The list of Terrible Workplace Ideas is long and storied and includes a wide array of soul-devouring activities, from team-building exercises and lunch-and-learns to Bring Your Ferret to Work Day.
Ranking high on this list is the office secret Santa gift exchange, an annual event in which co-workers uncomfortably receive gifts they don’t like from people they don’t know for reasons they can’t imagine.
Now I’m no Scrooge. I love the holidays and tend to think my halls are as decked as the next person’s. But the workplace gift exchange, rather than being festive, often serves only to plunk an extra dollop of stress on people’s decorative holiday plates.
Some companies have done away with secret Santa events, but the practice persists in many places.
This is one of the problems with secret Santa gifts. They’re well-intentioned, but the odds of a recipient actually liking, needing or not being mildly offended by the gift are slim. It’s a high-risk, low-reward endeavour.
More importantly, it’s an attempt to create interoffice goodwill via material goods. Or, to be more specific, via material goods that cost very little.
Instead of goodwill in the form of a travel mug you’ll throw out or some potpourri that will make you sneeze, what if we spread goodwill via actual goodwill? I know, crazy idea, right?
Workplaces have a tendency to take the simplest of good-hearted ideas and make them awkwardly complex. You want to do something positive — in the case of secret Santas, I assume it’s to build morale and bring workers closer together — so you create the most ham-handed and uncomfortable situation imaginable and then sit back and watch as it fails spectacularly.
It is best you create fun activities that help employees trust each other more, depend on each other more and generally encourage harmony and synchronisation in their work delivery.
Everyone loves getting, giving and receiving gifts, but they would rather prefer to do that with family.
At work, we don’t need trinkets or ear muffs or gag gifts. We need to talk. To be kind to one another. To have each other’s backs.
As I’m always fond of saying, we need to be decent human beings.
That’s not something you pick up at a store and toss in a gift bag. It’s just something you do. And I think Santa, secret or otherwise, would approve.
