Staffing & Recruitment: Gifting Employees at Christmas -Part 1 of 2

In November 2008, Susan Hollis of BCBusiness magazine approached Mike Lam of HRinmotion with questions regarding Gifting Employees at Christmas. Below we offer our experience from a corporate human resources perspective.

How and what do you budget for gifts/extras at Christmas?

I think it is important to separate any gift giving and bonuses. While ultimately both items come out of the budget, they are very different in that Christmas gifts relate to the holiday season and bonuses relate to the employment contract and really fall under compensation.

As such, bonuses like all compensation should be tied to job performance, meeting objectives, exhibiting company values and so forth. In contrast, Christmas gifts don’t relate to any behaviors at all. If such a separation does not exist, the potential impact can be a blurring in the lines that your staff sees between their job performance and reward. In such cases where employee reward is misapplied, the cost of the well meaning celebratory gift can become much greater than the gift price. For these reasons, we make sure this separation exists for our team. However I will touch on both gift giving and reward/compensation.

As for our Christmas gift giving practices, first we try to make it more inclusive so it really is more a celebration of the holiday season and the year end. Most of our team participates in a mystery gift exchange. Our gift exchange works like your typical mystery gift exchange, where everyone purchases a gift within a budget, participants then take turns to choose an unclaimed mystery gift, take someone else’s, and so forth. We have a lot of fun with it, our limit for the gift is $20 which helps to ensure participants are creative with their gift choice. Whether our team members participate or observe, everyone laughs from all the gag gifts presented.

When is the best time to dole out the gifts?

Our mystery gift exchange happens sometime in December depending on vacations and so forth.

For reward and compensation, in addition to our annual bonus we sustain a culture of reward and recognition with acknowledgment when someone does a great job. For example, when we asked our IT expert to complete an assignment and he went beyond our expectations, we gave him gift certificate for home electronics along with our personal thanks. As for time, it is best practice to reward as soon as possible after.

Do you give each employee the same gift to avoid conflict or favouritism?

Fortunately we do not have this problem with the mystery gift exchange.

As for reward, I think this really depends on your team, the culture and individual team member. If you are not sure, you can always take the gift certificate route. In the example above, we try to strike a balance and choose something that suits the person while giving them choice. In our example, we knew our IT person has a photography hobby and had his eye on a new camera so the choice was a no-brainer. If you do not have the benefit of this type of knowledge about your employee, you can always try a gift certificate at a box store where there is a good chance they will find something suitable. More importantly, if you do not know your employees well enough to make a general guess as to their interests, then there might be a greater challenge facing you beyond gift choice.

What if a few employees have really earned more than the rest?

We try to match the reward with the performance, such that someone who really exceeded expectations would receive more recognition than someone who didn’t. So yes, we differentiate in our rewards to ensure that don’t discourage our high performers. Having said this, I think it is vital that some thought is given to team rewards to recognize team efforts and encourage teamwork. For example, we had a team member who was new to Canada and had never been to Victoria. So we took the team for a weekend trip to Victoria.

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