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Comments
"I got my staff the dankest memes".
I'll try it next year./s
Francisco
I'm feeling a bit generous this year, Monkey JPGs for everyone!
Gifts themselves are also benefit in kind and are taxable (in the UK at least), so just because it's a physical gift does not mean there's no tax to pay. The benefits have monetary value, so they must be treated as taxable income which the employee must pay. Either way either you or the employee may be required to tax on the gift and on that basis it'd probably better to go with a gift that you can pay the tax on, rather than burdening the employee with a bill.
Yep, I hate taxes! I'd have to talk to my accountant but was thinking that maybe new computers, monitors, chairs, headphones, webcams, phones, laptops, software licenses, etc that could be considered work-related (e.g. if they use the webcam during Slack calls with me) wouldn't be taxable on the workers even if they also use it for personal use, and it would still be a business expense which effectively gives me 30% off, so a win-win situation. Not sure if things work this way though.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/use-of-employer-provided-mobile-phones-is-non-taxable-fringe-benefit
Just give them money in cash to avoid taxes. The real gift.
You give the gift of employment.
/s
As others said, cash bonus is always a plus but be aware it can create bitterness in future years where as you grow giving everyone the same total you give on year 1 for less staff may be more difficult or out of the budget in year 5 with more staff.
Time off is always nice, too. Even if it's just a gift of an extra vacation or personal day for 2022 or whatever. In a previous non-industry related job I used to have the option to comp any overtime or holiday pay and have the hours accrue into time I could take off at a later date as opposed to getting overtime. I (usually) figured my time away from the place was worth more to me than taking the pay.
cash or ...
watch for men
jewelry for women
Give them both cash and gifts.
I had an Uncle that worked for USPS and at least at the time his time off would roll over every year, he worked there like 30+ years and never took time off. Eventually, he was able to take a year and a half off (paid) before his retirement with all his time accumulated lol.
Gift the mall NFTs or Shiba.
1K USD per gift, how beautiful is the first world
But with rising inflation that's only about 3 gallons of milk and some discount deli meat.
Up to £50 per year IIRC is tax free, plus anything for "employee motivation" which is surprisingly broad.
I would give cash unless you can't afford it. If you're really struggling then give a gift.
We're giving £1k each plus a few people are getting big raises.
At the past two startup jobs that I've had (first in edtech then in GPU cloud) both companies were doing 7 figures in annual revenue when I left, if we assume $2,500,000 in revenue, and a team size of 10 to get $1,000 each as holiday bonuses, you're looking at a holiday bonus that's less than 0.25% of the revenue. Keep in mind at startups nowadays, people make $30 (at super cheap startups with a tonna equity) to $100/hr developing software, that's just how high the market is. At my previous job, even outsourced Brazil systems administrators were paid almost $100k/yr in total compensation. I have hiring manager friends at an established $70bn software company who say they are hiring mediocre engineers for $200k/yr because it's so hard to find talent in this bubble right now. That's $1000/day assuming a 200 workday year after subtracting weekends and vacations. So, actually one of my concerns was that a $1000 holiday bonus would be seen as "too small" lol.
That's why the Low End market is so interesting -- for me, $12/year might be a good deal for a server, but if it takes an hour more for a team member to set it up because it's slower compared to a $5/month server, the labor costs might end up higher, so I usually stick to DigitalOcean, use S3 storage instead of self-hosted Apache webservers, etc.
Different world.
Like the Old AOL IM, Send them a cash gift via PayPal, CashApp ... You got CASH!!!
There is one constant in life; you always want what you don't have.
So yes, if they have a decent income, some amount of money may come off as being too insignificant and ultimately money as a gift is just a cop out for a present.
Naturally if you are going to give money you are going to have to keep it above the board on both ends, for a multitude of obvious reasons.
What is more important than money, time is something that I have definitely come to appreciate, there never seems to be enough of it anymore.
Ideally you could find a unique gift for each of the people, say a bottle of whiskey, wine, champaign, etc. But time is getting kind of short for anything that needs to be ordered and shipped. Memories and experiences last forever and a $1K bottle of whiskey would be appreciated, savoured and remembered by most.
This quickly went from "I want to show appreciation and make people happy" to "how to I make this beneficial for my company and myself". All those things are great, but they should already have that, and if not they'll appreciate it some other time, not a a Christmas bonus/gift
True.
I want extra 10 years in my grandpa's life.
If you can provide, I'll go to your company.
Idk about that. I don't really want any dignity.
The other day I heard about some research on the radio. Apparently employees think that when their employee just gives them cash at Christmas they are taking the easy way out. When they receive an actual gift they feel more cared about, even though the gift is crap 9 times out of 10.
I don't really think this research applies to you because I think the cash bonuses they were talking about on the radio are probably a lot smaller but still I think it would be best to gift them something cool for maybe 10% of the budget and then pay out the rest as a bonus.
i worked for a company in the gaming industry and there some teams used to take part in sports competitions, eg marathons etc.
everyone who participated got a full set of company branded equipment (shirt, shorts, flipflops, towel,...). it probably didnt cost much but it was well liked and i still use it today for training.
As already stated by many, cash is never wrong.
But, if you want to give something more personal and at the same time do some teambuilding, how about a weekend somewhere?
I think the best reward I've ever got from an employer was when he paid for a weekend in Prague for the whole team. Started friday morning so no work on friday, flight to Prague, a nice hotel, good food and lots of fun, all expenses paid.
Memories for life and actually became good friends with a couple of the guys at work that I really did not care much for before the trip.
I still think of him as the best boss I've ever had, and that says something considering I've been self-employed for several years.
I have never received a Xmas gift from my employer.
My first ever job was as a trapper on a shooting range, and it was there I came closest I getting to one. Two gangster brothers from the east end of London came for a Boxing Day shoot, and at the end of the round gave the gaffer £100 quid to ‘buy the lads a drink’. There were 10 of us, and we got £5 extra that day.
Cash + a nice bottle of champagne and a handwritten card thanking them for the effort and dedication they put in during the last year.
I think what employees would appreciate most is being given options to let them decide. I can 100% guarantee that will make them feel appreciated.
Finding out you were asking a bunch of random people on a toxic public forum how they should be rewarded will not make them feel appreciated in any way.
Just the trap, not the pony?
It's not much, but it's a little something. Just some shirts made and if the quality isn't poor, I'll get a few more made to send to some upstream.
We're worker owned and small, so hard to justify big things when we're all equal already.