how should we handle birthdays at work?

A reader writes:

My workplace occasionally recognizes staff birthdays, but isn’t consistent. Sometimes there’s cake, sometimes bagels, sometimes nothing, and it’s often a last-minute announcement which can be frustrating to people who already have food planned out for the day.

Someone brought up the idea of bringing back a past practice: the monthly celebration of all January (for example) birthdays in one go. This could allow for consistent “observance” of birthdays, planning ahead on whether you bring a lunch, and less worrying about the impact on the budget.

I know not everyone feels the same way about their birthday so I turned to AAM for insights on how to start something like this and all I could find with a cursory search is stories of office birthdays gone wrong. What do workplaces do that get it right?

The biggest pitfall with office birthday celebrations is when they’re done unevenly: some people get a cake or a card or a gathering while other people get nothing. Most often this happens because there’s no formal system and it’s just based on someone happening to remember, without enough thought toward ensuring it’s consistent. Other times it happens because one person is in charge of it and when they’re out, there’s no back-up system to keep it covered — and sometimes it means they are the person whose birthday is overlooked, which can particularly sting when they’ve been organizing celebrations for everyone else.

I’ve talked here before about that being the reason why you really, really need to either have  formal system or skip birthdays completely. When you let it happen informally, it’s practically guaranteed that someone will end up feeling slighted.

The best systems I’ve seen for birthdays are these:

1. One celebration each month for everyone whose birthday falls in that month. Sometimes that’s its own separate thing (“there’s cake in the kitchen for all our March birthdays — happy birthday to Cecilia, Falcon, Imogen, and Ralph!”) and sometimes it’s tacked on to the end of a monthly staff meeting or something like that.

2. A custom that if it’s your birthday and you want to celebrate it, you bring in treats for the office. That way if you’re not a birthday person, you can quietly skip it — and if you are, it’s guaranteed to be celebrated because you’re in charge of it (and it’s guaranteed to be a treat you like, too).

The list of things definitely not to do:

• Don’t take up collections where people are asked to pitch in money for other people’s birthdays. They’re at work to earn money, not spend it.
• Respect it when people opt out of birthday stuff. Don’t let this happen:
     my coworker insists on celebrating my birthday even though I’ve asked her not to
• Don’t be an ass about Leap Year birthdays.

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