Office gifting: the leaving fund and the December draw

There are exactly two moments when a team deals with gifts, and they look nothing alike. A colleague leaves: everybody gives in the same direction. December arrives: everybody gives to everybody. The first calls for a shared fund, the second for a draw, and confusing them is what turns the whole thing into a chore.

A leaver: a shared fund

What usually goes wrong

The envelope going desk to desk has three faults everybody knows and nobody says.

It is visible: the person putting in 5 does it in front of the person who just put in 30. It is partial: it never reaches the people working from home, on leave, at a client site or in the other building. And it is manual: somebody counts, somebody chases, and that somebody loses two weeks to it.

What works

A free amount, invisible contributions. The total is public, the individual amounts are not. It is the only way to let an intern give alongside a director without anyone comparing.

A link rather than an envelope. A link reaches everyone, including the three people who are never in on a Thursday. It also reaches former colleagues, who are often the most pleased to have been told.

An announced closing date. Without one, the collection drags to the morning of the leaving drinks and the gift gets bought the night before.

A gift chosen first, not last. Deciding the gift first gives the collection a number to aim at, and avoids the awkward conversation where 340 has to be split across three ideas.

Who runs it

Rarely the manager, and that is deliberate. A collection started by the hierarchy reads as a request whatever the tone. It travels better coming from someone at the same level as the person leaving.

Retirements are their own case — larger amounts, a more symbolic gift — and we covered them in retirement gift list ideas. The mechanics of the collection itself are in the group gift contributions guide.

December: a draw

Why not a fund

Because there is no recipient. Twenty people each owing something to nineteen others is 380 gifts, and nobody will do it. A draw brings the exercise down to twenty gifts, one each, and makes attention possible where completeness was not.

The rules that matter

A tight cap. Between 15 and 25 in most teams. At work more than anywhere, the gap is noticed: a 60 gift opened in front of everyone embarrasses its recipient, not its author.

Participation stays voluntary. Somebody may have a reason — financial, religious, personal — not to take part. The draw runs on the list of volunteers, not on the org chart.

Cross-team exclusions, sometimes. Where several departments take part together, some prefer to draw outside their own team: that is what makes you give to someone you only meet at the coffee machine.

The secret held to the end. Including from the organiser. A spreadsheet in a shared folder is not a secret, it is a document.

The remote case

A partly remote team has a practical problem: handing the thing over. Three options, in order of preference:

1. hand it over on the day everyone is on site, if such a day exists;
2. ship directly to the recipient’s address, which means collecting addresses — and showing each one only to the person who needs it;
3. go digital, which solves the logistics and removes a good part of what made the gesture pleasant.

What HR should know

• Participation must not be measurable. Nobody should be able to observe that an employee did not give.
• The budget must not squeeze anyone. A high cap quietly excludes part of the team.
• A company-funded gift is not a gift between colleagues. Both can exist, but mixing them turns a gesture into a benefit, with whatever tax consequences follow in your country.
• The organisation must not rest on one person. If it takes two weeks of chasing, it will not survive the departure of whoever was doing the chasing.

The tools

For the leaving fund, Liiste gives a public page with the gift being aimed at, a progress bar, contributions by bank transfer — no commission, no account for the people giving — and amounts that stay between the contributor and the organiser.

For the December draw, Pindao draws from a list of participants, handles exclusions, tells each person separately, and shows the table to nobody. Both products come from the same workshop, because both moments turn up in the same team a few months apart.

A team’s calendar

• A leaver: announce as soon as the date is known, close three days before the drinks, buy the day before at the latest.
• December: run the draw in mid-November, and set the handover before the week half the team is on leave.

Both are half-hour exercises, as long as you are not doing them by hand.