202: How We Celebrate Workiversaries: Moments Not to be Missed

Hey there. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. I'm going to take you back to when I was 19 years old working my very first real job. Do you know what it was?

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

But when I first set out to

become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing. Doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

I was the backpack expert at REI in Raleigh, North Carolina. This was my first job in college and I loved working at REI for so many reasons. I was an outdoor enthusiast and backpacker myself, and so working here just taught me so much. Their onboarding was amazing, their program was amazing, and my boss was amazing. So I was in the backpacking section, which meant that I also kind of dilly dallied in tents and camping stoves. But my specialty was backpacks. I knew how to fit people properly. I knew all the little tips and tricks to wearing a backpack for a multi mile, multi day trip. And it just felt so fulfilling to work in this way. It was very connected. All of the employees were really close and we got to serve just incredible people. Now the reason that my experience at REI was really exceptional was Ken. Ken was my boss and I felt so much like he really saw me. He noticed my progress, he encouraged me, he wanted me to succeed. And every time I leveled up, he would celebrate. And so one day, I remember specifically, I think I sold more on the floor than anybody else. And he gave me a $5 Starbucks card. And never in my life has $5 felt like more of a bigger deal. He did it in front of everyone so everyone could see, which I'm sure was part of it. Like he celebrated me publicly. And this was just $5. It was like 5,000 to me. It meant so much because someone really saw me and just how good I was doing at my job, how interested I was in getting better, and someone was cheering me on. I Kept in touch with Ken for many years. He was kind of like a father or a grandfather to me. I would always come back REI to say hello to him when I was back in town, because I only got to work there for about a year before I got married and moved. So really, I think my takeaway here is just the support system. And when you have people rallying behind you to help encourage you who believe in your potential, then you want to do better, you want to reach higher, you push yourself to dream bigger. And that is why we take it really seriously to celebrate our team members workiversaries at Team B.C. so what is a workiversary? A workiversary is the date that each individual person joined our team. I would say that we even take work bursaries more seriously than birthdays, even though we take birthdays pretty seriously too. I think that it's so easy to get caught up in the grind. Like here's an example of our annual calendar at a glance. January to March, we are all hands on deck for January, the Immersion course and our Mastermind renewals and incoming new members. From April to May, we're doing new designs for our shop Flowery. We're doing fabric collections, we're doing Pattern Plus Deliverables and we're producing Pattern Magazine. From June to August, we're all hands on deck for our Surface Design Live conference. Again, Pattern Magazine new designs for the fall launch of Flowery. From September to December, we've got Flowery Holiday Prep. All of our in house systems get cleaned up and we're prepping prepping for Immersion with a bunch of different events. Not to mention our bi weekly newsletters, our marketing, our collaboration, our meetings. So does this kind of calendar feel similar to you? In the summer we take a four day work week. So our time as a team is limited a little bit in those months. And the months that we are together can feel just like they go quick and it often derails us from prioritizing people behind the projects. I think it can be so incredibly easy to just get caught up in all of the to do's and we have to make sure that we don't forget to connect and celebrate with the people who are helping us do all of the to do's. So before I move on, I have a super fun download for you. It's a list of gift ideas that we personally use in my business for all the giftable moments from birthdays and Mastermind members to workiversaries. So head on over to the show notes for today's episode to get a copy of that. Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your inbox? Or worse, having your emails land in your subscribers spam folders? I've been there, which is why I switched to Kit as my email service provider years ago. Kit is the email marketing platform built by Creators for for creators. With Kit, you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your subscribers are not only going to open, but actually love. Their drag and drop email editor makes it super easy to design emails that look professional without needing any coding skills. And the powerful automation tools make sure that you're sending the right message to the right person at just the right time. But that's not all. Kit's tagging and segmenting tools let you send targeted messages based on your subscribers interests and behaviors. So for example, on my email list I've got people who are interested in buying my fabric for their projects and others who want to learn how to design their own fabric. Thanks to Kit's tagging system, I can send relevant content to both groups without worrying about bugging the other with something that they're not interested in. Kit also helps you grow your email list easily. You can build out landing pages and forms to turn subscribers into customers. And you know we're always talking about growing that email list. With Kit, you can start adding subscribers within a day of focused effort. It's that easy to set up, create a landing page, add an opt in and start growing your list. In fact, your first 10,000 subscribers on kit are 100% free. Kit offers some fantastic features beyond email marketing as well. They have an extensive creator platform that allows you to easily recommend other creators that you love, fostering collaboration and community. And if you're looking to monetize your content, Kip makes it simple to turn your newsletters into a source of income as well. You can offer premium content to your subscribers, helping you build a sustainable business while sharing your passion with others. So if you're ready to take your email marketing to the next level, head on over to bonniecristine.comresources and sign up for that free trial of Kid today. Their support is incredible and and you'll see firsthand how the platform can grow with you from one subscriber to, I don't know, 500,000. Again, that's bonniecristine.com resources to check out Kit today. Okay, let's talk about what pausing and celebrating really does for your team. It is going to increase things like motivation Everyone works with diligence and excellence when they feel seen and valued. It's going to increase connection. Everyone feels like a part of the team and appreciated in their role. It increases value. Everyone knows that their value is high and in turn they value themselves and what they contribute even more. The result is a happier work environment and a happy team, which is the most important thing you could have. So let's put this into action. Just a side note, I think that you know this, but our team is far from perfect. I'm still figuring out a million things, but we're learning. And as we learn how to better meet each other's needs and work collaboratively and grow together, I hope bringing you into the behind the scenes of it will help you as well. And if you don't have a team, you might have a person that helps you. It could be a contractor, it could be a parent or a friend or a neighbor. And if you don't have a team, just kind of take notes for those times where you feel super supported by someone. How you can really celebrate and lift them up for a long time. I didn't have a team. For the first over decade of my career. I was a one woman show. And honestly I was proud of it. I did everything myself. I learned it all myself and there were a lot of overworked days and tired weekends, but I did it. And part of how I did that and really kept motivated was that I would kind of celebrate my own, my own mile markers with rewards. So I would set this deadline or big event and if I met it, I would reward myself. The biggest one I think I've ever done is if I launched the immersion course for the first time and it went well. This was in 2018. I would buy a greenhouse for my garden. And so I did. I launched in February. That summer I built this beautiful greenhouse and it is a place that brings me so much joy and also just consistently reminds me that it's connected as a reward. So anyways, as time went on, my team grew and I made a first hire and a second hire all the way to today. I have 13 team members and so pausing to celebrate them, so incredibly important. I want to tell you about four things that I do to celebrate workiversaries. So the first one is that we put workiversaries on the team calendar. So everybody's work anniversary is on our shared Google team calendar with a big celebration emoji. And this really sets a reminder so nobody forgets. It makes the person feel super special. It also gives something really fun and celebratory to look forward to. The second is that I have this tradition. We have a special Slack channel called Yay and it's dedicated to celebrations and so there are for every single one of us, every workaversary I write a poem to celebrate the person and I post it in the Yay channel. This is super fun. I always try to pull in all the little details about them. Their personal life or their work style and how much we love them. It's such a fun connection point and just the way that we kick it off, it is there to make people laugh and to make the team feel really fun and most importantly to make the person feel really celebrated. The third thing is that this is the most important. At the end of the poem, I invite the rest of the team to come in behind me and share their favorite thing about this person or their favorite memory with this person so that the whole thread just blows up with love for this person. The fourth thing is that I slip into their DMs with a video. This is like off the cuff. I'm usually on a walk or something and I grab my phone and I just share my heart with them about who they are, what they mean to me, how special they are, what I value about them. Just two or three minutes of me, yeah happen about how much I love them. And with that I deliver some kind of administrative stuff. So anytime we have a salary increase or change a cola, that's cost of living adjustment. And then I also make sure that they know to go use their ramp card. That's our team like debit card for a spa service. And so I give them a budget to go get a spa service sometime to celebrate their workaversary. And I think it's so fun. That's what we do for workaversaries. So I would love for you to think about how to celebrate the people that help you with your to do's. How can you gift them? How can you celebrate them? How can you pause and just let them know that it's super meaningful to you that they have come alongside you to help you put the thing out into the world. So three questions. What memorable event should you put on the team calendar? It could be a workaversary. It could also be a birthday, it could be a big event that you're getting through a deadline. But whatever it is, put it on the calendar. Put it on recurring if you can. Number two is what team tradition would be fun to create. So what kind of ritual will you do to celebrate those people? And how can you invite the rest of the people who are in the same environment to join in, come alongside you and celebrate this person? The work will never slow down. It's going to always be there. And so it's up to us to set the tone for this kind of team culture. And I think it's so incredibly important. Don't forget I created a download for you to help you brainstorm different ways to celebrate. You can use it, it's a list of gift ideas, but you could also use it for birthday ideas. And it's also a reminder that you don't need to spend money to communicate appreciation. So these gift ideas include all kinds of different. So make yourself a cup of something cozy, carve out a little bit of time to brainstorm about this one, and really take a moment to think about celebrating the people in your world. My friends, thank you for listening. I hope this was fun for you. Until next time, create the beauty that you want to see. Come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.