How to engage employees during Christmas and other seasonal celebrations

Thinking ahead: 4 ideas to celebrate the festive season

Though it might not feel like it just yet, Christmas and the festive season are coming up, and we know that HR teams are busily planning alternatives to the annual Christmas party and thinking about ideas to connect, recognise and support their people to end the year on a positive note. 

To help bring light to the lives of your people, leaders can implement a variety of tools to connect, support and inspire employees, no matter what or where they're celebrating. 

In 2019, Reward Gateway ran a survey that found that 65% of employees agreed their employers could do more to understand what would be most helpful to them during the holiday season. At a time when budgets are tight and household incomes may be suffering due to job loss or other financial stress, your employees may be saying show me the money when businesses can’t afford an expensive company-wide pay rise. 

Our experience has shown us that the ability to make an employee feel seen, supported and part of something bigger than themselves is critical to organisational and individual success. 

Here are a few alternatives to the year-end festive celebration that employers can put in place today, to make an impact for your workforce all year long:

1. Give your people the full value of end-of-year rewards with the power to choose what they can spend their dollars on to buy what matters most to them, whether that’s money towards their everyday shop or the big-ticket items that’s on their children’s wish lists. Bonus: Keeping them digital and automated will relieve your time-poor HR team of sending physical gifts or spending time aligning spreadsheets with new addresses, names and amounts.

2. Customise rewards beyond the traditional and give a meaningful reward to your employees. Think, lunch with the CEO, extra holiday or even the option to give their reward back to charity if that’s how they wish to celebrate. Tailor employee rewards to suit your employer brand and double down on their accomplishments throughout the year with a reward that they’ll be sure to remember.

3. Offer creative benefits (without breaking the bank!). Add a fresh and innovative employee benefits program to extend your employees’ disposable income all year long. Reward Gateway’s platform is one of those benefits that is a low-cost, low-maintenance yet highly effective and popular benefit for employees. We’ve seen the incredible impact it can have on a household’s disposable income and organisations that launch pre-Christmas use it as a way to boost morale and strengthen the financial wellbeing support of employees.

4. Support your employees’ wellbeing. The festive season may be bright, but it also brings added stress, especially when coupled with an ever-evolving backdrop of COVID-19 on the cusp of ruining plans. Set your employees up for success to tackle whatever comes their way with wellbeing resources to improve their mental, physical and financial wellness that they can access anywhere, at any time.

Demant, a global provider in hearing technology and medical services, uses the Reward Gateway platform to automatically distribute rewards to its 1,000+ employees, scrapping the previous strategy of mailing a 'one-size-fits-all' gift to hundreds of different sites. Turning their end-of-year gifting into a fully digital process reduced the time, stress, administration and logistical cost of distributing physical rewards. We’ve also seen an uptick in our clients that use the employee discounts program offered by Reward Gateway around Christmas time, as employees look to the Cashback and discounts on top retailers to save money on their festive shopping – one of our clients, building merchant Travis Perkins, saw massive savings amongst its 20,000 employees of in AUD $140k in just one month in the lead up to Christmas. 

To help put the perfect bow on your end-of-year planning, Reward Gateway is offering a 4-in-1 bundle to new clients to take advantage of innovative ways to drive culture and connections, no matter where your employees are this year. 

To learn more, get in touch with a consultant today, or watch our latest webinar, How to Celebrate Employee with Creative Rewards and Benefits (that won't break the bank!), on-demand to hear Kelly Brown, Business and Events Specialist from Demant, share her first-hand experience of embracing digital rewards and benefits.