Work anniversaries can inspire employees to start looking for a new job. They are one of the reasons employees start looking at other opportunities.
One study cited in Harvard Business Review shows that work anniversaries play a significant role in when employees quit their jobs. Certain events inspire comparison and can compel employees to start looking for other opportunities. As employees approach work anniversaries, they often compare where they are with what they thought they’d be, which can significantly affect their previous happiness level.
And, other milestones also do this. Class reunions, with their reminiscing, catching up, and unfortunately the exaggerations of classmates, often bring about dissatisfaction for employees. Another milestone? Birthdays, especially the big 40 or 50, tend to make employees reevaluate their employment. This process of evaluating and finding that the ambitious dreams of youth may not have come to fruition is so typical that we call it a mid-life crisis, and companies market around it.
The good news?
Employers have an excellent opportunity to take proactive steps to lower employee turnover. This article will focus on three things you can do around work anniversaries to help increase employee happiness and longevity.
1. Meaningfully Celebrate Service Anniversaries
How you celebrate your employees’ work anniversaries can demonstrate how much or how little you value them. And, sometimes the wrong message comes across because of how hectic and busy the workday can be.
Imagine coming in and finding a 10-year pin from HR on your desk. Your manager and colleagues don’t mention your anniversary. Does it make you feel appreciated? Slightly better is taking 2 minutes out of a team meeting to enjoy an employee’s anniversary before switching back to the business at hand.
Celebrate employees’ work anniversaries. Take time as the anniversary approaches to create something meaningful or write a meaningful message to them. Or, use the Celebrate feature in Thanks, which allows employees to record a message and compiles them into an anniversary video for your employee. Taking even a few moments to record a personalized message and invite the rest of the team to do the same creates a unique and memorable recognition for an employee.
Or, write them a hand-written note, donate to their favorite charity, or create a yearbook highlighting their time at the company.
2. Discuss Growth Opportunities With Employees
Before work anniversaries arrive, take the time to discuss growth with employees. Some employers actively recruit employees for internal openings. But even if you don’t have a new job opening for an employee, consider the many other ways employees can seek job growth. Some ideas include becoming involved in a mentoring program, continuing ed or on-the-job training for a different department, or spearheading a project.
It is human nature to want to grow, learn, and be challenged. Even though an employee may seem happy in their position, chances are, they’d love an opportunity to grow. You can accomplish this in many ways. In addition to promoting the internal growth of employees within your organization, you can also help them gain new competencies or learn about other departments within the company. Consider job-swapping or creating a learning club. Or, for additional ideas, check out this article on how to recognize employees by advancing their careers.
There are many ways an employee can gain additional skills and grow in their career without constantly changing jobs. And, it’s much better to help employees grow within the company than to have them decide they aren’t where they want to be and move to the competitor.
3. Discuss Milestones and Growth Instead of Time
When celebrating an employee’s anniversary, it’s easy to focus on how much time they’ve spent at the company and celebrate their loyalty and longevity. Especially at a time when most employees leave their employer before the five-year mark, longevity is essential.
But, instead of focusing on the time they’ve worked for you, focus on their growth. Realize that to some employees, longevity may be a sign to them that they’ve failed to climb the work ladder by switching companies often into “new better jobs.” Relive significant accomplishments, growth, learning, and advancement that your employee has had while working at your company.
This takes more time and effort to pull off. It may require that you keep notes of significant projects and which employees participate in them, save accomplishments, or document challenges overcome. But, these steps can be invaluable, especially when it helps an employee look back on their time with the company and remember how far they have come in their growth.
Helping them remember the many things they’ve accomplished can help them not feel stuck or haven’t accomplished much in their career.
Conclusion
Comparison is a thief of contentment, and sadly, work anniversaries tend to make employees compare where they are with where they wanted to be at that point. Employees may compare themselves to friends and peers, forgetting everything they’ve accomplished. This has a tendency to make other opportunities look better and the grass greener elsewhere.
By taking the time to really connect with employees during these important milestones, you can help them remember and review the positives, challenges, and victories they were a part of. Doing this helps employees feel that service celebrations aren’t just another function of HR but a true celebration of how much they are valued and appreciated at work!
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks make it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition.