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I recently got married and was disappointed that my work colleagues didn’t celebrate my big day in any way.

Elaine Varelas discusses the value of an organization recognizing the major personal life milestones of their employees.

Ask the Job Doc. Boston.com

January 24, 2024

3 minutes to read

Q: Most of the offices that I have worked at always celebrated employees’ birthdays and milestones like having a baby or getting married. One team I worked on even had a party fund where we would just chip in $2 every pay period to pay for birthday celebrations and little parties. Having recently gotten married, I was disappointed that my colleagues didn’t so much as get me a card, much less celebrate with a cake or a gift. Is it wrong to feel slighted?

A. A significant part of employee engagement is an organization’s recognition of life’s big milestones. This includes both professional milestones such as your work anniversary as well as personal milestones such as getting married or having a baby. Employees want to know that the organization and the people they work with recognize them as three-dimensional individuals. We will focus here on positives milestones. Organizations need to develop practices for the sad milestones as well, for example deaths in the family or illnesses.

Typically, people in HR have driven this behavior, especially as it relates to employee work milestones. Managers are typically encouraged to recognize any personal milestones because they will generally know that information sooner than HR will. Organizations who don’t recognize these milestones are missing huge opportunities to foster and cement workplace relationships, between the employee and the organization and the employee and their colleagues.

Some situations are highly sensitive or are potentially negative for employees. For example, if departments are led by people who believe in recognizing these situations, for example, birthdays, and other departments and divisions are not, it becomes questioned throughout the organization where people look at the “good manager” as the person who celebrates employee’s birthday and the “bad manager” as the person who does not. Employees don’t want to attend birthday parties at work when they’ll never get one themselves.

Many organizations have created a monthly celebration where everyone’s birthday for that month is recognized and celebrated with a cake, cupcakes, or some significant acknowledgement that a milestone has passed. The consistency of celebrating milestones throughout the organization needs to be encouraged. However, it’s important to be mindful that not all employees will want their birthday celebrated for various reasons, so it’s best to ask in advance if they are comfortable with having their birthday celebrated at work. Be sure to accommodate for religious beliefs. And be mindful that not everyone might want to talk about what number their birthday is so don’t ask about their age, whether this is a “big” birthday, the year they were born, etc. “29 again” is an absolute actual age!

It’s understandable why you might feel hurt and disappointed to not have this major milestone in your life recognized at all by your work colleagues. However, recognizing that your entire organization is not a party type is more important than feeling slighted. You can help to create a different environment while encouraging your own work team or your own manager to brainstorm ways to celebrate an employee’s life milestones.

I’m in favor of having companies fund these events rather than having employees shell out money for every other employee’s activity. These events are organizational bonding events and seeing people celebrate something helps you get to know individuals in a much more personal way. I’ve seen great experiences where people are asked to tell a story about their best birthday party or their worst birthday party, their best birthday gift, etc. There are many positive activities that can support organizational development and team building by recognizing that employees have major milestones in their personal lives in addition to those that are work related.