Celebrating employee achievements, anniversaries, and birthdays is an integral part of the healthy corporate culture. Good employers always keep track of employee milestones and commemorate them accordingly. However, it has been noticed that tracking employee milestones and celebrating them is mostly limited to large organizations. The majority of SMEs don’t have an established HR protocol of recognizing and celebrating things momentous to individual employees.
In this post, we’ll shed light on why enterprises, irrespective of their size and corporate standing, should celebrate employee milestones. We’ll also outline some of the meaningful and easy-to-execute ways of celebrating employee milestones.
Why Do You Need to Celebrate Employee Milestones?
The philosophy behind celebrating employee milestones is the same as celebrating any other event that means something to a particular individual, i.e., to make them happy and let them know how much they mean to us. When employers celebrate employee achievements and dates that mean something to them, it shows workers that their organization is more than just a place to work and get a paycheck.
We can also break down the rationale of celebrating employee milestones in terms of their corporate significance. These are some key corporate reasons to celebrate employee milestones.
Improved Spirits, Happy Employees
Celebrating employee milestones can prove to be a great morale booster for the workforce. A birthday present /a bonus on the work anniversary from the employer can have a very positive impact on employees. This commemoration can instill a sense of belonging and ownership among the workforce. Even if these celebrations don’t involve expensive and tangible presents, just a simple act of remembering employee milestones and congratulating and wishing them can improve the happiness index of your workforce.
Better Productivity
Happiness makes people more productive, and scientific research also substantiates this fact. When you recognize employee’s good work and celebrate their anniversaries, they tend to perform better. You can also say that the celebration and acknowledgment by the organization act as a positive reinforcement for employees.
Higher Retention
Organizations fail to retain employees for various reasons. While lack of growth, poor organizational culture, and better opportunities elsewhere are the leading reasons, many employees also bid farewell to their existing employers because they think they are not being appreciated. Despite getting a good salary and perks, they believe that they are just doing a thankless job.
Having a proactive milestone celebration routine can take care of this issue. It can convey to employees the message that they are not bots brought in to work and get their service fee in return. Appreciated employees are less likely to look somewhere else.
In short, enterprises that give importance to celebrating their workforce can significantly improve their retention rates.
Better Workplace Environment
Disgruntled, sulking employees can never partake in creating a good workplace environment. The negative energy of those brooding workers often becomes contagious and affects other employees as well. The culture of recognizing employee efforts and celebrating them as individuals dilute the collective bitterness of employees. With more happy and less discontented people, it becomes easy to have a good workplace environment with positive vibes.
Good Corporate Image
Celebrating employee milestones reflect well on the corporate report card of an organization. Employers can boast about this good trait in their branding activities. Moreover, good word of mouth by employees also improves the organization’s standing among its competitors.
5 Ways to Celebrate Employee Milestone
Managers and HR departments can consider some of these ideas to celebrate employee milestones.
1. A Handwritten Note
Many supervisors and HR managers send out emails to mark employee birthdays and work anniversaries. Truth be told, employees don’t think very highly of these emails. They consider them another boilerplate correspondence from managers just to be on the record. However, the same message in a handwritten note on a thick faded paper can make all the difference.
Such old-fashioned handwritten notes offer more personalization and hence remain more impactful than run-of-the-mill emails. You can also add a goody bag to this handwritten note to make the celebration a little sweeter.
2. A Small Workplace Event
Everyone loves to get public recognition of the work they do. A small event to commemorate employee’s work anniversaries, birthdays, or project completion is a good way to arrange that community recognition for them. Those small workplace events can also serve as a great team bonding/building exercise.
3. A Day Off
Who doesn’t like a day off? No matter how much employees love their job, they would always appreciate a one-off date of rest and leisure. Many organizations don’t fancy this idea because it involves a paid day off. But they don’t understand how this complimentary leave can reenergize employees and top up their productivity levels.
4. Paid Vacation
There are not many gifts better than a paid vacation from an organization to its employees. Offering paid sabbatical is one of the most impactful ways to celebrate employee milestones. You can have that gift reserved for rare milestones. For instance, you can have them for 10th anniversaries or when an employee has successfully completed a big, momentous project/assignment.
5. A Decision-Making Window
It is an interesting way to celebrate employee milestones where you give employees decision-making power on their big day. For instance, the employee can decide the day’s menu or have their favorite piece of décor added to the workplace. Offering this decision-making power even for little things can make employees happy and improve their dedication levels.
SimplyHRMS: An HRMS Solution to Facilitate Your Employee Milestone Celebrations
Even for small enterprises, it is not easy to manually keep track of every employee milestone. This is one big reason why many of them doesn’t celebrate employee milestones altogether. SimplyHRMS by Microsys has resolved this issue for SMEs that don’t have any mechanism of tracking employee milestones.
This web-enabled, lightweight HRMS application keeps track of milestones of all the employees that you’ve entered into its database. The application’s main interface will notify the HR managers and departmental supervisors about the upcoming employee milestones in advance so they can easily make the required celebration arrangements in time.
SimplyHRMS by Microsys is also an effective solution for a list of other HRM activities for small and medium-sized enterprises.
