All About Careerscapes: The Collectable Career Anniversary Awards From O.C. Tanner

Employee anniversaries aren’t just an excuse to have a pizza party. Career anniversaries mean a lot to employees, and giving these milestones the appropriate attention matters.

Why it’s important to celebrate work anniversaries

Your employees are the lifeblood of your company. Nothing happens without them. Consistently recognizing their unique contributions lets them know that their success matters—that they matter.

Anniversary celebrations are an especially important time to offer recognition, and when done right, they can strengthen company culture and improve employee retention. And not only does this kind of recognition send a strong message to the people who work for you, it communicates a lot about your company to press, prospects, and potential recruits.

The perfect career anniversary awards

Now let’s get to the juicy stuff: Careerscapes. These symbolic awards bring the employee experience to life, representing employees’ unique careers and growing and adapting with them as they hit milestones and unlock achievements.

Each Careerscape features a fully customized acrylic background and a high-quality aluminum or walnut base with three channels to hold custom icons, which narrate your company’s history and employees’ significant milestones. Every employee builds their own interactive display of icons connecting individual, team, and company-wide experiences in a rich, ongoing career story.

How Careerscapes elevate milestone work anniversaries

Here’s what makes Careerscapes such an incredible recognition tool in your years-of-service program.

Personalized

Unlike generic work anniversary awards, Careerscapes reflect each employee’s unique journey with your company. 

Unique and modern

No one is clamoring for a stuffy traditional trophy these days. Careerscapes have an undeniable cool factor, and employees love to display them.

Equitable

Careerscapes celebrate everyone, whether they work in the office, at home, or out in the field. Eighty percent of the workforce is deskless and offline, after all, and since these folks tend to feel underappreciated compared to their online, in-office counterparts, equitable forms of recognition are key.

Community-building 

While each Careerscape tells a different story, certain icons are shared by everyone in the company, showing that every employee impacts the company’s success and shares in its purpose.

Handcrafted 

O.C. Tanner makes each Careerscape in house, using a combination of specialized machinery and skilled manual craftsmanship. 

Environmentally sound

O.C. Tanner uses ambitious recycling, sustainability, and pollutant-reduction practices in the manufacturing of its awards, and vets all of its materials suppliers for the same standards.

Custom branded

No two company’s Careerscapes are alike. O.C. Tanner works closely with each organization to create a truly unique design that reflects their brand and culture.

Versatile

In addition to commemorating career anniversaries, Careerscapes can also depict company anniversaries, historic locations, foundational brand elements, cornerstone products, prestigious awards, and more.

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How to create your Careerscapes

To get started with developing your company’s Careerscape, book a meeting with the O.C. Tanner awards team. They’ll take all of the guesswork out of the process by conducting a thorough discovery interview to understand your company’s history, philosophy, mission, and brand, as well as your logistical requirements. 

Prior to this meeting, spend some time thinking about the employee and company milestones you want to celebrate and how you might want to represent them.

The team will apply what they’ve learned to some initial designs and present them to you for review. They’ll take your feedback and make adjustments, continuing this process until the designs are just what you want.

Once the final designs are approved, O.C. Tanner will get to work creating your Careerscapes. Every piece is made in house, from die casting to etching to polishing.

And finally, the team handles the fulfillment of every Careerscape to every employee, whether they’re on site or remote.

Just like your employees, your company will grow and change, and O.C. Tanner can always add new icons to the mix to mark important moments.

Tips for celebrating with Careerscapes

When you present an employee with a Careerscape icon, make it a special event. Gather together for the work anniversary celebration and encourage teammates and leaders to participate in the festivities. Talk about the employee’s performance, achievements, contributions, and character. After all, you’re celebrating a person’s career, not just a number on a timeline. 

Align your remarks to the company’s purpose. Connecting the accomplishments and growth of the award recipient to the purpose of the organization inspires a sense of fulfillment and helps other team members to connect to the company purpose as well. Think about the impact this recognition moment will have on new hires who are just getting acquainted with your company.

Looking for other unique years-of-service award ideas? Consider pairing the icon with a Yearbook experience to celebrate the employee’s work relationships and make the moment even more personal and meaningful. O.C. Tanner Yearbooks collect comments, photos, and videos from employees’ colleagues, and, like Careerscapes, are a personalized and lasting reminder of an employee’s time with your company.

Careerscape examples for work anniversaries

We’ll leave you with a few of our favorite Careerscape designs.

Want to learn more about Careerscapes or get started on your own designs? Drop us a line and we’ll get back to you right away.

You can also visit octanner.com to learn more about employee recognition and the Culture Cloud platform.