Jess Lindgren is a longtime C-Suite assistant, and host of the Ask an Assistant podcast.
In this Ask an Assistant spotlight episode, Jess talks about celebrating birthdays at work.
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ABOUT JESS
Jess Lindgren has worked in the C-Suite of organizations great and small for 20+ years. She focuses on supporting her current CEO in his many endeavors, improving the relationships between EAs and their Execs, and has very low tolerance for any meeting that should have been an email. Jess hosts the wildly popular* business podcast, Ask An Assistant.
*in her Grandma’s sewing room
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Burrows 0:00
Hey, friends, it’s Jeremy Burrows, host of The Leader Assistant Podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. I’m actually excited to put the spotlight on my friend Jess Lindgren’s podcast called Ask an Assistant. Jess takes questions from you all and then answers them on the Ask an assistant show. So be sure to go to askanassistant.com to check out more episodes and submit your questions for Jess. I hope you enjoy this spotlight episode of the Ask an Assistant show, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Podcast Intro 0:34
The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident game changing, leader, assistants.
Jess Lindgren 1:02
Hill, hello and welcome to another episode of Ask an assistant, the podcast for executive assistants and the people that love us. I’m your host. Jess Lindgren, let’s get to work this week. There is no esteemed colleague who has written in to ask about this, this question, this one’s all me. We’re going to be talking about marking birthdays in the workplace. I know it is a mildly divisive topic. Some people love it. Some people really do not, but my birthday is coming up. I love my birthday, so we’re going to talk about it. So just as a brief overview for the episode, I’m going to talk about three distinct experiences that I’ve had while marking birthdays in the office. The first is at a former role as a largely executive, somewhat personal assistant, where I supported a high net worth individual, or h n, h n, w, i is the acronym there high net worth individual at Anaplan. Is the second experience. I was a hybrid office manager, facilities, project manager, and I would say like 50% office manager, 60% office manager, 30% facilities, 10% executive assistant, support, so kind of a three pronged hybrid role there and then, across all roles. The third experience where I have been personally celebrated by the people to whom I report. I’ve been very spoiled and fortunate and privileged in that regard. So I would love to talk about it just a little bit, hopefully not in a bragging way, hopefully in a fun way, to give you some ideas about how you might celebrate birthdays in your working relationships. So without further ado, speaking in the first role, the former role, where I was the EA slash PA to a high net worth individual, the company structure was that we had multiple different branches of the company, so there were a lot of birthdays that needed observing, several companies that the executive owned, and then the internal company that basically managed all of the other companies that we owned. So I maintained a huge calendar with names birthdays, and once a month, I’d have my executive sit down with a stack, well, they would have a box of cards, rather, and just have them write everything out with the appropriate message on it. So one of my favorite parts of the job was being able to go to Target about, I don’t know, two three times a year I would get to go to target with the company credit card, buy a bunch of greeting cards, and I’m talking like hundreds of dollars of greeting cards every time I went. So probably somewhere in the neighborhood of, I don’t know, 600 to $1,000 worth of greeting cards every year, just depending on what might happen throughout the course of any given year. Um, no generic Costco multi pack for this person, like they wanted a good mix of cards across theme, across occasion. So, you know, birthdays, obviously birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, sorry for your loss, sympathy cards. It was very, very fun to get to go and just, you know, buy like boy, birth of a baby, girl, birth of a baby a handful of actual numbered birthdays, depending on the friends and family members and company members who needed to be celebrated. You know, oh, last year we got a fifth birthday card for a boy. So let’s make sure that we buy a sixth birthday card for a boy this year. And then again, just a nice smattering of all other occasions and a bunch of blank ones too, like if they were pretty. Regularly funny. If they had a cute picture on the outside, you could definitely repurpose a blank greeting card to suit any purpose. So super duper fun, I’d get to go a few times a year buy a few $100 worth of gift greeting cards. And then I would also go to a nearby bank, and I would buy prepaid Visa gift cards. I would get cash in whatever denominations my executive asked for. And again, once a month, we’d sit down, I’d give them the upcoming, you know, look 246, weeks ahead of time, just depending over December. Things get a little crazy the first week or two of January. So those might be done as early as Thanksgiving. So like end of November, anything for the next four to six weeks would be done, but then usually about two to four weeks worth of cards. I mean, we’re doing this once a month, so at least four weeks worth of cards would be written up in advance. I’d give them the card box, write up a little post it note, here’s the name, here’s the date, here’s the occasion. Rifle through the box. They’d put the post it on the card that they wanted it to be for, and then reply on the post it. You know, Hey, Jenny from accounting, gets $50 or whatever, and I always had some happy birthday stamps, some really nice kind of generic, fun stamps for happier occasions, some kind of generic like floral. So that was a part of it too, getting to go to the post office a couple times a year to pick up more stamps. Yeah. And it might sound a little silly, but it was just a really big, really fun, year long project. And we always got really nice messages from everybody who received a card from us and a gift, how much they appreciated it, how much they felt thought of. Because even back in I mean, this would have been 2009 ish, 2010 somewhere in there, 2008 to like, 2010 or 11, even back then, a written in the mail, sent on time, gift, birthday card, was kind of a dying art, even more so today in 2024 so definitely something that I really enjoyed doing, something that I if I worked at a bigger company. It’s presently a company of two, so not a big multi birthday card operation over here at this point in time, but it was a very fun project. While I was working with that individual, while working at Anaplan, shifting gears as the office manager, I was also semi officially in charge of office culture, which covered everything from weekly happy hours to like regular volunteering, community engagement events, finding them, researching them, putting them together, actually making sure they would happen, as well as monthly birthday celebrations, I would always ask folks for birthday month. Day was optional, and I really stressed that I did not want to know what year you were born. It always took the wind out of my sails a little bit to find out the people I was celebrating being paid twice what I was being paid were about 10 years or more younger than I was. But you know, what are you going to do at a SaaS company? It just is what it is. I’m the office manager. They are the pre sales or engineers or whatever. You know, it just is what it is little demoralizing to know that the people I’m baking a cake, literally baking a cake for were so much younger. So I really tried to steer away from getting people’s birth year. I always tried to make it as much fun as possible. I just said I would often bake the cake myself. Definitely make it a voluntary and optional event. Working at Anna plan specifically, a lot of folks traveled quite a bit. So you couldn’t always guarantee that the birthday person would be in the office on the day that you celebrated. And it was always easier to get a card for each birthday person, to try to choose a day where everybody would be in the office when the office was only like 20 people coming in regularly. But as things scaled and we had more people coming and going. At the time that I worked there, we only had two actual offices, and then a handful of locations, two for sure that I can remember off the top of my head that were based out of like a we work or a co working facility, which eventually transitioned to three physical offices. But you know, when you’re a largely remote workforce and you’ve only got a couple offices, a fair a surprisingly large number of people would come through the Minneapolis office all the time. So just it kind of had to be something where it used to be. Be customizable and a little closer to the people whose birthdays were actually being celebrated. But eventually, I definitely just had to choose a day. Let’s just say, for sake of conversation, I picked the third Thursday, put it on the calendar, ordered a cake celebrated. Anybody who wanted to be celebrated. Didn’t make a huge thing out of it. It was more just, more, just an excuse for everybody to eat cake. And, yeah, people really enjoyed it, and it was low key, but still fun. Like, I would definitely pick up some birthday hats.
Jess Lindgren 10:36
Like, what are those things you blow? And the it makes like a horn sound. I’m totally blanking on what these things are called. You know, little party blowers. What have you get? Some helium balloons, that kind of thing, definitely make it feel a little fun and festive. But, yeah, it was definitely fun to just have one day a month where all birthdays would be celebrated, like if you think about that episode of The Office where there was a stretch where it was basically, you know, 10 people had a birthday in September, and then nobody has a birthday, January, February, March. So just picking one day a month where you catch all the office birthdays is a really great way to do it, and it was a lot of fun at the time. And I really hope that whoever took over the office manager role after I left kept it up, or maybe there’s something else that they’re doing now. But I always love my little birthday club. It was a lot of fun, and I mentioned at the top of the episode My birthday is coming up. I love my birthday. I have been so incredibly lucky when celebrating my birthday at work. First things first, I do not work on my birthday. It is my own personal holiday. I make that clear from the jump that I will be taking that day off every single year in all the executive assistant roles I’ve held, I have always been I’ve always been given a budget and gotten to choose a gift that I truly wanted and would enjoy, which I cannot stress enough just how much I appreciate that as a person who is, let’s say, particular about their tastes and hobbies and whatnot. I also have a lot of dietary restrictions. I am very sensitive to scented products, so things like a lotion or a candle are not great sensitive skin, sensitive sinuses. It’s so incredibly fortunate to have been given a budget by every executive that I’ve ever worked with to pick something that I would enjoy, something that’s truly just for fun and an indulgence, like a spa day money tour. I remember this. This is actually how I bought my Tiffany heart bracelet. Is every year I would ask for for Christmas and my birthday, a Tiffany gift card. And so when I finally had enough to enough saved up to buy that bracelet. I’ve been wearing it almost every day ever since for 10 plus years. So money toward a piece of jewelry, sometimes even an actual piece of jewelry. I definitely really also love a Tiffany sterling silver ring. And the rings are not all that terribly expensive, you know. So sometimes, instead of a gift card, my executive, this is many years ago, would say, you know, I’m tired of buying you these gift cards. Could I please actually give you an actual piece of jewelry one of these years? And I absolutely let them for a couple of years. So it was a lot of fun. I do fancy myself to be a very fun person, but I am also nervous about spending money, so and you’ll probably hear me say this if I haven’t already that I love spending other people’s money, and what I mean by that is, when I’m planning like a big company event, I love writing the check for $50,000 for the AV team or whatever. I love picking the catering menu and spending $10,000 on breakfast and lunch for the crew. Like, that’s the kind of spending other people’s money that I really love. I do tend to kind of freeze up when it’s time to choose something that is truly fun and frivolous when it is for me, and especially when it’s like expensive. Like, the example that came to mind while I was thinking about this episode is like, buy like buying myself one vegan chocolate bar on a whim. No problem. Out at the grocery store with my husband, we see a brand that we really like or a brand that we’ve never seen before, we make sure that it’s dairy free. We’re buying it if we like it, we’ll come back and buy another one next week, whatever, buying one with the company grocery budget, because everybody else gets to eat Greek yogurt and protein bars with whey powder in them. I don’t even think twice. Like, I’ll buy myself a big jar of garlic stuffed olives to go with a chocolate bar. Don’t even think about it. But like, if we’re going with the chocolate bar metaphor here, buying myself a case. Percent of vegan chocolate bars with somebody else’s money for my birthday makes me really nervous. For some reason, vegan chocolate is super expensive. It’s super delicious, but it can be very expensive. And again, just having my executives really lean into Hey, we really want you to do something indulgent, like if you really want a new Dutch oven, a new cast iron pan. Go for it, but like we’d love to treat you, we’d love for you to have something super fun, and again, so spoiled, so very privileged, so very lucky to have executives that a love birthdays just as much as I do and B are very generous of spirit and generous of wallet when it comes to this kind of thing. So in the role supporting the high net worth individual, I would give them two to five options. They would choose their favorite from what I proposed. You know, so like a lot of the time, I really kind of hoped for that Tiffany gift card, but there were definitely times where they would gift me a massage or an actual piece of jewelry, like a Tiffany sterling silver ring. I wasn’t getting, like, you know, a $50,000 Tiffany engagement ring or anything, but still, like, a Tiffany ring is very nice, very generous gift, and so is a spa day or even just the massage. It was a really fun game to play, and I still think about that executive honestly every birthday since I left the role in 2014 so executive, you know who you are. You’re still out there, and I do think of you every year when my birthday rolls around. I even honestly still have a couple of birthday cards that they wrote me. Yeah, it just as stressful as that role could be. Birthdays were a very fun occasion, whether it was mine, theirs, or anybody else’s in the company. Just again. So very lucky and glad that it has continued on into my current role, where I have been working with my executive for 10 years, and he is the absolute best about my birthday. He loves seeing my birthday. Time off request pop up in gusto. He sends me a message with whatever he would like my budget to be for my birthday gift, which he honestly just did today, which is why I’m recording this episode, and I, in turn, share a little bit about my birthday plans, and always send a picture enjoying whatever it is. I use my birthday budget on so the budget has been given, the gift has not been chosen, but I will report back, maybe even share a picture on the old Instagram as it were, up top, I did mention that birthdays in the office can be a mildly divisive subject. I do recall a story. I had to look this one up. I knew the bones of it, but I didn’t know exactly when, because honestly, anything pre 2020 is kind of a blur. But this happened in 2019 where an employee told their company over and over, do not celebrate my birthday like do not I don’t want to be part of this at all. It makes me anxious. It makes me nervous. I don’t want it. The company went ahead and did it. The the employee had a panic attack. They got fired and eventually settled for about half a million dollars. So I’ve seen lots of folks in EA groups say that they like to keep their personal and professional lives 100% separate. But honestly, this can also be kind of challenging, because many of us help our executives celebrate other birthdays and occasions throughout the year, and it can feel really hard sometimes to celebrate other people’s birthdays and then feel like your executive isn’t marking yours. For whatever reason, it feels hard as an executive assistant to bring up that it’s your birthday, especially if your executive is very generous with other people. It’s also hard if you start right before or right after your birthday, like, if you start right before your birthday, you don’t want it to be the first thing that you talk about. Like, Hi, welcome to the company. It is my birthday next week. What would you like to get me? It’s also hard if you start right after your birthday, because you might forget that they didn’t celebrate you last year, and you might not feel you know the birthday comes up, and all of a sudden you’re like, Well, I’m not going to tell them now. It’s tomorrow, so it is just kind of a little bit of a rock and a hard place. And I completely, completely understand and respect people that want to keep it 100%
Jess Lindgren 19:45
personal and professional life separate, using the story about the person who sued their company for celebrating their birthday, very specific circumstance. Look it up. It’s a fascinating read, but I. Do like to keep birthdays optional. You know, there’s no mandatory reason. Touching back on the Anna plan of it all, I used to try to round up everybody whose birthday it was, get them a card. I’ll even post a picture of me with the cake where we had celebrated three specific people. And again, that gets harder the bigger your company is, or if it’s just not something that you’re interested in celebrating, that’s okay, like, just make the birthday thing optional. Whether it’s for you, for the whole department, for the whole company, it’s totally up to you. How you do and don’t want to be celebrated. I would love to recommend that when you start a new role, set expectations. It’s a very close working relationship with your executive, and it is really not uncommon for boundaries to blur between personal and professional. Ask your executive if they want to celebrate your birthday early, like when you first start working together. I mean, again, it’s challenging. If you start, like, right around your birthday, you don’t want it to be the first thing that you bring up, but definitely it’s something that you want to align expectations on between you and your executive. If you’ve been working together for a long time or have never broached the topic. There’s no time like the next office birthday that you mark the next time that you help them write a card for their cousin or whatever, or maybe a month or two before your birthday, like, just find a natural on ramp for it to come up and be like, you know, executive, we’ve been working together 125, 1020, years, and we’ve never talked about birthdays, no time like the present. Going back to the role with the high net worth individual that I used to work with, we would even say, you know, because we had, again, the calendar of everybody who needed at the very least a card, if not a gift card or cash or an actual gift. It was a big calendar that I maintained and then shopped and wrote cards appropriately throughout the course of the year. But so when my birthday would come up, I would just say, you know, hey, executive, your assistant’s birthday is coming up in six weeks. I need time to shop. What would you like to get them this year? And so that was, you know, we’d kind of have a little laugh together, TeeHee, I’m the assistant. I’m the one getting the gift, I’m the one doing the shopping. But it was, it was fun. I really liked it. And I know some people might find that strange or off putting or what have you. But again, I’ve just always been very, very lucky in terms of how my executives have chosen to celebrate me over the years. And yeah, again, I would just love to hear from any and all of you askanassistant.com I hope any of my thoughts today on celebrating birthdays in the office were helpful. I would love to know from all of you, how do you presently celebrate your birthdays? Is it something where you do cards weeks or months or days ahead of time? Is it something? Are you doing gifts? Are you doing something, maybe a little bit more, like the birthday club that I did at annaplan, where once a month, you just pick a day, and everybody who’s a November baby gets celebrated. What do you do? I would love to hear it, and I would also love to hear what is the coolest birthday gift you’ve ever gotten from your executive. I do think for me personally, it was at the time saving up for my Tiffany heart bracelet. I still wear it absolutely all the time. My nieces and nephews are obsessed with it, because it’s basically like a little puzzle, like you have to tilt the clasp in just the right way to get it to fit through the hole to secure. So every time I hang out with my niece, it’s the first thing she’s like, bracelet. I want your bracelet. Give me your bracelet. So it was just a really nice thing to have worked for, saved up for, and it’s professional, and it’s just timeless and classic and goes with everything. And I wear it to absolutely every work function. I wear it tons and tons in my private life. So honestly, my Tiffany bracelet is probably one of my favorite gifts I’ve ever gotten through work. So again, would love to hear from you, askanassistant.com Until then, if your weather is anything like my weather today, enjoy the unseasonably warm September experience that we’re all having. As always, stay hydrated. Call your grandma and take care.
