Don’t let a vendor ask your employees to pick their own work anniversary gift
So you’ve read other blog posts on this blog, and you’re convinced better work anniversaries would make a difference at your organization. Yay!
But, you’re busy, you think everything else you’re doing is important, and you wonder, can’t you just outsource this to someone?
Among larger companies with money, it’s really popular to hire a vendor that automatically sends employees a link to a catalog of generic items they can choose for their work anniversary. They just click on it, enter their address, and a week or two later it arrives.
This is appealing to companies because they can check off celebrating work anniversaries without putting any effort in themselves. The vendor handles everything! No one at the company had to get involved at all!
Remember the blog post about reducing effort as one of the forces of mediocrity? This is that force taken to the extreme in combination with not having a lot of pressure from the force of reducing cost.
And that’s okay, if you can afford it. It’s a lot better than doing nothing. But…
Catalog gifts do nothing for your workplace culture
People who are paying a lot for catalog gifts are often taken aback when they hear me say that. What do I mean? Here’s the employee experience:
The employee gets a generic email (that is, if your IT team remembered to set it to not go to spam, and if it goes to spam, then the vendor wins because now they don’t have to send an item to the employee, and you probably paid per employee up front).
The employee clicks on a link and scrolls through an online catalog of generic items that have nothing to do with the organization or the work. Sometimes there are weirdly anachronistic items, assumedly from when the program was originally set up, like DVD players.
The employee often struggles to figure out what to pick. Often the items have weirdly different price points (though there are no prices listed), so the employee realizes that there is an optimization game where they want to pick something worth “the full amount”. Then, another common phenomenon is that there are lots and lots of options and they’re not organized in any particular way. It starts taking a long time. The email came to the employee’s work email, so it’s typically work time, and the employee starts to feel pressure to get back to whatever important work they were doing.
Often what happens next is that the employee just gives up and doesn’t pick anything. They get back to work. This is great for the vendor! In many cases, you paid the vendor per employee, and if the employee doesn’t pick something, that’s more profit for the vendor. Yes, the vendor is incented to make the process difficult for your employees. 🫤
OR
The other approach is that the employee just picks something, like perhaps since they don’t see anything they really want, they choose to get the vacuum cleaner and give it to their spouse. 😲
Assuming they pick something, the next step is to enter their address. Yes, the process ends with a final reminder that the employee is so unimportant that the organization couldn’t bother to remember their address, which they clearly have for payroll and benefits purposes.
Tips if you have to go with a catalog
Clearly, I’m not a fan. But, there are a couple takeaways if you are going to go with this approach:
Make sure your contract is set up such that you do not pay for gifts that are not chosen and delivered.
Make sure the vendor allows you to upload all of the address information needed to deliver the gift to each employee.
Alternatives to catalog gifts
So what’s the alternative? If you want the gift to contribute to your connection with the employee and the broader workplace culture, then you will need to put a little more work into it.
There’s an entire blog post on work anniversary gift ideas, but for purposes of strengthening workplace culture, here are some of my favorites:
Company-branded clothing – Note that this option can be completely outsourced to a number of vendors. But a company branded fleece is just more meaningful than a mid-priced vacuum.
A “numbered” gift – Choose the option that’s appropriate to your workforce and custom-designed to really lean into your unique culture. The options are framed certificates, blocks, pins, or stickers.
Whatever your company sells – This is a great option available to companies that sell to consumers.
Team lunch – Let the employee choose the restaurant and take along the people who work with them, including people from beyond their immediate team. You’ll probably also want to bring along an inexpensive certificate and present it at lunch. (See this blog post for more about celebrating work anniversaries at team lunches.)
Each of those options encourages a connection or feeling of belonging between the employee and your organization.
For an updated list of workplace culture aware vendors, check out the workiversary.com vendor guide:
https://www.workiversary.com/vendor-guide
The most important question to ask yourself about a potential work anniversary gift
There are of course many other options too. The question to ask yourself is:
If the employee worked at another organization, could they still get this gift?
If they could, the gift isn’t doing anything for your workplace culture.