Strengthening workplace culture through uniqueness
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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. |
Think about broader, societal-level cultures. Think about one that you are especially drawn to.
What is it about the culture that appeals to you?
Whatever it is, it’s the parts that are different.
What makes the culture unique is what makes it special.
To value belonging to something, there needs to be something to belong to. And for something to exist, it has to stand out from everything else. Quirkiness is good. Having your own lingo and traditions—and in general doing endearing things that don’t necessarily make sense—creates an identity that employees can belong to.
For example, if you work at a midsize accounting firm that’s just like a hundred other midsize accounting firms, employees may find it pleasant enough but won’t feel a strong sense of belonging, because there’s not a strong cultural identity. But if that accounting firm has a sports team in every corporate league from softball to water polo to kickball to roller derby, there’s going to be a culture. They’ll have a team name, like the Ledger Lions or the Number Ninjas, and someone at the firm will volunteer to be the mascot at games. Suddenly this is an accounting firm that stands out.
Accounting firms don’t need sports teams, and this accounting firm won’t be a good fit for everyone, but for the sporty accountants, it’s easy to see how they’ll feel they’ve found the organization where they belong.
If you want to create a strong workplace culture, it needs to be unique, and work anniversaries can help.
Embrace rituals
Rituals are actions or behavior that, at least for the most part, are unique to your organization. They’re things that don’t make sense or have a rational purpose, since, after all, if they made sense or accomplished something, other organizations would do them too and they’d just be common business practices.
Signing up for vision insurance makes sense, lots of employees at lots of organizations do it every year, and it’s not a ritual. Putting umbrellas in the bucket thingy by the door on rainy days makes sense and it’s not a ritual. Shredding documents with sensitive customer data is not a ritual.
Ritual is associated with the unusual, and with moments of change in a person’s life. Dimitris Xygalatas, a leading researcher into the science of ritual and author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, writes:
Ritual is a true human universal. Without a single exception, all known human societies – whether past or present – have a range of traditions that involve highly choreographed, formalised and precisely executed behaviors that mark threshold moments in people’s lives.
There is a large body of research showing that rituals, while often appearing senseless (or what is amusingly referred to scientifically as “causally opaque”), in fact provide a lot of prosocial benefit. These benefits can be categorized into three categories:
Rituals reduce anxiety. Rituals are especially common in highly uncertain situations such as gambling, athletics, and living in war zones. How does this relate to work anniversaries? Many employees are constantly anxious about the safety of their jobs. Rituals related to their sense of belonging at the organization can ease that anxiety.
Rituals build community. Research shows that time invested in ritual strengthens social cohesion and a willingness to sacrifice for others in the same group. Work anniversaries strengthen the social bond at work, making employees more likely to view themselves and their coworkers as part of a team. This is an indirect but more effective way to overcome diversity and inclusion challenges than simply saying, “Differences shouldn’t matter.” Instead, rituals positively amplify the sense of belonging to a common identity, the organization.
Rituals improve performance. This is true for both individuals and teams. Since rituals ease anxiety, they make room for individual employees to take on harder tasks that would otherwise not fit in their “anxiety budget.” And since rituals build community, team performance is enhanced through an increased willingness to put the best interests of the group ahead of individual desires.
Ready to explore how you can start building ritual into your work anniversaries? Be forewarned—it’s going to get … weird.
Do things that don’t make sense
Doing things that don’t make sense doesn’t usually come naturally to businesses. Most organizations are always pursuing efficiency, and an obvious path to increasing efficiency is eliminating things that have no obvious causal effect on desired outcomes.
But when it comes to work anniversaries, the line between senselessness and efficiency isn’t that obvious. Being efficient is inefficient. To put it another way:
Being completely efficient completely ruins a work anniversary
That is, if you totally automate the process and have an outsourced fulfillment warehouse ship the same generic gift you bought in bulk at a great discount to everyone, you’ll save a lot of time and money, but the outcome will be useless at best and demotivating at worst.
That said, the goal isn’t complete randomness either. Here are some indirect goals that well-celebrated work anniversaries can communicate:
The employee is appreciated and respected
The employee’s colleagues will be there for the employee in times of need
Optimism about the future
To get you started, imagine that at your organization each employee’s manager gets them their favorite candy or snack on their work anniversary. How can you make handing it over a fun ritual? The most efficient thing would be to just drop it on their desk whether they’re there or not and go back to work, but we’re looking to do something that’s not that.
How about if the manager hands it over with two palms-up hands, reminiscent of Japanese business card exchanges? Or maybe the manager kneels and bows their head as they hand it over? Or maybe the employee kneels as the manager recites a short, standard swearing-in type of speech, expressing being honored to be their manager and thanking them for the past year? Whatever you choose, go all in with that one. Be over the top with it. Believe it to be wrong not to do it that way. Have employees refuse to accept the candy or snack unless the ritual was followed precisely.
Or maybe your organization runs more through cross-functional teams and the manager role isn’t that important. In that case, how about having every employee on the work anniversary employee’s team stop by the employee’s desk or a particular spot in the break room to leave a message on a Post-it note? What if people take the ritual so seriously that employees who won’t be there that day or who work at another location send their Post-its to a colleague who’ll be there so that they magically appear anyway? What if at the end of the day, the manager (or HR) comes along and puts all the Post-its in a frame and gives it to the employee?
What if there are hurdles to getting into the office on the first day of your new year with the organization? Maybe you need to do the chicken dance every time you cross the doorway that day, even if nobody else is around. And if you forget or get caught trying to skip it, you’ll have to go back out and come in again. Or maybe you’re not allowed in the door unless you’re wearing the work anniversary crown that your team made for you—and you’re expected to wear it all day. If not a crown, how about a sash? Or maybe once you’re in the door, there’s a sacred line of gaffer’s tape on the floor and you jump back and forth over it once for every year you’ve been with the organization while counting them out aloud? (Or tap your foot on either side if jumping is physically difficult or painful for you, or wheel back and forth if you use a wheelchair—there’s always an inclusive alternative.) Or maybe before you can start your day, you need to have your picture taken holding a garishly decorated three-foot by three-foot “Happy work anniversary!” frame around your head.
Or maybe there are too many entryways into the office and/or there’s no one at a front desk, and so the ritual happens sometime during the day. Maybe it’s that the employee is surprised at a random time during the day, with one colleague firing off a confetti popper at them and another conspiring colleague taking a photo of their face at their most surprised moment. Then maybe there’s a public collection of all the photos, either online or IRL.
Other approaches are needed for remote workers, of course. What if on your work anniversary you start your day on a videoconference call with your manager and everyone else who can attend witnessing you recite the organization’s sacred work anniversary vow? What if it not only involves reaffirming working toward the organization's purpose or mission and living the core values but also rhymes, and for extra luck you can rap it? Or maybe on your work anniversary you’re expected to make a homemade sign with the number of years being celebrated attached to a Popsicle stick and you hold it up at the start of every video call you’re on that day? Or maybe there’s a plush work anniversary walrus that gets physically mailed from employee to employee and is expected to show up on videoconference calls with the employee on their work anniversary?
For hybrid organizations, a fun ritual is to set up a fifteen-minute video call any morning there’s a work anniversary. On the call, start with spinning a spin-to-win prize wheel that lists a variety of work anniversary gifts. In-person employees can get what they win right away, and remote employees have their prizes sent to them—though some prizes don’t need to be sent, like the afternoon off.
After the prize wheel, you can re-create some of the magic of in-person meals by borrowing the approach of having everyone on the call go one-by-one and say something kind about the employee celebrating their work anniversary. The kind words can either be free-form or follow prompts like:
What three words best describe the honoree?
What’s your favorite memory with the honoree from the past year?
Why are you thankful the honoree has been with us for the past year?
There’s also lots of fun to be had in coming up with your own ideas. Get creative, but always ask yourself these questions:
Does this ritual honor the employee?
Does this ritual express that, as a group, we stick by each other?
Does this ritual point to optimism about the future?
A great work anniversary ritual doesn’t need a yes to all three questions. It just needs one strong yes and for the answer to the other two question to not be, “It’s the opposite of that.”
Believe in magic
The idea of magic is as old as humanity, but we’re always coming up with new ways to believe in the impossible. Sure, there’s Santa Claus, but there’s also the Elf on the Shelf. You can create new work anniversary magic for your organization!
One of the special powers of magic in supporting work anniversary rituals is that it allows employees to playfully, but firmly, confront employees who aren’t following the rituals. The more outlandish the ritual, the better a bonding experience it can be—and the more likely you’ll run into one or more people who’ll feel really awkward doing it and try to get out of it.
But if some sort of future good luck is attributed to the ritual, an employee can be admonished for risking everyone’s future by refusing to join in. And the more specific the luck is the better. It’s not general “good luck” that’s at stake—it’s good luck with new hires, or next month’s sales, or not forgetting to come off mute when talking, or not forgetting to go on mute when you should.
Did someone make a mistake while performing a ritual? No matter how minor, make them do it again to avoid calamity! Is the employee claiming that what they did was close enough? Remind them that President Obama had to be sworn in a second time because one word was said out of sequence. You can also quote Greg Craig, White House counsel at the time, and say they need to do it again “out of an abundance of caution.”
Want to up the stakes? Make more nonsensical rules! Like maybe the three-by-three “Happy work anniversary” frame grants luck for the following year as long as you don’t turn it upside down. And if you do turn it upside down? Well, everywhere that picture is posted, you’ll be upside down!
But there’s more to magic than granting luck.
Do you give gifts for work anniversaries? Can they come from a mythical being? If you have a mascot, that’s the obvious choice. If not, how about an animal with a silly name like Wally the Magical Work Anniversary Warthog? (Or something else that’s alliterative with your distinct name for work anniversaries.)
Another fun way to include mythical beings is with desk decorating. Like with Santa and the Easter Bunny, you can attribute desk decoration to the Work Anniversary Fairy, whom no one has ever seen. The more elaborate you are with this, the more fun it will be. Create a backstory for this mythical being or talk about what the lore says will happen if they’re ever spotted.
These are just examples. The options are limitless.
Make up origin stories
Whenever someone new is first involved in doing something that doesn’t make sense, they’ll generally ask why.
Here’s the wrong answer: “Someone in HR read a book about work anniversaries and arbitrarily came up with this useless thing for us to do so that we could fool our brains into trusting each other more.”
Here’s a generic one that’s better: “Because no [insert your type of company here] company that has done this regularly has ever gone out of business!”
But if you can get more creative and come up with something unique to your organization, that’s the best. If your organization has a mascot, tell a story about them. And if your organization doesn’t have a mascot, maybe this is the impetus it needs to create one.
Are there bad days in the organization’s history? Can they be playfully blamed on the fact that a ritual wasn’t done or was done the wrong way?
Conversely, are there especially good days in the organization's history, like the day it was founded, the day the first customer signed, the day the really big customer signed, or the day you received regulatory approval? Can any or all of these days be attributed to proper performance of a ritual?
Sing
Not every organization will go here, but if your organization tends to attract a big enough percentage of employees who are happy to sing in front of others, work that into your work anniversary gatherings.
Sing together? Am I serious? Yes. Researchers have found that singing causes people to bond together more closely and more quickly, and it also lowers aggression, improves mood, and makes people more cooperative. (link) Singing has long been a big part of human culture and of people working together. Neuroscientists even have reason to suspect that humans developed the ability to sing before the ability to speak evolved. (link)
Sing what, you might ask? You can sing “Happy Birthday” with your special word for work anniversary substituted for birthday. Or you can sing “For They’re a Jolly Good Colleague” to the tune of “For They’re a Jolly Good Fellow.”
But—for all the marbles in the great game of work anniversary workplace cultural uniqueness—if at some point someone in your organization writes a work anniversary song specifically for your organization and it catches on, that’s a story to tell for years to come!