When teams are small and can sit around one table, it is easy to celebrate a birthday or work anniversary. And that’s because these milestones are obvious, important moments. Difficulty arises as teams get bigger. As teams become larger, more complex, or international, it can be challenging to remember everyone’s birthdays and work anniversaries. Celebrating these moments may seem impossible.
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Milestones Still Important When Teams Are Big
Milestones are clearly and naturally recognized within small teams. The importance of these moments don’t disappear with big teams. They just get more difficult and get suffocated under the weight of organizational complexity.
Celebrating milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries can make a big difference. As we wrote about in our “How To Make Work Anniversary Celebrations Special” post, a simple recognition program that congratulates employees on their work anniversaries can increase the average employee tenure at an organization by 2 years.
It’s probably even more impressive and impactful in big organizations. In large organizations, recognition and celebrations can be complex. When done well, they become even more special. And huge orgs can get it right.
Create Photo Collages
It’s great to tell someone happy birthday on their actual birthday. In large organizations, employees may become fatigued by receiving birthday or anniversary messages cluttering work channels every day. Maybe multiple each day! Big organizations must optimize this by grouping people together in weekly or monthly increments.
Grouping birthday and work anniversary celebrations can be a pain in the neck. Trust me, I used to do it manually!
Back when I was VP of People Operations for Levelset, every month we painstakingly created photo collages for birthday and work anniversary celebrations. We’d post them to Slack every month, and then flash them on slides during our monthly all-hands meeting. The project was simple enough, but digging up every person’s photo, formatting and sizing it, and then making sure we got everyone included and didn’t make a mistake was a huge time suck.
CultureBot makes photo collages easy for huge teams.
- Turn on Collage Feature: Go into your Work Anniversary or Birthday Celebration settings, and click “Edit Message”
- Brand It: Make it match your brand by selecting a collage background color.
- Create Your Headlines: You can leave this blank and use defaults, or make your headline message more customized.
- Save It & Forget It: That’s it. You can save it and forget it.
You may want to check how often you send birthday/anniversary messages, and set it up to send weekly or monthly.
That’s it!
You can sit back and let CultureBot collate everything for you. Once the images are posted, you can easily save them. You can use these images in slide decks, all-hands meetings, direct messages, emails, and more.
Scale Personal Birthday & Anniversary Messages
Wouldn’t it be great to create personal birthday and anniversary messages within huge organizations? I’m not talking about AI generated content to mimic or “look like” personal content. I’m talking about true, personal, human messages. Messages directly from an employees manager and close teammates?
Nothing is better than sending a thoughtful and personal message.
And nothing is more difficult when teams get really big.
Instead of asking CEOs and People Ops leaders to create personal experiences for everyone, organizations should leverage their teams. This approach can make celebrations more special and meaningful. And personal.
At Levelset, our CEO Scott was really great at this. When our team expanded to more than 400 members, it became challenging for Scott. He found it hard to send a personal message to each employee on a regular basis. But Scott was great at empowering our people ops group, and our front line teams, to create special moments at scale.
One of our most effective strategies was having teams contribute and put together virtual cards for a celebration. We can’t take credit for this. We just spotted it happening naturally within certain teams. Once we spotted it, we looked for ways to empower it and make it easy for teams.
CultureBot can do this for you.
In the days or weeks before a birthday or work anniversary, CultureBot can send reminders. These reminders can go to the manager or close teammates. This reminder encourages them to sign a virtual card or create a personal message.
CultureBot gathers personal messages and sends them to the employee being celebrated on their special day. It creates a virtual card or “board,” similar to KudoBoard, ThankBox, or Recocards. This really does scale making the celebration personal and special.
Don’t Forget Compliance When Scaling Celebrations
While milestone celebrations are enjoyable and meaningful, large organizations must also consider the compliance aspects of recognition. Birthdays, work anniversaries, and shoutouts involve personal information, such as names, hire dates, and photos. This raises privacy and sensitivity concerns.
In Europe, the GDPR treats birthdays and start dates as “personal data,” meaning companies need a valid basis for using them. Even in the U.S., overlapping rules like the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), the ADA, and state privacy laws such as California’s CCPA/CPRA apply to employee information. That doesn’t mean you should stop celebrating—it just means you should celebrate responsibly.
Here are some best practices big teams can use to keep things personal and compliant:
- Offer Opt Outs: Give employees a clear way to decline public recognition if they prefer.
- Minimize Sensitive Details: Never share birth years or age; focus on tenure or contributions instead.
- Keep It Internal Unless There Is Consent: Don’t post celebrations on LinkedIn or external newsletters without explicit approval.
- Respect Cultural & Religious Differences: Not everyone observes birthdays or anniversaries; tone and inclusion matter.
For more on this topic, review our Compliance Guide to Birthday and Work Anniversary Celebrations.
Handled thoughtfully, compliance isn’t a burden—it’s a way to ensure your celebrations feel authentic, inclusive, and safe for everyone.
