden block tray, it’s best to print the organization’s purpose or mission on the front of the platform. And, if you don’t have a purpose or mission, then use the company’s name. For the minifigure, someone will choose the hair and head block for each individual. The torso and legs blocks may vary by job role if your job roles have different ways of dressing. Then, a nice touch for the torso blocks is to print the company’s logo on the front and put the employee’s first name at the top of the back, like a sports jersey.
Some organizations will choose to also provide additional auxiliary blocks. The most common is a set of blocks with each of the core values printed on them. If there are slogans, taglines, or hashtags that are a big part of your organization’s culture, they’re candidates, too.
Organization-branded clothing 👕👚🧢 (and other swag)
Another common work anniversary gift is branded clothing. Wearing clothing with an organization’s logo, and other people doing the same, creates a feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself.
Most vendors who produce branded clothing help customers do a good job in not making egregious design mistakes, because it’s in their interest that the clothing looks good.
However, as a trained designer, if you know your organization is going to start giving out branded clothing, you may want to see if there is a way that you can be involved in checking it over before it’s ordered. Even subtly better changes matter, as they will subtly send the message that the organization is a high quality organization and the gift matters.
Good luck and have fun! 😃
Remember, this is a project where one-time effort from you will make countless special moments more special!