While the festive season is a time of the year to appreciate your employees, corporate gifting is sometimes complicated. A good gift can work wonders by improving the morale of the employees, creating goodwill, and changing the organisational culture. Nevertheless, there are many pitfalls that an organization continues to pursue that degrade a well-meaning initiative into a non-event. In this blog, we will take a look at some common pitfalls associated with corporate holiday gifts—and how a shift to digital vouchers can help.
- Choosing Generic Gifts
One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is to give every person the exact same item, such as a mug with the company logo, a box of candies, or a blanket. While these are good intentions, most of the time they seem impersonal and are easily forgotten. Employees like everyone else have preferences, so, why not get to designing something specific for them?
The Solution: Digital vouchers offer flexibility to employees, and this is what makes them the perfect festive season gift. They can spend the voucher to buy a gadget they always wanted, have a good meal to eat, or buy things for a hobby they enjoy. With over 10,000 choices spanning across more than 400 national, international, and regional companies, they offer something for everyone.
- Ignoring Employee Preferences
Some employers presume what their employees might prefer given current trends or available ideas about suitable gifts and more often end up with choices that the employees did not fancy at all. For instance, offering a box of sweets to a person who cares about his or her health or technology gadgets to a person who does not care about technology is not effective.
The Solution: Digital vouchers remove the guesswork entirely because the employees are afforded an opportunity to take exactly what they want. The way that you let them choose anything that exists in the market—from clothes to gadgets, food, or a journey—gives employees a feeling that they are special, that someone really cares about them.
- Overcomplicating the gifting process:
Gifting during festivals can become tricky. Adding to this, responsibilities such as coordinating the delivery of gifts, managing the stocks, and making sure that every employee gets his/her gift on the planned date should not be added to your schedule. Physical gifts, as we should all know, take shelf space and are more likely to get lost or end up a crushed mess in transit.
The Solution: Digital vouchers are easier to give and use compared to normal paper vouchers. The good thing is that you can provide them via email or even text messages to avoid time-consuming delivery. Also, they can redeem them at any convenient time, and thus, the process will be easy for you and your staff as well.
- Overlooking Convenience
People like gifts that are not complicated to use. Long, complicated procedures or limited utilization chances can turn a fabulous prize into a nightmare. What could appear as a well-meaning gift card that is only usable in one store or perhaps a store in an area that the employee rarely visits will often not get used at all.
The Solution: When it comes to convenience, nothing beats digital vouchers. Employees can simply avail them from the comfort of their home, have a variety of brands available to them, and use them at their leisure time. Whether they have to shop online or visit a store to shop physically, the choices are countless.
- Ignoring flexibility.
It is a known fact that the festive season is a busy time of the year for most people. People at work may not get time, or the energy, to go shopping, and tangible gifts have the added factor of being used at the time they are received. However, when there is little or no freedom that defines the offerings, then the gift may seem like a burden to many.
The Solution: The digital vouchers, on the one hand, provide convenience because the employees don’t need to redeem the vouchers at a specific time. They are free to choose when exactly to use it—during the holiday season or some other time they need to. This flexibility consideration shows appreciation for your employees’ time and personal lives.
A Better Way to Gift
Corporate festive gifting should therefore be all about making your employees feel special and valued. Therefore, finding the balance between not falling into the usual pitfalls of generic gifts, potential issues that often arise with sending gifts to a large number of people, and having several options is possible. That’s why Edenred’s digital vouchers are an ideal solution—it’s choice, flexibility, and convenience ensure that each employee feels valued and is happy with the rewards you give them.
