Looking for ways to show that you appreciate your employees during the holiday season and beyond? Here is a quick-hitting employer gift guide with some helpful insights and ideas.
5 Gift Giving Ideas for Employers to Give to Employees
1. Brand New Company Branded Swag:
The key? Don’t give the same swag every year. Come out with something fun and fresh. Give something that most people will enjoy and use regularly like clothing. Want to give something random and fun? How about a branded pizza cutter, cutting board, or nice portable cooler? For some fancier and high-quality swag, check out GuildedBox. What about giving employees a gift amount and set them loose to choose their own company-branded swag at a site like SwagDrop?
3. Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner on the Company Tab
Catering a meal for your in-office team is simple. What about remote or hybrid employees? Send them a gift card to a local spot or something sweet like a gift through Sugarwish.
4. A Fun Outing:
- Membership to a local zoo or museum
- Gift cards to a local bowling alley or golf-dome like Topgolf.
- Cooking or Baking Classes with A Local Expert
- Movie Tickets
- Dinner at a Local Fancy Restaurant
- A local excursion like skydiving, city ghost tour, or offroad adventure
- Tickets to a local sports event or concert. The Nutcracker is a great event for the Holidays. If you’ve never seen the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, it is quite an experience.
- To make this meaningful and fun for everyone, consider giving people an option of what fun outing they’d like to choose.
5. A Monetary Bonus
Perhaps you’ve seen the movie Christmas vacation where Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) gets enrolled in a “Jelly of the Month” club instead of a holiday bonus. Instead of putting a down payment on a brand-new swimming pool, he gets a gift that he’ll most likely never use. (See the last bullet in idea #4 above). It’s a funny scene but the concept is there. If you are able and think your team would appreciate this gift over some other fun ideas, a monetary bonus may be the right move.
Additional Gift Ideas
- Books
- Personalized Notebooks
- Care Packages
- Gift Cards for fun and hobbies like camping, biking, travelling and photography.
- Grocery Store gift cards may be a great option too
- Collectible Bottle of Wine
- A Getaway
- An additional (or multiple) days of vacation on top of what they are entitled to already.
- For remote employees, a standing desk could be an awesome gift!
What Are Additional Ways to Recognize Employees?
Managers and employees alike have preferred methods of giving and receiving recognition, and the holidays are perfect opportunities to do so. Some people receive different types of recognition in different ways, thus it’s important for both parties to maintain professionalism and gratitude simultaneously. While recognition isn’t a good replacement for a holiday gift, recognition in addition to a gift can go a long way.
Informal Recognition:
This type of recognition can take place in 1:1 meetings, conversations or via methods like email. Some people prefer this off-the-cuff method because it is perceived as genuine and spontaneous.
Formal Recognition:
This type of recognition is often planned in advance and in front of others to some extent. If you have company awards this is a good example of formal recognition.
Monetary Recognition:
From sales bonuses and contests in recognition of met goals, or surprise bonuses and raises, monetary recognition is highly effective when used equitably.
Social Recognition:
Peer-to-peer recognition can be one of the most motivating and effective methods of employee recognition. Whether formalized or emphasized strategically by example, peer-to-peer recognition builds strong bonds within teams for a long-term positive effect. As Booker T. Washington is credited as saying, “If you want to lift yourself up, lift someone else.”
Here Are Some Additional Employee Recognition and Gift Ideas:
Happy Holidays From All of Us At The Panther Group
At The Panther Group, we understand the value of recognizing employees during the holiday season and throughout the year. Our goodwill extends to our company partners and how we treat our contractors and other employees. If you’re looking for a staffing firm that deeply understands diversity recruitment and has many years of experience and expertise, we’d love to chat.
Over 30 years of deep recruitment and staffing experience gives us a competitive edge that extends to our clients. We put our curated professional talent pools to use for you. Whether you need accounting and finance employees or technical teams, we’ve got you covered. If you’re looking for engineers with the right experiences and skill-sets, we can connect you with the right ones. Struggling to meet your diversity spend goals? We’re experts in the field. If you’re looking for help managing your workforce we can help you sort out worker misclassification issues and put our payrolling solutions to work for you!
Our Staffing and Recruitment Disciplines Include: Professional & Administrative, Accounting & Finance, Engineering & Manufacturing, Information Technology, Life Sciences, Customer Service, and Federal.
We Serve Industries Including the Following: Aerospace & Defense, Financial Services, Higher Education, Media, Telecom, Government & Non-Profits, Healthcare & Insurance, and Consumer Products.
We Also Provide Workforce Management Solutions Including: Managed Service Provider (MSP) Vendor on Premise (VOP), Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), and Payrolling.
If you’re looking to bring your staffing and recruitment strategy to the next level, we’d love to offer a conversation to see if we’d be a good match. Our reputation is extremely strong with both candidates and our clients and we’d love to bring that to bear in a potential partnership with you. Please feel free to fill out our contact form to initiate a simple and low-pressure conversation with someone from our leadership team.
