The Secret Way To Retain Your Team

The Secret Way To Retain Your Team

Happy Birthday! These two simple words aren't just a nice gesture in the workplace - they're a critical component of building a true connection with your employees. Just the simple act of acknowledging and celebrating a team member's birthday can help foster deeper, more human connections in professional environments.

It's a personal touch that goes above and beyond what's expected of an employer and helps your team feel valued as individuals - not just cogs in the machine. Adding an extra surprise of a birthday gift for your employees can help strengthen this bond further - meaning less time recruiting and training for you, and more happiness and work being done long term.

Why Celebrate Employee Birthdays?

Recognising your team’s birthdays is a smart yet simple strategy. Not only does it foster a sense of belonging, appreciation, and loyalty, this can then translate into higher retention rates and job satisfaction. Companies with happy employees and positive work environments typically see higher productivity and 81% higher customer satisfaction.

Celebrating employee birthdays might be one of the simplest ways to help bolster your employee retention strategy.

Just as you’d send birthday wishes to your friends and family, it’s important to acknowledge your employees on their birthdays, too. Birthday cards are classic sentiments that show you care about the recipient. Cardly's unique platform helps make celebrating employee birthdays and retaining your top talent simple, effective and reliable, regardless of where your team might be. 

Why Celebrate Employee Birthdays?

A Few Words Make A Big Difference

Most people typically work on their birthdays, so acknowledging their effort on their special day helps boost morale and show gratitude for their hard work. Generic messages in a card certainly won’t have the same impact as one that shows genuine appreciation.

Personalised birthday cards containing a thoughtful message helps shows your company cares about its employees as individuals and recognises their individual contributions to your success. Moreover, companies that excel at personalisation generate 40% more revenue from their activities than their competitors.

Personalized birthday messages should reflect an individual’s contributions and personality. Being sincere, specific and positive in your message by:

  • Writing from the heart and be genuine.
  • Recognize your employee’s unique value by specifically referring to contributions or qualities you appreciate.  
  • Focus on good wishes and a positive future.

You can even get the whole team involved! Encourage team members to add their own messages and enhance their sense of community. Cardly’s platform allows you to add messages from different people in their own unique style, color, and messiness of handwriting. You can even add a few doodles and custom signatures to make the card even more special.

Remember, just a few words for a simple birthday message in your employee’s birthday card can make a big impact and bring a smile to their face on their special day.


Cardly offers a fantastic variety of cards that can be tailored to suit different occasions and individual tastes, which makes it feel really personal. As a medium-sized organisation, we especially appreciate the ability to automate sending cards this has made it so much easier to consistently acknowledge key milestones and events without adding to our admin load. It's user-friendly, thoughtful, and efficient!
- Sherel, US

Say Thanks With Employee Birthday Gifts

There's something truly uplifting about receiving a personalised, handwritten card - it's an action that speaks of thoughtfulness and gratitude. Handwritten birthday cards also serve as trust builders in work relationships:

  • Receiving a real card shows someone is valued. Unlike an e-card, a real card can’t happen without a financial commitment - however small!
  • Personal messages and gifts tailored to a person speaks volumes to your employee and helps make them feel recognised and show you care.
  • Handwritten cards have permanence, unlike digital chat messages, posts or emails that can be easily filed, deleted or forgotten, a handwritten card is a tangible reminder of your company's appreciation and can become an employee’s personal keepsake.

Not only does Cardly help you do this with thousands of beautiful designs created by independent artists from around the world, you can also upload your own designs for full creative control. Upload just an amazing front cover design, or get super specific and customise every panel of a card for full control over your employee birthday cards - the choice is yours! Complement your chosen designs with our range of gift cards from around the world

Say Thanks With Employee Birthday Gifts

Remember Employee Birthdays Easily

Acknowledging your employee’s birthdays is a powerful motivator - but it can just as easily be the opposite if you forget them! When an employee’s birthday is missed, it may make them feel like they’re not valued or appreciated, which can have a big impact on team morale, productivity and engagement.

Cardly helps make this easy, so you never forget an employee birthday again. Sync your employee database with our platform and enable one of our powerful birthday automations and sending employee birthday gifts is a snap. We'll take care of all the tricky parts of timing when to send cards in various areas around the world so you can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your cards are going to arrive in time for your employee’s birthday. Cardly easily caters to geographically dispersed teams and work-from-home arrangements with cards sending daily to more than 90 countries around the world from our network of production facilities. 

Setting up automated birthday cards can be done in as less than 30 minutes. Best of all, when automating your corporate birthday cards with Cardly, you can ensure no employee gets the same birthday card two years in a row by setting up different rules for different years. Send a beautiful floral design for their first birthday celebrated at your company, then that cute ‘Have A Paw-some Birthday’ card for year two!

My company used Cardly to send birthday cards to our employees at home addresses. We include a gift card. I can see the gift cards are being used, so I am confident they are getting delivered. Customer service is invaluable. I needed help setting up our account and adding the gift card. They responded with a video to walk me through the steps, and it was so helpful to SEE how to do things and not just hear the directions. The card options are great, and I love how we can personalize the card. We have ours branded with our logo and use one of the available text fonts for the message inside. There is also the option to use someone's handwritten note and/or signature.
- Andi, US

Celebrate Employee Birthdays With Cardly

If you're ready to start boosting your team's productivity with employee birthday cards, get started with a free Cardly for Business account. We’ll create your personalised business portal, and you can set up your first employee birthday card list right away. We've worked hard to create helpful walkthrough prompts and videos to guide you through the set-up process. If you need any extra help or have an queries, our incredible support team is also available to help you out too!