Companies are often concerned with increasing employee morale because a dissatisfied workforce can turn minor office hindrances into human resources nightmares. According to our study, both gift-giving traditions and holiday parties increased workplace morale. Making the office more festive is also likely to have a positive effect on employees' relationships with co-workers and higher-ups.
Unfortunately, when it came to workplace satisfaction, the impact wasn't as large for a modest portion of employees. Only 65% of people said a workplace gift-giving tradition positively affected their job satisfaction, while 66.8% said the same of a holiday party.
Party and Give Till 2020
While there's no one-size-fits-all approach to celebrating with your team, our findings suggest that upping the holiday spirit around the office with a party and/or gift-giving tradition may do a lot of good. Contrary to recent developments, the majority of your workforce is looking forward to letting loose.
Is gift-giving your favorite tradition? Nearly 53% of the participants in our study reported being mostly or very satisfied with the gifts they received from co-workers. Visit Office Depot for holiday gift exchange ideas – we've got gifts under $25 that will surely raise any office's morale.
Methodology and Limitations
The data used in this project was curated via survey on November 1, 2019 using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. To qualify for the survey, participants needed to be currently employed and work at a company that had workplace holiday gift-giving events and/or parties. There were a total of 1,005 participants. 696 participants had a holiday gift-giving tradition at work. 922 reported receiving a holiday gift from a co-worker at least once. 922 reported attending their workplace holiday parties at least once.
For this survey, the term "holiday" was defined to participants as referring to the end-of-year holiday period.
For the graphics titled, "All About Workplace Holiday Parties" and "All About Workplace Gift-Giving," enjoyment included people reporting they moderately or very much enjoy workplace holiday parties and/or gift-giving.
The data was not statistically tested. Also, as the data rely on self-reporting, there is the potential to introduce issues such as exaggeration and selective memory.
Fair Use Statement
We're big fans of holiday cheer, and we know there's no better gift than good content. Feel free to share these findings for noncommercial purposes with your co-workers and friends, but don't forget to cite this study and link back to this page.