CEOs and work anniversaries
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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. |
If you’re a CEO and in a hurry, as many CEOs are, one option is to scroll straight to the summary at the end of this post.
Or if you have a trusted executive assistant, there’s also the option to stop reading and instead have them condense this down to exactly what’s relevant to your organization’s specific situation. There’s even a set of blog posts specifically for executive assistants to help them further.
Why work anniversaries matter
To start with, if your organization doesn’t actually care much about employees, then work anniversaries probably don’t matter. If employees are readily replaceable and don’t play a part in your competitive advantage or brand promise, then whatever you’re currently doing for work anniversaries if fine and you should stop reading here.
If on the other hand, engaged employees and a strong organizational culture are key to your organization’s success, then work anniversaries are a uniquely tangible, measurable, and promotable part of your organization’s culture.
Want a better workplace culture? There’s just not a simpler or more cost effective place to start.
While they can’t do any of these things completely on their own, high quality work anniversaries can meaningfully contribute to the following objectives:
Reduce attrition by providing a memorable and meaningful experience during the month employees are otherwise twice as likely to quit.
Make it easier to hire top candidates by providing very concrete, easy-to-communicate proof that your organization cares more about employees than do their other options.
Improve team effectiveness by providing opportunities for teams to build trust and understanding through shared celebration of moments unique to your organization.
Improve skip-level communication by providing a non-threatening, easy-to-explain, and hard-to-postpone opportunity for senior leaders to have meaningful conversations with employees multiple levels below them.
Reinforce your organization’s culture by providing regular opportunities to remind employees of your organization’s purpose, mission, brand promise, core values, and/or slogans.
Support marketing by providing a regular stream of photogenic and compelling material for your marketing team to use to promote the quality of your employees to your prospects, customers, and other external stakeholders.
And, work anniversaries can deliver all that at very little cost to your organization.
The HR team and individual managers drive a lot of an organization’s work anniversary program, but this blog post describes a number of opportunities unique to the CEO.
Use work anniversaries to connect with frontline employees and managers
Here are four ideas on how work anniversaries can make it easier to connect with front-line employees and managers.
#1: Celebrate work anniversaries at all-hands meetings
If your organization holds all-hands meetings, and work anniversaries are called out, then you should be the one announcing them. It will feel more special coming from the most powerful person in the company.
The simple universal message is to thank those employees for all they have contributed over their time at the organization.
If you want to go beyond thanking, then tying work anniversaries to your organization’s purpose, core values, or slogans is a great way to increase the cultural impact, which we’ll talk about later.
And lastly, if you are long-tenured yourself, then, since you were there, you can remind the organization of how much progress has been made since the people being recognized started. You can then turn that into an inspiring message of how much more progress everyone can make going forward. You might also be able to throw in a brief personal anecdote from your early time working with them that will make them feel special.
#2: “Magically” remember work anniversaries
Casual mentions from the CEO, especially on the actual day of the work anniversary, carry a lot of power.
They can become the story the employee tells their spouse at night. It can even become a part of your “lore” as the mysterious CEO who cares so much about employees, they remember work anniversaries!
To pull this off, you’ll need some sort of system for being reminded of work anniversaries before your meetings on any given day. You can have a list of work anniversaries for the day emailed to you first thing in the morning. Or, if you have an assistant, you can set up something where they give you a heads up. For smaller organizations, you can also set reminders on your calendar.
If your organization has multiple remote locations that you visit, another powerful approach is to know if anyone at a location you’re visiting is having a work anniversary that day. If they are, taking a little time out from your itinerary to go find them, shake their hand, and thank them will likely become a positive story told multiple times.
#3: Hold skip-level conversations
Most CEOs would like to connect with frontline employees and managers more, but find it can be awkward to set up and easy to postpone. Who should you talk to? How do you explain why? How do you bridge the divide in your roles? How can these conversations compete with other urgent tasks? Work anniversaries can solve these problems.
Simply decide how many conversations you want to have per year, and then pick the corresponding work anniversaries that roughly match that count (everything divisible by 5, or by 10, or maybe concentrate on new employees and do all the first anniversaries).
Then, set up 15-minute meetings with those employees on their actual work anniversary. Commit yourself to having as many of the conversations as possible on the actual work anniversary, and if not that, then before.
How to run the actual conversation?
You may have your own approach, but our favorite CEO ice breaker is, “if you had a magic wand, what would you change about this organization?” It’s worded to pull out useful constructive feedback in an enormously positive way.
Also, it doesn’t set up expectations that you need to do something…people don’t expect magic wands to exist. If you do actually do something, then you’re magical!
As employees start to learn that that’s what you ask, some will start preparing, and the quality and value of the conversations will keep getting better.
#4: Hold long-tenure employee breakfasts
If you don’t want to do the one-on-one conversations described above, or if you want to reach more employees than you can with that, then consider having quarterly or annual long-tenured employee breakfasts (or lunches).
Again, decide how many people you’d like to attend, and have someone calculate out which anniversaries that means will be included. The goal is for the group of people to be small enough that each employee feels they have access and could have brought something up with the CEO, even though not everyone will. For larger, older organizations with enough employees who have been there over 25 years, a catchy name for this is the [your company name here] Quarter Century Club.
For maximum impact, add the employee to the invitation on the exact date of their qualifying work anniversary with a congratulatory note welcoming them to this special and influential group.
Use work anniversaries to encourage what’s important to you
In addition to providing great opportunities to connect with employees, work anniversaries also provide great opportunities to encourage what’s important to you.
#1: Reinforce your organization’s culture
Work anniversaries are a naturally recurring communication opportunity where it’s especially easy to come off as genuine.
A work anniversary is the celebration of the date that the employee joined together with the organization to work together towards a common purpose, mission, and/or goal. A work anniversary is when that employee joined the culture, learned the lingo, started acting according to the core values, learned the slogans, started delivering on your brand promise, and became “one of us”.
That makes all of your work anniversary interactions described previously naturally compelling times for you to reinforce your organization’s purpose, mission, goals, core values, slogans, and/or brand promise, whichever is most important to you.
When it comes to organizational culture, you’re especially important. As the figurehead of the organization, you’re the one everyone looks to to understand how important the purpose really is, or how important the core values really are. Or in general, to figure out what is important.
As leadership expert Patrick Lencioni has observed, leadership communication is 75% about creating clarity through repetition. Three of his Four Disciplines of Organizational Health are “create clarity”, “over-communicate clarity”, and “reinforce clarity”.
Don’t miss out on using work anniversaries to create clarity about your organization’s culture, and steer your organization’s culture in the direction most important to you.
#2: Encourage the on-time work anniversary delivery rate
Have your head of HR include on-time work anniversary delivery rate in the departmental metrics they track and publish to the senior leadership team.
Being late or outright forgetting work anniversaries is bad, and this metric is a rare example of an objective, easy-to-track employee experience metric. It also has the advantage over engagement and retention of being a leading indicator rather than a lagging one.
You may rarely or never pay attention to this metric, but just requiring it be captured sends a powerful message that will improve how well work anniversaries are handled.
Want to go all in to make sure work anniversaries aren’t forgotten, and if they are that you’ll find out about it? Put a large “bounty” on forgotten work anniversaries. That is, publicly declare that work anniversaries are so important to your organization that if anyone’s work anniversary is forgotten, they get a conference room (or machine or whatever makes sense for your company) named after them and a free trip to Bermuda for them and their family.
#3: Model the behavior you want
Everyone is looking to you to see what you value so that they can behave accordingly.
If your organization has expectations for how managers acknowledge work anniversaries, and you want them to be followed, then you should do what’s expected on your direct reports’ work anniversaries.
If your organization doesn’t have specific expectations of managers, remember the two core most important things for a manager are:
Set up a reminder system for all your direct reports’ work anniversaries
Acknowledge every work anniversary in a live conversation on the day of the anniversary or the Friday before weekend work anniversaries
Summary
Here’s a quick summary of the highest leverage actions a CEO can take to support their organization’s work anniversary program.
Use work anniversaries to connect with frontline employees and managers
Personally acknowledge work anniversaries at all-hands meetings
Come up with a system to “magically” remember work anniversaries
Set up one-one 15-minute work anniversary meetings
Set up a long-tenured breakfast or lunch
Use work anniversaries to encourage what’s important to you
Use work anniversaries to reinforce your organization’s purpose, mission, goals, core values, slogans, and/or brand promise
Use tracking of on-time work anniversary acknowledgement as a way to measure how well your organization is prioritizing employee experience
Acknowledge your direct reports’ work anniversaries the way you want managers at your organization to acknowledge them
Remember that while many of these things may seem minor to you, they can easily be the highlight of an employee’s day. Their loved ones will likely hear the story that evening!