Once a year, Facebook bombards employees with custom balloons and shout outs — and even Mark Zuckerberg participates

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook employees

• Facebook hypes up employees' work anniversaries.

• Employees celebrate their "Faceversaries" with balloons and lots of Facebook posts.

• Facebook VP of HR Janelle Gale told Business Insider that the tradition is all about thanking employees and recognizing them for their work.

Facebook takes work anniversaries seriously.

"Faceversaries," as they're known, are celebrated annually. At the tech giant, they're pretty much like work birthdays, complete with balloons and a deluge of social media posts.

"We really visibly celebrate peoples' time at Facebook," Facebook VP of HR Janelle Gale told Business Insider. "It's a big deal."

Gale said that Facebook has an "internal ticker" tracking the percentage of people that you're ahead of in terms of tenure. People track their status as a "point of pride," she said.

Glassdoor recently ranked Facebook as the best place to work in 2018. Gale even spoke about maintaining a positive company culture at Glassdoor's Best Places to Work Tour.

When a person's "Faceversary" rolls around, coworkers can festoon each others' desks with customized balloons from the campus store. Managers and colleagues also take to social media to commemorate the person's time at Facebook.

"It's literally a post on Facebook and a thank you for the work that they're trying to build the community," Gale said.

People celebrating a "Faceversary" will also often post about any accomplishments they're particular proud of.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg also gets in on the action. In a post honoring COO Sheryl Sandberg's "Faceversary," he wrote, "Sheryl, you've done so much to grow our community, our business and our culture these past 8 years, and to help me grow as a person. I can't imagine being on this journey to connect the world without you."

Recode reported that Zuckerberg is also known to commemorate "long-tenured" individuals' "Faceversaries" during his Friday afternoon company Q&A sessions. Sometimes, he'll even call on longtime Facebook employees to get up and reflect on their favorite work memories.

Gale said "Faceversaries" tie into the community behaviors that Facebook encourages in order to keep up its connected and engaged culture.

"It's the expectation that you help Facebook operate better, and you have a role to play in that," Gale said. "What we're doing is thanking people and recognizing them for the work they've done over the prior year."

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