How to write an amazing work anniversary email?

A lot of companies expire email and chat after some amount of time. Many do not expire calendar events, even from the distant past. A calendar invite with yourself can serve as a makeshift notepad.

Anyway… if you want people-focus, more than project focus, if you can export your calendar and get it into a text format, you may be able to do a frequency map of folks you’ve met with. You might filter your immediate team and just name them directly.

Once you have that, you can either make a list, or do something like a word cloud emphasizing those you’ve worked with most (or met with at least).

Beyond that, people love stories. If you take 5 (or 10 or whatever) people with different types of relationships (team mate, mentor, mentee, partner team member), you can write up as briefly as possible your best memory of working with them.

From there, if it’s authentic, you can note in passing (“While I’ve worked on amazing efforts like X and Y, what matters most…”) projects, but assert that the people you have worked with, taught, learned from, etc. are what have meant the most to you over the last 5 years, and those memories will stay with you even if every work item you ever completed is deprecated and gone, etc.

I like to sprinkle humor in to really line them up for a gut punch of emotion like that at the end. Gets their guard down.