Recognition without the monthly scramble.

The work before

Each month, the coordinator copied birthdays and start dates from the HR system into an employee list, Google Contacts, and an anniversaries calendar. She looked up managers, arranged reminders, and chased anniversary discount codes without a set deadline.

The anniversary meal needed another kind of attention. The delivery app could not schedule ahead, so someone had to order that morning, about 30 minutes before the employee arrived. A missed reminder meant a missed meal.

The firm estimated about an hour of work each month, with more copying and coordination for every new hire.

What the diagnosis uncovered

• ◆The same facts lived in four places. The coordinator was the person keeping those copies aligned.
• ◆There was no offboarding path. A departed employee could remain on a reminder list, although that had not happened yet.
• ◆Some replies landed in a Slack channel the coordinator could not see.

What we built

Four scheduled workflows connected the recurring tasks:

• ◆Daily sync: add new hires to Contacts and the calendar; remove and log departures.
• ◆Anniversaries: request discount codes monthly, with a deadline and automatic follow-up.
• ◆Birthdays: remind managers and ask HQ staff about the group cake choice.
• ◆Month-end summary: compile birthdays, anniversaries, and departures for the founder.

What stayed human

Before launch, we named an owner for each decision the workflows would not make. The day before an anniversary, the system reminded the manager and nudged the coordinator about the meal. It did not place the order.

• ◆The coordinator keeps the employee list current and confirms employment and manager details.
• ◆The end client creates the discount codes.
• ◆People choose cakes and meals and confirm who will actually be in the office.
• ◆The founder owns policy, exceptions, communication decisions, and the recognition note.

What happened in practice

When the end client's Slack proved unreliable, employee and manager messages moved to the inbox the coordinator already used.

A month-end summary logged a departure. That person was removed before any further reminder could go out.

When July birthdays moved to an event, the founder asked to stop the cake emails. We also stopped the paired cake-order task, so the coordinator would not chase replies that were no longer needed. The remaining workflows kept running.

The result, and its limits

At handoff, the estimated savings were 45 to 60 minutes per month. The end client wound down its recognition program in July, before there was a long enough run to measure sustained time savings.

The observed results were narrower but concrete: a departure was handled, messages moved to a usable channel, and a change in plans did not require rebuilding the whole process. The value was not just a smaller monthly task. It was making that task less dependent on one person's memory.