Lauren Wagner 
You’re Invited
Cleary is introducing a new way to celebrate employee milestones in an increasingly virtual environment. ‘Celebrations’ takes the place of the classic office party for birthdays, work anniversaries, or to welcome new hires by delivering a one-of-a-kind digital card to employees on these special days. In the form of gifs, words, images, and more, colleagues can celebrate each other with an outpouring of meaningful messages, funny stories, and compliments.
The office party tradition is simply not the same. It can be difficult, or even impossible, to plan an in-person event with hybrid and fully remote employees. Back when almost everyone was in the office, a manager or colleague might remember an upcoming milestone and buy a card to secretly pass around and have signed, doing their best to include everyone. A cake might have also been ordered and a time setup on the special day for everyone to get together. For many companies, those days are long gone since employees can be based around the world now.
In an attempt to replicate the office party, virtual events and Zoom happy hours have popped up on calendars. But celebrating virtually is hard. The question then is how do you handle employee milestones when only pockets of people are in office on certain days or not at all? What about the rest of the team who would like to contribute but missed the Slack reminder? Coordinating these efforts often lands on managers – and that’s not always an equitable experience. Varying schedules could mean sparse attendance for a birthday Zoom or worse, busy managers could forget an upcoming work anniversary all together.
