Communicating work anniversary dates within your organization
|
by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries. |
Are you in HR? Do you want to make work anniversaries better?
Are you wondering where to start?
This blog post is the place to start, and this is the number one most important thing for the human resources team to do.
If you do nothing else, do this.
Make work anniversary dates easy to find
The absolute simplest thing to do is to make sure that work anniversary dates are discoverable by everyone in the organization.
Nothing great is going to happen if no one knows when it should happen
While it will be far from comprehensive, this one minor step will open up the door for motivated individuals throughout your organization to take matters into their own hands and celebrate the most beloved of your employees.
Some HRIS systems will have a mechanism for doing this, but if you can’t figure that out, then a shared spreadsheet with everyone’s name and hire date, preferably linked to from your intranet or wiki, will solve the problem. Then, add one more step to the onboarding checklist for adding the new hire to the work anniversary spreadsheet.
There’s another great option for the smallest of organizations where all employees use the same calendar system and an administrative assistant puts paid time off holidays on everyone’s calendar. You can also put everyone’s work anniversary on everyone’s calendar. This is great at encouraging colleagues to acknowledge each other, but it generally becomes too much at around 50 employees.
Announce work anniversaries in advance in one or more company-wide communication channels
Is your organization too big to put everyone’s work anniversary on everyone’s calendar? Or do employees not use a work calendar? Then the next step is to find a way to “push” work anniversary dates out to employees.
This will vary by company, but consider options like newsletters, intranets, or bulletin boards. For any of these communication channels, consider including a regularly updated section on upcoming work anniversaries.
Considering the size and age of the company and the frequency of the communication, you’ll need to choose which work anniversaries are communicated. Generally speaking, you will want there to always be at least one but not more than ten. The ten rule isn’t absolute, but the more you list, the harder it will be to scan, and the less special everyone listed will be.
If you can recognize every work anniversary, then that’s great. This would mean about a hundred people covered by a monthly communication or about five hundred people covered by a weekly communication.
If that’s too many, what about all the “fives”? Or what about all the fives starting at ten? Or all the fives starting at twenty?
The really important thing is to do it in advance. Most people have no idea when their colleagues’ work anniversaries are. Most managers have no idea when most of their reports’ work anniversaries are. If they’re going to do something nice, or even just congratulate them, then it’s helpful for them to know ahead of time, because acknowledgment on the day is infinitely better than belated acknowledgement (especially from managers).
Get them right
Once you’ve made a master list of work anniversaries available and have potentially started publishing them regularly in a newsletter or elsewhere, you’re on to the next challenge.
For some people, their work anniversary isn’t simple, and they may disagree with the date you have. These are the cases you’ll run into:
Employees who have left and rejoined
Employees who started out as temps or contractors
Employees who joined as part of an acquisition
Employees who simply remember the date wrong
Employees who had their work anniversary entered into the system wrong
Once you’ve published the work anniversaries and started announcing them, we recommend reaching out to each employee to let them know what you have as their work anniversary. You can then invite them to let you know if they think it’s actually a different date, and you can work through the details. If you want to reduce the number of people who reply to you, then for more complicated cases, you’ll want to explain upfront why one date was chosen over another option.
In the complicated cases, which date is best? The employee will generally appreciate the more generous, earlier choice, so if you can do that, then go for it. Though, generally that means the start date will ripple through any other time-based benefits. Having two dates is too complicated and sets up too much opportunity for confusion and disappointment.
Here are my thoughts on what to do in the complicated cases.
For acquired employees, their start date with the company being acquired should be honored. There is lots of change and risk it will be perceived negatively during an acquisition, and you want to win over the acquired employees. Telling them they’ve lost all their seniority just doesn’t go over well.
For temps or contractors, it is very kind to honor the date they started working as a temp or contractor, but this is generally handled situationally. The fewer the people you have in this situation and the more critical their role, the more likely the earlier date will be honored. The more people you have in this situation and the more entry-level they are, the more likely the later date will be used.
For employees who have left and rejoined, it can get complicated. It’s nice to be generous, but that also is a little bit at the expense of employees who were there all along. In the extreme, an employee celebrating a 25th work anniversary who has only actually worked for the company for ten years is weird. To make it a simpler, objective call, we recommend comparing how long the person was with the organization before the gap and how long the gap was. If they were at the organization for four years and then had a one year gap, you stick with the earlier start date. If it’s reversed, where they work for the organization for one year, then take a four year gap, then you start over again with the new work anniversary. But, as an exception, for gaps of six years or more, you always start over again with the new work anniversary.
And finally, once you have everything straightened out and communicated, then going forward you should make it part of the onboarding process to be clear about their official start date with any employees in any of the special cases bulleted above.
Remind managers
At this point, you know and have agreed on everyone’s official work anniversary.
Next, do you know who manages who? Do you know when it changes?
If you do, you can move on to the next level of sophistication, which is reminding managers both a couple weeks before each of their direct reports’ work anniversaries and on the actual day of each of their direct reports’ work anniversaries.
Each organization will have different technology for this.
For bigger organizations, you will likely have to configure your HRIS system to do this. (If you use Workday, check our post about configuring Workday to remind managers.)
For smaller organizations, you may be able to have someone manually set up scheduled emails, scheduled Slack messages, scheduled reminders, or any other schedulable communication that your company uses.
While this is harder than just publishing work anniversaries, you are now actively targeting someone who can make a big difference, and you’re setting up an expectation that they do something, which is a big step forward.
Congratulations!
If you implement the steps in this blog post, you have a lot to celebrate:
You’ve made it so anyone in the organization can find work anniversaries
You’re broadly communicating them in advance
You’ve made sure they’re accurate
You’re notifying managers specifically about their direct reports
This is a strong foundation to build from.
If you want to go further, you can look through other blog posts for ideas, or now that you’ve given your employees and managers what they need to get started, you can just wait and watch for well-received things your employees start doing on their own and then encourage replicating those successes across the rest of your organization.