The company Christmas rewards: Why, what and how to give gifts
As part of our focus on Christmas preparation articles last year, we discussed the pros and cons of offering a Christmas gift to colleagues to thank them for the hard work that they’ve put in for your company.
As always, there is an argument to say that hard work is what you pay them for, and offering them a gift on top of their salary should not be necessary. As we discussed here, we’d say that offering a well thought-through gift for colleagues is actually a good way of encouraging them to do more than just show up to get paid.
Why give…
There are several reasons for this. Primarily, it’s the festive season, a time for giving thanks and showing your appreciation.
A Christmas gift or bonus can help boost morale and help people get through the dark days of January and potentially stop them wondering whether the grass is greener elsewhere. The positive associations can last for the entire year, and a well thought-through gift can make people less quick to brush down their CV.
As we pointed out, a well thought-through gift can also form part of an effective internal communication strategy, helping reinforce messages and reiterate the importance of a new product or service.
What to give…
If the reasons for giving a gift are relatively clear, the question of what gift to give can be somewhat more complex, as we pointed out in The Employee Christmas Gift Minefield here.
We looked at the strengths and weaknesses of individual gifts, cash, vouchers and gift cards, experience days, food and drink hampers and e-codes. Obviously, we have a certain bias, but we genuinely believe that e-codes have a number of advantages over the other options.
E-codes have almost as much flexibility as cash without being so flexible that they simply get spent without anyone batting an eye. While you may think they are lacking a bit of the potential theatre of vouchers, they can also be extensively personalised, assuming that your team members are comfortable with a smart-phone or tablet, and they reduce distribution issues if your team is busy away from the office seeing clients, customers or partners or if they work from home.
Whichever way you decide to go, we would still offer three pieces of advice when choosing a gift:
- Know your team: so that you reduce the risk of accidentally offending
- Have fun with it: like most things in leadership, people can pretty quickly sniff out when you are just going through the motions
- Don’t leave it to the last minute: the sooner you start going through the process of finding a gift, the more likely you are to have the inspiration to get it right at a reasonable budget
How to give…
A third Christmas article looked at how to present a gift to ensure that your company got the best from the effort that you’d put in here. Making sure that you deliver with a little panache can help boost morale and bring smiles back to people’s faces when they are trying to get out of bed on those dark January mornings.
We did point out however that it’s also important to avoid going over the top with your presentation. Nobody wants wrapping-paper that’s more expensive than the gift itself.
The main advice, as ever, is to start planning early to make sure that you can deliver something that people genuinely want in a way that makes the most mileage from your company’s point of view.
Giving a well thought-through gift during the festive season can really help with morale and teams with higher morale tend to stay with a business for longer.
Love2shop offers a range of Christmas gift options. If you’d like to find out more, you can see our full range by clicking here.
