Use a Delivery Service for a Gift Exchange
Office gift exchanges have been a long-time tradition during the holidays. There are two main styles of organizing gift-giving extravaganzas: Secret Santa and White Elephant.
Secret Santa works like this: each team member chooses a person at random (for example, everyone picks a name out of a hat), and that is who they purchase a gift for. The gift-giver remains anonymous, presenting the gift to their person in a secret manner (e.g., leaving it on their desk when they aren’t looking), and each person tries to guess who their gift came from after all gifts have been received.
On the other hand, the White Elephant game is played a little differently. Everyone brings a wrapped gift and chooses a number. The person who chose No. 1 chooses a gift from the pile and unwraps. The person who chose No. 2 then has the option to steal that gift to keep for themselves or open a new one. Then, whoever has No. 3 can choose to take gift No. 1 or 2 or open a new one, and so forth. There are various twists on these fun holiday office gift exchanges, but ultimately, the general idea is always some blind gift-giving.
Although it won’t be possible to replicate the exact concept of a white elephant gift exchange when planning it for a remote workforce, you can still organize a remote Secret Santa activity and keep the gift-giver’s identity a secret. That’s really the main difference between an in-office secret Santa and one that is completely remote.
Since the gifts are being shipped and delivered, a return address will ruin the secret part of Secret Santa! What’s the fix? To make sure that the gift-giver remains anonymous, you can ask that everyone participating use a different return address, like the game organizer’s address. This will keep the mystery alive and well between the gift-giver and the gift-receiver.
There are some helpful websites available that pair people up for the gift exchange, such as Elfster, which simplifies the organization process by letting you input all of the details for the gift exchange, matches everyone up, and sends them all of the necessary information. There is also DrawNames, a handy site that will save your list year after year so that you never get matched with the same person twice, and Giftster, which acts very much like a registry where participants can add items to a wish list and things can be marked as they are purchased. This Secret Santa generator is another option, as well.
You can take the remote gift exchange one step further and arrange for a virtual conference call where everyone can join together to open up their gifts and guess who their Santa was among the whole group. Play holiday songs in the background while everyone opens up their gifts, encourage people to dress up in festive colors and keep the holiday cheer loud and proud.
But what happens if you pick a person you don’t know very well? In this situation, you might not be sure what kind of gift to purchase for this particular co-worker because you don’t know much about their hobbies and interests outside of the workplace. The trick here is to think about practical gifts, like a wireless mouse, an insulated water bottle, or a planner. Other ideas could be a variety pack of K-Cup® pods, a colorful desktop calendar, a desk lamp, or a set of pens.
Remember that no one is expected to spend a lot of money on these friendly gift exchanges, so don’t get too stressed out about it if you end up picking a person you don’t know all that well. In most cases, there is a mutually agreed-upon cap on the dollar amount that each participant can spend on the gift. It’s just supposed to be a fun, light-hearted way to engage with your co-workers during a time when you don’t see each other in the office every day, as you once did.
