1. Challenges of Festival Gifting: Festival gifting can be challenging due to time sensitivity, budget constraints, personalization needs, and logistics, particularly when working with a dispersed or remote workforce.
2. Best Practices for Effective Gifting: Organizations should plan well in advance, secure funding, and select the right vendors to ensure a successful gifting experience. Providing employees with gift choices, such as vouchers, can enhance satisfaction and personalization.
3. Ensuring Convenience: Offer employees convenient gifting options, such as digital or easily transportable gifts, to minimize the hassles associated with physical items.
4. Utilize Online Platforms: Leveraging online platforms for managing festival gifting programs streamlines the process, provides a range of gift options, and reduces administrative overhead.
Given the importance of festivals in India, organizations have always tried to participate in such celebrations for their employees. It has generated considerable attention to festival gifting among organizations. To help organizations navigate through this challenging process, we have put together this guide to festival gifting for employees:
Traditionally, organizations have gifted items such as sweets, dry fruits, snacks, or even small appliances to their employees.
Now, chocolate boxes, gift vouchers, and electronics are increasingly replacing them.
Organizations find it challenging to manage the process of festival gifting due to various reasons:
Employees need to get the gifts in time for the festival.
Budgets are usually tight in most organizations.
Employees have different preferences.
Getting the right gift to the right place at the right time is always challenging.
Each employee’s preferences vary based on factors such as age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, personality, and other personal characteristics.
Hence it is a nightmare for the organization to come up with a scalable solution to festival gifting.
Due to their small size, small organizations find it challenging to identify vendors, negotiate with them, and manage the entire process.
Larger organizations face the challenges of big numbers and the geographical dispersion of their workforce.
This gets further complicated as many employees are working from home, often from smaller places.
Given the visibility and importance of festival gifting, there is considerable pressure on the HR and Admin teams.
To top it all off, even a single lapse receives significant attention, drawing considerable flak from the employees and management.
A large insurance company with over 13,500 on-roll and 5,000 off-roll employees faced massive challenges with the Diwali gifting for its employees.
They have tried various methods for years, such as delivering physical gifts or sending gift vouchers for a specific brand.
However, these options required significant administrative hassles in procurement and distribution, and due to delays or a lack of choice, they did not provide the desired employee experience.
The company leveraged the HiFives platform, already in use for its employee rewards and recognition program for its festival gifting program.
Employees were given gift points on the platform instead of physical items or vouchers. They could redeem these points for any of the hundreds of brands of e-gift cards available on the HiFives platform.
The new process delivered several benefits to the organization immediately:
1. Eliminated the administrative overheads of distributing physical gifts or even digital vouchers
2. Employees could select any brand of gift cards they wanted; these gift cards were delivered to them digitally
3. They could club the festival points with other reward points that they have received
4. Since the points do not expire, employees could use the points wherever they wished
5. The company was able to do live tracking of the actual utilization of the gift points
6. The company was charged only for the gift cards that the employees ordered
Organizations understand that festival gifting is a great way to enhance employee experience and create emotional bonding with employees.
Given its importance for organizations, they must manage it as well as possible.
Here’s a guide to festival gifting that is simple and easy to implement:
Since timing is critical, organizations must start planning well in advance, ideally several months before.
Firstly, they need to get the necessary budgetary approvals and start identifying the right vendors to partner with.
Apart from budgets, they need to consider other financial implications, such as taxation, etc.
One of the biggest challenges is ensuring employees feel happy and satisfied with their gifts.
Hence, the best way to ensure this is by providing choices to the employees in selecting their gifts.
For example, giving gift vouchers that employees can use at multiple retail stores or online shopping websites is a great option.
These gift vouchers offer employees the freedom of choice, as opposed to specific items such as home appliances, gadgets, or beauty and wellness products.
In earlier times, employees would lug home an appliance they had received as a festival gift. Or even a big box of sweets!
However, physical gifts can be easily lost, misplaced, or stolen.
Organizations need to look at gifting options that ensure the convenience of the employees.
Organizations should consider using an online platform to manage their festival gifting programs.
Such platforms offer employees multiple gift options within a specified budget range.
Platforms such as HiFives provide options for hundreds of gift vouchers of popular brands, delivered electronically.
It ensures both freedom of choice and convenience for employees.
Organizations can use these platforms for festival gifting, employee rewards, and recognition.
The main hurdles include tight timelines, limited budgets, varied employee preferences, quality control, and logistics—especially with remote or dispersed teams.
Traditionally, gifts included sweets, dry fruits, or small appliances. Now, there’s a shift toward chocolates, gift vouchers, and electronics.
Advantages include reduced admin work, employee flexibility in choosing gifts, digital delivery, combining festival points with other reward points, non-expiry of points, and real-time tracking of utilization.
1. Plan well in advance — secure funding, vendors, manage budgets, and taxation.
2. Offer employee choice — such as multi-brand vouchers instead of fixed physical gifts.
3. Ensure convenience — use portable or digital gifts to avoid cumbersome logistics.
4. Use online platforms — they offer centralized management, variety, and ease of distribution.
Because personal preferences vary—based on factors like age, gender, and culture—offering multiple gift options ensures higher satisfaction.
By choosing gifts that are digital or easily transportable, organizations spare employees the hassle of carrying or storing bulky items.
Organizations deal with massive volumes, a dispersed workforce, and vendor coordination, as well as logistics, which can lead to delays or dissatisfaction if not managed carefully.
Festival gifting is an important activity for any organization looking to build a stronger connect with its employees.
This guide to festival gifting for employees can help organizations manage the process smoothly with minimum administrative overhead and operational hiccups.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in both corporate and entrepreneurial settings. Previously, Sagar has held leadership roles with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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