When it comes to employee holiday gifts, it’s always been hard to find one standard gift that pleases everybody. Your employees are unique individuals, and creating a uniform gift that accurately reflects your appreciation for each one is difficult. 

Especially in 2020, when employees are working remotely and balancing never-before-seen stressors, no two employees are in the same situation.

This year, the best employee gift you can give is a shopping stipend. 

For 7 years, I worked at a small gift basket shop. Consider It Done in Downers Grove, IL was a “ma and pa” gift shop that specialized in beautiful and customized gift baskets. I’ve personally built hundreds of baskets, ranging from small boxes to elaborate corporate baskets built in a company-branded cooler. 

Because of my years spent there, I’ve become known as a gifting expert among friends and coworkers.

This holiday season, gift giving is different than ever before, with a majority of gifts being sent by mail rather than hand-delivered at a party or in the office. 

If you’ve been tasked with deciding on this year’s employee holiday gift, we’re here to make your job a lot easier. 

From talking with customers and industry experts, we’ve narrowed down the trending gifts for WFH employees this year into three categories: Cozy & Comfort, Trending Tech, and Home Accessories. Here are the top gifts we’re seeing within each category. 

As with most things in 2020, the upcoming holiday season presents workplaces with a new round of questions. Should we host a virtual holiday party? How do we get gifts to employees at home? What gift can display the appreciation we feel for our teams at the end of this rough year?

We’re here to provide some answers. We’ve been having conversations with companies of all sizes across the country; here are the trends we’re hearing.

Usually on October 1st, we’d be hanging cobwebs on desks, filling kitchen candy bowls, and ordering office costume contest prizes. What does Halloween “in the office” look like when everyone is working from home? 

As with most things this year, it’ll be different. But there are still ways to celebrate the season from a distance and share small joys with your team. Here are our top 5 ways to bring Halloween to your team in 2020. 

With Christmas around the corner, it’s time to get your office in the holiday spirit. If you haven’t already been blasting holiday tunes for weeks (guilty), we’ve compiled a low-key Christmas playlist perfect for the office: a mix of classics, covers, originals, and acoustics – with no annoying songs in sight. Sorry, Alvin. 

Thanksgiving used to be one day long. 

Now the season for giving thanks gives us a whole month of celebrating gratitude, hosting Friendsgivings, and kick-starting the holiday season. 

In the office, however, with end-of-year goals sneaking up and holiday party planning in the works, it can be easily missed. This often raises the question: Given everything else going on, is it worth the trouble of planning an office potluck for Thanksgiving? Will my colleagues still be excited, post photos to Instagram, and enjoy the celebration, or will the meal be rushed as everyone is preoccupied with other stressors?

Here are a few ideas to help you decide 1) Is it worth having and 2) If so, how you can organize this event without sacrificing too much of your time. 

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Halloween has come and gone and all that remains in the office candy bowl are a few Tootsie Rolls, Circus peanuts, and a handful of candy corn that no one has the heart to throw away.

While businesses aren’t going bankrupt over the annual Halloween candy run, or the upcoming holiday happy hours, all of this Holiday-related spend is a source of ambiguity that leaves office managers with questions like: How much did we spend? What did we order last year? What should our budget be for next year?

Tracking this manually is a tedious process. And it also kind of ruins the holiday spirit. As an office manager, you want to enjoy the season too, not be running a Post-It note tally of the egg nog vs. antler headband spend. 

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♪ It’s the holiday season

So whoop-de-do and hickory dock

And don’t forget to hang up your sock

‘Cause at just exactly at twelve o’clock

… your boss is going to ask you to plan the office holiday party. ♫

Okay, we’re not fortune-tellers and we might not even be songwriters, but all too often, the responsibility of planning the holiday party falls on the Office Manager.

Sometimes this is a well-received request, and the OM whips out the Christmas gel pens and gets to planning. If that’s not you – we’re here to help.

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The Fourth of July is kind of a weird holiday. It always seems to fall on a work day, and you never know how many people will be in the office or which days people are taking off. The day after the 4th you could have anywhere from half of the office back, or just those three guys who you’re pretty sure snuck fireworks on the roof last year.

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