Employee gifts: 3 ways we use them to support our company culture

A strong company culture can do wonders for your business. It can help you retain top talent, improve productivity, and enhance morale. But maintaining a consistent company culture across multiple offices is harder than it might seem. We have a distributed team in several locations, so we understand the challenges you face! Employee gifts and recognition are a huge part of our culture. Here are a few ways we use gifts to help keep our team motivated and connected, enabling us to grow through good times and tough ones. 

Employee gifts support a great company culture 

If you want a culture where employees don't care about you and you don't care about them, showing appreciation doesn't matter. For everyone else, appreciation is absolutely central to your strategy. Employees care more when they feel cared about. Your customers can feel it.  

But how do you choose a one-size-fits-all gift, one that will make every employee feel appreciated and motivated? There is no such thing, no matter what your budget. So how do you figure out what to get them? What will they actually use? Which colors do they like? What size shirt do they wear?  

That's why an online store makes a great culture-booster. You can select a range of company gifts and let employees choose what they like best. They get the fun of shopping, and the company gets to show appreciation with gifts that are useful and meaningful for each person.  

Our top 3 tips for great employee recognition gifts 

Acknowledging accomplishments is #3 on this list of "Remote Team Management: 8 steps to create a 'Best Place To Work' Company Culture" from Forbes. It's so important to recognize and celebrate the great things your team does. We all need to know our accomplishments are seen and appreciated.  

Tip #1: Recognize employees with an incentive store.  

An incentive store is a different twist on the company store. Instead of company-sponsored gifts, the incentive store contains a range of desirable items employees can shop for with “points” they earn by being great at their jobs. Find more incentive store ideas here. 

Manager recognition  

• Make it specific. Tell the story that prompted the recognition.
• Make it personal. Include a personal note or card.
• Make it public. You don't have to put a shy team member on the spot by asking them to be in the spotlight, but your appreciation should be seen by more than just the individual.

Peer-to-peer coupons  

Create a way for teammates to recognize each other when they see someone going above and beyond.  

• A custom-printed sticky note pad they can use to leave each other “I saw you being great” notes. 
• A form they can fill out to nominate a teammate for a special award tied in with the company’s core values. (Doing these quarterly works well for us.) 
• A company store coupon they can give to recognize a great teammate. We give these monthly in our town hall meetings. Two employees recognize an exceptional peer, and the next month those that received the recognition are the ones to pass it along. 
• An on-the-fly peer-to-peer coupon budget. At SOLV, every employee also has a yearly budget we can use to give peer-to-peer coupons on the fly. 

Tip #2: Quality counts with employee gifts.  

Don't go cheap.  

Gifts that feel like a cheap afterthought can backfire on you, making people feel LESS appreciated, not more. Remember how much more expensive it is to find and train new hires than it is to keep the great employees you already have. Set your gifts budget accordingly. 

Packaging makes a difference. 

“Don’t go cheap” doesn’t mean you have to spend a fortune, though. Even simple gifts have a lot more impact when they’re thoughtfully packaged, whether that’s grouping similar items to create a theme, or literally putting them in a quality box. Branded tissue paper is a nice touch!

Tip #3: Let them choose. 

It bears repeating: there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all. No one gift is going to be perfect for everyone in the company. (Rumor has it there are even people in this world who don’t like chocolate!) That’s why we love helping our customers set up a company gift shop where employees can pick out gifts and logowear they’ll love. It’s the perfect win/win situation.  

You can read more about our award-winning company store solutions, or contact us to talk about your next project and how we can help!