A retirement gift from the whole team

Ask each person for one photograph and one line about it, with a date attached. A workplace group gift has the same failure mode as a family one — everybody means to, and then the leaving do is on Thursday.

The difference is that at work you have a roster, which makes chasing easier and makes it obvious who has not replied.

Why the collection is the hard part, not the choosing

Somebody always ends up organising this, and that person does the chasing alone. Every extra step you ask of a colleague is a place they stop: a login, an album, a decision about what counts as a good enough photograph.

One picture and one sentence removes the decision. And the sentence is the part worth having — a photograph of a team at a conference in 2019 says nothing on its own, and he drove four hours to that thing because I was nervous about presenting does.

What to send round

We're putting something together for Dave's retirement. Can you send me one photograph with him in it, and a line about what was going on? Deadline is the 14th — I'll chase you once and then stop.

The last clause is worth including. It tells people there is exactly one reminder coming, which converts better than an open-ended ask.

Expect some of it to be heavier than you planned

A thirty-year career produces material that is not all jokes about the coffee machine. Somebody will send the photograph from the week their mother died, when he covered their shifts without being asked. Leave yourself a sitting to read what comes back rather than processing it between meetings.

Make it survive the leaving do

The best marker of a retirement is the one still worth having on a wall when the date has passed. That rules out the obvious — the year printed across the front, the job title, the number of years served. Those date the object to the week it was given.

What survives is the photograph and what people said about it, because those are about the person rather than the occasion.

Timing and size

Three weeks is comfortable, two is workable, under a week means asking a handful of people rather than the whole department. Where a team is putting its name to one piece, Signature is the usual choice — it is sized to hold a wall on its own.

The mechanics of the chasing are the same as for a family, and are covered in how to get relatives to actually send you the photos.