Work Anniversary Zero

by Rick Joi
Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries.

Five tips for onboarding with great work anniversaries in mind

This may not be intuitive, but great work anniversaries begin on day one, which is also known as work anniversary zero.

For no additional budget and minimal effort, the onboarding team can have a huge impact on the quality of work anniversaries at their organization.

Below are some ideas about valuable additions to your on-boarding checklist.

Tip #1: Take first-day photos

Photos from the past make work anniversaries special, both for the person celebrating and for newer employees who will be entertained by old photos. 📷

While the investment takes a while to pay off, building the capture of first day photos into your onboarding process is also free. There are many fun variations:

At the front door of the office
At their new desk
In front of something quintessential about your workplace, like the big machine, or the statue of the founder
Fully remote? Grab a screen capture of them on an onboarding video call (which ten years from now will look amusingly antiquated)
Use photo IDs? Take a picture of their new photo ID

Next, make sure you store these photos systematically in a place where other important documents are stored so that they will be migrated every time your organization changes systems. If it can be somewhere that many people have access to, that’s great, too, but the most important thing is that the photos are maintained over the years. Ideally, you’ll come up with an image file naming convention that includes the employee’s name and their hire date.

Tip #2: Capture employee preferences

Here’s a new item for the onboarding checklist that’s sure to be more fun than almost all of the others, both for you and for the new employee!

Are you familiar with those questionnaires that parents send in to teachers at the beginning of the school year so that they know what to get them for holiday and end-of-year gifts?

You can do that as you onboard new employees, too!

And, they’ll be doing so much paperwork, they may well forget that they filled it out, and so it will be a mysterious surprise when they get their favorite candy bar on their first work anniversary!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, the idea is to capture the employees preferences on a variety of things that makes it easier to get personalized simple gifts for them.

For example, you can ask them for:

Favorite candy bar 🍫
Favorite snack food
Favorite gift card
Favorite coffee/tea ☕️
Favorite flower 🌻 (more often used for get-well flowers than work anniversaries)
Favorite restaurant (go there for work anniversary lunch?)
Favorite baked good (the cake every time for everyone can get boring)
Favorite pizza toppings 🍕 (pizza party with a special pizza just for them)
Favorite sandwich (also useful for celebrating by eating in)
Favorite soup (can go with the sandwich, or also useful in a get-well package)
Favorite color 🎨 (for decorations)
Favorite fruit (make sure it’s in the fruit basket or use as a substitute for those people who answer the first question saying they don’t eat candy)
Favorite sports team ⚽️ (tickets? bobblehead?)
Favorite hobby (not always useful, but sometimes it is)

You can capture it on paper and then photograph it, or you can capture it electronically, perhaps with a Google Form connected with a Google Sheet.

The important thing is to make sure the preferences don’t get lost. They, like the first-day photo, should be stored such that it will get migrated along with other important documents as your organization switches systems over the years.

The preferences should also be included in the work anniversary reminder set up for the employee’s manager, which will be discussed next.

Tip #3: Set first work anniversary reminders

If you want work anniversaries to be reliably acknowledged, then you’re going to need reminders. Setting up recurring annual reminders of the new employee’s start date should be on the onboarding checklist.

The details where to set the reminder will vary by organization. The three most common types of reminders to set are calendar entries, scheduled Slack messages, or scheduled emails. And, in many cases, you’ll want to do more than one.

Then, there’s the question of who should get the reminder. The new employee’s manager should definitely get two reminders. First, a reminder to prepare a couple weeks before the work anniversary, and then a reminder the day of the work anniversary. The manager’s manager might appreciate a reminder the day of the anniversary so that they can mention it. And lastly, anyone in HR involved in any part of the work anniversary process should also get reminders. They will likely need a preparation reminder, and in some cases, a day-of reminder will also be useful.

While all the reminders are important, the manager reminder that goes out two weeks ahead of time is the most crucial. That reminder should include reminders of what’s expected of the manager. It should also include a link to the employee’s preferences that were captured as part of onboarding.

Tip #4: Set up new managers for success

If the new employee is a manager, then there are two more onboarding steps needed.

First, share with the new manager what the expectations are at your organization around the manager acknowledging the work anniversaries of their direct reports.

Second, you’ll need to get them the work anniversary dates of each of their direct reports and transfer the reminders discussed in the previous section to the new manager.

Tip #5: Communicate performance review and pay raise timing

The timing of performance reviews and pay raises is a topic for another blog post, where it will be suggested that neither should happen on an employee’s work anniversary, but from the onboarding perspective the important thing is to set accurate expectations.

If you don’t communicate how and when your organization does performance reviews and pay raises, then many employees will assume that they should happen on their work anniversary.

This can lead to unnecessary bad feelings and angst when their work anniversary comes and goes and the review and pay raise don’t happen. Some employees will just speak up, but many more will just miserably stew about it.

If all raises take effect the 1st of the year, let the employee know. If your organization believes that high quality one-on-ones with your manager eliminates the need for an annual review, then let the employee know. If your organization is haphazard about these things, and they have to advocate for themselves, then let the employee know.

This is very important to have on the onboarding checklist, because pay and reviews are such emotionally charged areas, getting expectations wrong on either of them can ruin other nice things that might have happened on the employee’s work anniversary. 😢