Work anniversaries don’t celebrate time
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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. |
When you think of classic work anniversary gifts, what comes to mind?
A watch? ⌚︎ A clock? 🕰
It’s a cute connection, right? You spend a lot of time at an organization, and you get something that tells time.
But, celebrating the passage of time is completely missing what makes a work anniversary special.
What does a work anniversary celebrate?
If it’s not about time, what is it about? Here are some bolder options to consider:
A work anniversary celebrates a sacred moment when a person became part of something bigger than themself.
A work anniversary celebrates a sacred moment when the person and the organization chose to join forces to work together towards a common purpose, mission, and vision.
All of our work anniversaries together are a collective celebration of how humanity is capable of doing more together than apart.
If that’s what you believed, how would how you treat your work anniversary change? How would your organization’s work anniversary program change?
Thinking differently
Here’s a three step process for thinking differently about work anniversaries:
Step one. What is your organization’s purpose, mission, and/or vision? How is your organization making the world a better place in a way that your organization is uniquely positioned to do?
Step two. How has the person having the work anniversary contributed to that purpose, mission, and/or vision? Maybe it’s really concrete and numerical. Maybe they’ve prevented untold illness by administering 1200 vaccines in the past year. Maybe they’ve been a part of assembling 12,000 high chairs that will help make it easier for tired parents to help their babies learn how to eat. Or maybe it’s a single major video game release. Or maybe it’s harder to quantify. Maybe it’s keeping the front desk area both efficient and compassionate so that people coming through are a little bit better positioned to help with the company’s purpose of finding a cure for lupus.
Step three. Put the answers from steps one and two together. Celebrate work anniversaries by reminding employees of the organization’s purpose, why it matters, and their role in contributing to that purpose.
With this approach, work anniversaries become a reminder to each one of us of why all the time we spend at work makes a positive difference to the world, providing each of us with another reason why we matter to the world.
Summary
But most simply, work anniversaries celebrate being part of something bigger with a bigger purpose.
That’s needed for people to set aside their petty self-interests, and setting aside their petty self-interests is what’s required for groups of people to accomplish great things together.
And, by setting aside our self-interests, we can make the words of Aristotle (and the Google People Analytics team) apply to our teams and our organizations:
“the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
Just like a watch is so much more than a pile of its parts. 😉