Fun committees 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. |
Fun committees go by many names. Maybe yours is more culture-focused than fun-focused. But whatever the name, if you’re part of a group of people enthusiastic about their mission to make their organization a better place to work through activities, culture, and/or communication, this blog post is for you.
Take and organize photos 📸
When people think of making work anniversaries better, they usually think of making the work anniversary better for the person being honored. While that’s great, it’s valuable to think bigger. Work anniversaries can also be improved for those witnessing the work anniversary.
One of the valuable roles of a work anniversary is serving as an excuse for the organization to share details about the employee being honored. This allows other employees to get to know the honoree better, and it provides loosely connected employees with icebreaking topics they can use to strike up conversations. This helps to build trust and team cohesion, which leads to higher-performing teams.
Sharing photos of the employee at work makes it more fun! But to do that, you need to have photos of the employee at work.
The outgoing, enthusiastic types who are drawn to being part of the fun committee will probably be well-represented at the organization’s social events and most likely won’t mind jumping into the middle of an interesting situation and saying, “I’m with the fun committee, and we need a picture of this!”
While it can be good to have lots of people taking photos at these events, one person will need to oversee collecting, organizing, and publishing them. Here are the options:
Someone who’s friendly with everyone just asks around for people to send them their best photos — when anyone on the committee needs work photos, they go to this person
Apple Photos shared albums can be a good solution if everyone in your organization has an iPhone, but if they don’t you risk excluding people
Another option is to work out a way of capturing and sharing photos using Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or whatever cloud-based file sharing application your organization uses
There are also some special-purpose solutions designed for this that you might want to explore, like Greenfly, Cluster, and DropEvent, but they all have limitations, and none of them have especially large market share
Decorate desks
For in-person employees at the same location, decorating people’s desks for their work anniversaries can be a lot of fun. It’s also great for making employees feel special and for facilitating conversations, since anyone passing by the decorated desk will be likely to congratulate the honoree.
This is obviously not a remote-friendly option, so if you’re a remote-only organization, skip to the next section.
But if you’re a hybrid organization where some people work in person and others are remote, still consider this. This is the one exception to the work anniversary “no favoritism” rule. Being an in-person employee can be lonely and under-appreciated these days, and let’s face it — it takes people more effort to get dressed and travel to the workplace every day than it does to stay in their pajamas and walk to their computer desk. Giving your in-person employees an extra perk by decorating their desk in a fun way once a year is an acceptable acknowledgment of that extra effort.
So how do you do it well?
The most common approach is to have a large box of supplies. Some supplies are mostly reused, like signs, banners, banner flags, balloon weights, balloon sticks, pom-poms to hang from the ceiling, swirls to hang from the ceiling, window clings, and fringe curtains. Other supplies need to be periodically restocked, like balloons, streamers, and confetti. A couple of people are then put on desk-decorating duty. Ideally they do it after the honoree has left on the day before the work anniversary or before they arrive on the day of the work anniversary.
Rather than just blowing up balloons, organizations that are really into it may prefer helium balloons and either have their own helium tank or go out and buy helium-filled balloons. (Note that a small percentage of the population is allergic to latex, which is what many blow-up-able balloons are made of, regardless of what they’re filled with. If you’re concerned, get mylar or bubble balloons instead.)
Another extra-effort approach is to match the decoration color theme to the employee’s favorite color. Of course, this requires a bigger supplies box and a way of finding out and tracking the employee’s favorite color, but it does make it feel much more personal.
Last and least fun for most people, it’s important to take the decorations down that night. The general convention is to let the employee know to take home any of the decorations they want to keep, because anything left at the office will be discarded that night — and by discarded I mean that the cleanup crew gets to take the balloons home to their kids.
Sidewalk chalk
This is a much better idea in, say, Arizona than it is in Seattle, Syracuse, or San Juan, but greeting an employee on their walk into work with sidewalk chalk messages wishing them a happy work anniversary will generally go over well and often will result in amused-grin selfies shared on social media.
As with decorating desks, the tricky part is doing it between the time the employee leaves the night before and arrives on their work anniversary. For extra credit, use the employee’s favorite colors.
The wrinkle is, of course, the weather. A cute way to handle precipitation is with a backup portable chalkboard that always says, “As with weddings, rain (or snow) on your work anniversary is good luck!” and allows you to wish the employee happy work anniversary in chalk on a smaller scale inside in an amusing way.
If you do happen to be in Seattle, Syracuse, San Juan, or anywhere else it rains all the time, you may want to purchase a portable sidewalk message board sign and write “happy work anniversary!” messages on that. They’re generally less than $500, and the fun committee may be able to come up with other creative uses for it as well.
Write it on your organization’s sign
Does your organization have an outdoor sign that allows you to convey customized messages? Whether it’s an old-style analog sign where you slide in the physical letters in a message under your organization’s name or a digital sign where you rotate various images through, the fun committee can decide which work anniversaries to include — all of them, just the fives, or whatever makes sense for your organization. The key thing is that whatever you choose, don’t miss any. (Disappointed employees aren’t fun.)
Help out with long-tenure events
At a lot of organizations, it’s the fun committee that knows how to throw the best parties. If this is the case for yours, consider taking over or helping with the various work anniversary “parties” described below.
Work anniversary CEO breakfast 🍳🥞
The CEO breakfast is a — you guessed it — breakfast, usually catered or delivered, which may happen once, twice, or four times a year and to which all employees who hit major milestones in the past three, six, or twelve months are invited. The CEO thanks them all for their contributions and speaks about the organization’s culture and/or some current concern for which they’d like the long-tenured employees’ input.
While executive assistants often organize these events, some fun committees will be well-positioned to take them over and make them more … fun!
CEO breakfasts are covered in lots more detail in the EA guide to work anniversary breakfasts blog post.
The Quarter Century Club
I think the name says it all, but just in case: this is a club specifically for employees who’ve been with the organization for twenty-five years or more. Younger organizations might have a Decade-Or-More Club (for employees who’ve been with the organization ten or more years) or a High Five Club (for employees who’ve been with the organization five or more years).
These clubs are usually self-organizing, with the events set up by elected members of the club, but there are situations where the fun committee is well-positioned to help the events be more … fun!
Read more about these kinds of clubs in the recent blog post: The Quarter Century Club.
Work anniversary galas 💃🕺
Some organizations will have annual or semiannual evening events after work specifically targeted at major work anniversary milestones. Each honoree can bring a guest, there’s generally a formal dinner, and the main attraction is speeches about the honorees.
For these events to be successful, employees have to want to attend them after hours more than anything else they might do with their time outside of work. That’s where the fun committee can come in by making these events more … fun!
Read more about these events in the Work anniversary celebration events after work blog post.
Embed organizational culture in work anniversaries
If your fun committee’s mandate relates to your organization’s culture rather than fun, this section is for you.
This blog has advised repeatedly to avoid simply acknowledging time passing and instead celebrate the employee and the organization working together toward a common purpose.
(See the classic blog posts Work anniversaries don’t celebrate time and What are work anniversaries really? and Purpose and work anniversaries)
Or, looked at another way, work anniversaries can be thought of as a celebration of belonging. And what does the employee belong to? The unique culture of the organization.
Both of these angles point to how powerful it can be to make sure the organization’s purpose, mission, vision, and/or core values are all prominent parts of the employee’s work anniversary. The slides at the all-hands meeting can call out the purpose. The framed certificate can call out the organization’s core values. The CEO can send an email thanking the employee for helping to make the vision a reality.
If you have a culture committee, you know that an important part of making a culture stick is embedding it in ongoing processes like hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and even firing. If you forgot to include work anniversaries in that list, you’re not alone, and this is your cue to put a small team together to see what they can do.
Train managers
This is another idea for fun committees that embrace workplace culture.
The Work anniversary tips for managers blog post details a lot of practices that a manager can do to make work anniversaries more special for their employees, and the culture committee can take charge of embedding those practices throughout the organization by making an initiative of upgrading how managers handle work anniversaries.
The steps are straightforward:
Read the Work anniversary tips for managers blog post
Decide which of the practices described in the chapter are a good fit for your organization
Pilot the practices for a few months with one or more members of the culture committee who are managers
Encourage those pilot managers to put together a presentation promoting their experience to other managers in the organization
Deliver the presentation at the next all-managers event
Does your organization not have all-managers events? They’re really valuable and can be fun. Starting them up could be another initiative of the fun committee.
Generally, all-managers events are periodic long lunches that all managers in the organization are invited to. One or more managers are called on to share things they’re doing that are working well so that the other managers can adopt the same practices. For smaller organizations, a powerful ending is to go around the room and have each manager share one thing they’re going to do differently that they learned in the meeting. For larger organizations, the expectation can be that each manager shares electronically.
Advocate for better work anniversaries
The best fun committees are made up of enthusiastic employees who are trusted by their colleagues and listened to by the leaders of the organization. They’re generally more motivated by the organization’s best interests than they are by petty politics, looking good, or avoiding blame. Because of this, they’re in a unique position to speak truth to power when appropriate.
Many if not most work anniversary programs are mediocre at best. They often elicit quiet sighs and eyerolls. In many cases they’re so poorly done they’re downright demotivating. But who’s going to tell the company that the Tiffany bowl with the company name and logo on it that they give to everyone is unanimously loathed and a big waste of money? Sure, some long-ago boss or boss’s spouse thought it was “lovely,” but it’s time to do something employees will actually like.
The fun committee — that’s who’ll tell the company.
Things may not be as bad as that example at your organization, or maybe they’re worse. Maybe the issue is that the organization doesn’t do anything at all, or maybe your organization is constantly trying new things, many of which don’t work. Whatever the situation, the fun committee can be the conduit between the front lines and management when something isn’t coming across well. They can also advocate for successful department-specific work anniversary practices to be replicated throughout the rest of the organization and enact real, positive change.
The fun committee checklist ✔
Work anniversaries are an opportunity to inject more fun into your organization!
Take, organize, and publish photos
Decorate desks
Announce work anniversaries with sidewalk chalk or on the organization’s updatable sign
Help out with events for long-tenured employees
Spearhead the embedding of workplace culture in work anniversaries
Train managers
Advocate for better work anniversaries