Thoughts on why work anniversaries usually aren’t great…
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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. |
They do start with great intentions.
Celebrating a workiversary is typically intended to help an employee:
feel noticed / “seen” 👀
feel appreciated 🥰
in general, feel good about working at the organization 😍
Even more aspirationally, workiversaries can be a group ritual that can increase each employee’s sense of:
connectedness 🖇
belonging 👩👩👧👦👨👨👧👦👨👩👧👦
What can go wrong?
It’s fairly easy for celebrating one employee’s workiversary to have the opposite effect on other employees. 🙀
If one or more employees’ experiences are perceived as better than the other employees’ experiences, then the other employees will come to resent the “favored” employees and those showing the favoritism.
Or, even if the experiences are the same, but the organization gets busy or distracted and can’t keep it up, then employees who “are missed” will feel disappointed and hurt.
Even employees whose workiversaries are merely recognized “late”, can feel disappointed and hurt. 🙀
The common path to avoid things going wrong
A workiversary program that doesn’t cause harm needs to:
be something you can do the same for everyone
be at a level of investment you’re willing to do for every employee
be a level of effort that you can do no matter how busy things get
The programs that best avoid these pitfalls are:
✔ generic
✔ low-cost
✔ low-effort
And, the most generic, lowest cost, least effort thing possible is, of course, doing nothing at all. 🚫
But, wait, what just happened? 🤨
Does generic, low-cost, and low-effort lead to a great experience for the employee?
no 👎
Are the concerns causing this understandable?
well, actually, yes 😕
And, that’s the problem to solve…
What would it be like to somehow make workiversaries achieve the original intentions in a way that could be sustainably amazing for everyone?
magic! 🦄
The Workiversary Group is going to make this magic happen. 🎉
Join us on the journey!
If you want to be a part of making the magic happen with us, check out our product and see if you have what it takes to be a workiversary enthusiast.
(a glimpse into where we’re going)