Contributing Editor Bill Meagher weighs in on the age-old dilemma of what to give.
So every year, you get to the holidays and all you can think is “Whose idea was this?”
Everybody wants to take time off. Valuable resources are being used to plan the company party. And the parade of employees sneaking out early to chase down a little shopping is very nonproductive. All you can think about are the year-end numbers and how all of this “ho, ho, ho” crap is getting in the way.
You’re a warrior, a captain of industry, the backbone of our capitalist society. You look at the Occupy Wall Street movement and think, “There’s a reason these people can take time to protest. They don’t have jobs and aren’t contributing to the GNP.”
In short, you’re the man.
You’re also a Class-One-Stone-Cold-Mortal-Fly-to-Vegas-Bet-the-House-Lock to be named Scrooge this year. Your employees are sizing you up for do-it-yourself YouTube videos of “A Christmas Carol” with your head shot pasted in. They’re making jokes in the break room with the punch line, “No, Scrooge wouldn’t do that.”
For executives stumped at this point, go to your bookshelf and spy the book, A Christmas Carol. It’s right there next to your copy of the One Minute Manager, Good to Great and something by Zig Ziglar.
So as a public service, NorthBay biz presents a guide to avoiding the Scrooge label this season. Feel free to take notes in the margin and to use a highlighter—unless you’re using a tablet.
Our guide is a collection of tips to guard one’s reputation, part gift guide and part primer for getting through the holidays without having the talent at your company rooting for Santa to bring you nothing but coal for your stocking—and not that really neat “clean coal” the coal industry is doing such a spiffy job telling us about.
The basics
The first thing you, as a potential Scrooge, need to realize is that perception is reality. You may have a heart as big as all outdoors, but if your employees perceive you as the digital era Ebenezer, their subtle actions are going to have larger impacts than just having the Ghosts of Christmas Past visit you after a few too many eggnogs.
So the first order of business is to welcome the holidays into your office. Please notice the use of the word “holidays” in that last sentence. That’s because even Santa will acknowledge that we live in the capital of political correctness. The North Bay has much beyond an intelligent and willing labor force, decent distributing channels and a burgeoning biotech corridor to recommend it. From a lovely climate to top-drawer nature, it’s quite the place to hang your Giants baseball cap. But one of the things that can be a wee bit frustrating is the worshiping at the altar of Political Correctness. Life was more fun before everything became deadly serious and feelings became paramount.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So the holidays now officially include: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Festivus, Human Light, Ramadan, Winter Solstice, The Day of the Return of the Wandering Goddess, Yule and Celebration O’ Plastic.
I’d like to go into vivid detail about this list of celebrations but you all know about Google. Also, I made the last one up.
The party
As the well-intentioned folks in human resources can tell you, there’s much peril in not including all stakeholders in the office celebrations, so any tradition can be considered. But the more practical solution is to make the season generic, festive and relaxing.
Let me tell you a story. It’s a true story and, like some stories, it has a moral. At some point in the not-too-distant past, I worked for a company in Novato that was engaged in writing business and investment newsletters. In the interest of engaging in the spirit of the holidays, I’ll allow the company to go nameless—that will be my gift. The corporate culture at this anonymous outpost was one of pinching pennies until management’s fingerprints had been replaced by Abe Lincoln’s likeness. It wasn’t about the company struggling for profit; rather, it was the CEO’s desire to run an enterprise that resembled a skeleton, which in some ways made each day like Halloween with more tricks than treats.
So holiday parties were never swanky affairs featuring ice sculptures or Jose Feliciano in person singing “Feliz Navidad.” But one year, our holiday party was held at a homeless shelter that had a program for training its residents to work in restaurants as servers and chefs. While we weren’t pressured to make a donation on the spot, in the days leading up to the soiree, it was implied that such a gesture would be “a nice thing to do.”
While all of us understood the idea of paying the shelter for lunch and contributing to a worthy community program, it was also the once-a-year party where, in theory, the company did something for its employees. Had the company said it would match or double employee donations to the shelter and, in the spirit of giving, how about we all do something to help, that would have been fine with the rank and file. Of course, we would have expected a party of some sort as well, perhaps held at a local business as it had been in previous years. That way, we would have felt appreciated and felt good about doing something positive for the local economy as well.
Following the shelter lunch, there were more than a few grumbles about the value the company felt for employees, and the hard feelings grew. Later, when things did get challenging from a bottom-line standpoint, the holiday party turned into a potluck lunch and morale dropped faster than Charlie Sheen’s popularity on the set of “Two and a Half Men.” Moreover, with morale bobbing along below sea level, the New Year dawned not with the can-do attitude that’s critical to a company fighting to get back into the black. Rather, the predominant attitude could best be characterized by the phrase, “Why bother?”
Charity begins at home
Having spent a fair amount of my career in the newspaper business, back in the days when it was a license to print money (phrase stolen shamelessly from Ben Franklin) and not a death sentence, December papers were chock full of stories about charities that needed a hand. We stocked the pages with heart-tugging tales of families in desperate or heartbreaking situations. It was as if we discovered in the last month of each year that people needed help. Come January, we went back to the business of covering the news and forgetting about the community.
And though I knew that the stories I wrote shed some light on nonprofits that needed help, the tales also made me feel like a hypocrite. How come the paper and I weren’t writing about these organizations and people the rest of the year?
So another step away from Scrooginess-as-usual is setting up a program where your company gives to organizations all year and encourages employees to do the same whether through cash donations, a match program or donating volunteer time.
A season for giving
Regardless of your religious persuasion or feelings about the holidays, it seems to be a universal truth that during the season, we’re expected to give others gifts. Indeed, giving someone a gift that they truly enjoy is a gift one can give one’s self if one was of a mind to do that for one.
But knowing what to get for someone isn’t always easy. All you have to do is walk into Macy’s men’s section to know this is a supreme truth. How else do you explain the endless 29-piece toolkits, razors of every color and description and golf accessories that wouldn’t make sense if you were a touring pro? I mean, I get the fact that all of us have whiskers, live to replace the 3/8-inch wrench with its metric cousin and that you can never have too many tees or bag towels. And I realize these items are placed in the men’s section because, as a species, we’re regarded as primitive when it comes to our gift-giving skills. We’re more likely to make an impulse buy when it comes to getting something for Uncle Ron, who we don’t really like.
But the thing is, we’re required to get him something, wrap it festively and hand it to him. This exercise results in him taking five minutes unwrapping the gift because of his bursitis, and another five minutes of his doing his best to tell you that the electric dog polisher you just got him is exactly what he was trying to find. Then he goes into such painful detail about his bursitis that you wish you were home with his tea cup Chihuahua that’s the size of an undernourished rat, yaps incessantly and responds to “My Little Taco.”
Not to put too fine a point on it.
It becomes even more complicated if you’re put in a position of having to buy something for your employees or even Secret Santa gifts. With that in mind, here are a few dos and don’ts for gift giving.
Martha Stewart, bless her ex-con heart, will tell you that giving somebody something you’ve made is indeed a very admirable thing during the holidays and your effort will be deeply appreciated by the recipient. In addition—as Martha would no doubt point out if we were all sitting someplace watching her latest TV show—you can save a little cash by making something at home rather than heading to the mall.
On the other hand, not all of us are good with a glue gun. Equally troubling is the fact that some of us have skills that people pay for but are really not applicable to the notion of making something to give as a gift. For instance, I essentially gather information and sell words for living. But my sentences are not necessarily everybody’s glass of grog (a feeling you may be getting right about now).
As long as we’re considering celebrity gift giving, let us open our circle to Oprah. Now here’s somebody who knows how to hit the right chord. Just reach under your seat and find those keys to your new car!
Nothing succeeds like excess
With that sentiment in mind, here’s an idea for the enterprising CEO looking for a gift to make his or her employees sit up and take notice: Cash.
Just a thought.
There’s also something to be said for gift certificates. They’re generic, so they can be given to anybody. Giving gift certificates doesn’t require any sort of awkward survey to be filled out by employees and returned to HR and then distributed to the gift committee.
Finally, we’re lucky enough to live in Wine Country, which means a bottle of the grape is always in good taste. I mean even if somebody doesn’t drink, an employee can always re-gift the bottle for a host gift at any number of holiday parties.
Moreover, with a little planning, you can have the company name slapped on the label and cover not only employees but clients as well. Want a little value add with your Cabernet? How about the fact that you’re helping fuel the local economy? And while I’m not an accountant (nor do I play one on TV), it seems to me that, with the company name on the label, those young bottles of red become advertising expenditures and qualify for write off status.
Disclaimer: This is not meant as tax advice. Speak with your accountant about specifics. Your mileage may vary. For erections lasting more than four hours, consult a physician and bust out the digital camera.
Now let’s move on to the gifts that aren’t your best moves. The holiday season is full of traditions. On cold winter nights, when the mercury in these parts dips into the low 40s, in some suburban neighborhoods, groups of carolers swathed in North Face and Patagonia gear can be found knocking on doors and singing Christmas tunes. This is an example of a holiday tradition that’s cute and kind of charming in an old school way. When it becomes creepy is when they do more than one tune and act like they’re hanging around for some sort of tip. I mean, how much do you grease a guy dressed in a down vest the color of a margarita so he’ll stop singing?
Fruitcake is another example of a bad holiday tradition. Nobody likes fruit cake—except for the companies that manage to sell those baked bricks filled with candied-jellied allegedly fruit-like bits. While the cakes may have a shelf life that can be measured in the same way you measure nuclear fallout, there are no real uses for such cakes, with the possible exception of doorstops, because not even a mouse will eat that junk.
Not even if it were stirring on Christmas Eve.
