2020 Gift Guide To Please Your Remote Workers

On this holiday season due to the global shift to WFH resulting in 42% of the US workforce going full-time remote, employers search for special ways of showing gratitude to their employees.

Not to feel too remote from your remote workers, cut the distance and give your employees appreciation with the gifts that will please them and help stay productive and motivated throughout a new promising year.  

This guide will assist you in developing your company's gift-stack. But before diving in the actual list, there are useful tips to keep in mind to make gift-giving a memorable and pleasant experience.

Make best of inspiring experience

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Browsing the stories (telling of various gifts, from most extravagant to highly practical like grocery store gift cards), HR teams can get inspired by the companies that' made it happen' and collect best and proven ideas for meaningful gift giving.

Go completely digital

In busy preparation for winter holidays and worldwide shipping on probable delays, it could be a game-changer to give an upper hand to 100% digital gifts. Digital solutions exclude any hassle and will bring fun to your remote workers with a guarantee.

Reduce marketing

As the holiday season hits, inboxes get overflooded with marketing offers. Lots of companies traditionally jump at any marketing opportunity at this time of the year. However, when it comes to sending greetings and gifts to your remote workers, it is a wise move to resist any temptation of self-promotion.    

Quoting the best experts on gift giving:

Gifts that include company logos are the least desired of business gifts, making recipients feel less than appreciated and resulting in lower levels of satisfaction. One respondent said, “I enjoy buying & giving business gifts. I enjoy getting them, too. Having said that, I have far too many pieces of (#$($* with my employer’s logo on them.”

Be practical and thoughtful

In most cases, gifts are a reflection of businesses' values. Get started with mindfulness and practicality in mind: taking the perspective of the recipients of the gifts would be the best strategy that pays off by creating the image of the employer who is supportive and employee-focused.  

Personalize your gift

Adding a personally addressed message (especially if it is hand-written) is another way of 'humanizing' business and compensating the loss of their physical presence at work. If the gift allows customization with the remote worker's name, you can surely try it too.  It is a proven way of gift giving that is worth remembering.

For more ideas, read here, directly from the best corporate-gifting companies.

Is there something else for remote workers? In actuality, these recommendations work well for remote workers with the only add-on of extra attention to making clear company policies about the protocol.

This year marked with the pandemic fatigue might be a bad time for experiments.

Thus, it would serve best to think meticulously about gift delivery and format (online one-on-one, big virtual event, allowing unboxing, arranging feedback, etc.), and use the holiday season as an opportunity of staying connected, enhancing remote employees' engagement and perfecting communication.  

Top gifts by categories  

🎁🎄for motivation

Top Ideas 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣: coverage of learning needs, babysitting services,  arrangements for fitness routine.    

The best gift ideas for keeping remote workers motivated include coverage of superb learning materials from Master Class that can become a cradle-to-career promotion in 2021.

Another motivating gift includes subsidized babysitting services and babysitting cards that any work-from-home parent will appreciate.

Researches confirm that the best way to keep motivated is to be involved in activities excluding sitting down. Luckily, there are plenty of virtual fitness subscriptions to consider that will not only maintain motivation but also help train resilience and improve remote workers' health. A collection of virtual fitness apps best-suited your remote teams alongside features and price detailed info is here.

🎁🎄for work life balance

Top Ideas 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣: solutions for building work life boundaries, practicing meditation, supporting remote workers' mental health  

Remote workers report longer working hours due to the blur of border between work and life. To help your employees build the physical border digitally, there is a brilliant solution of implementing an automatic time tracker. It is designed to maintain work life balance not by declarations but in action.

We also consider time tracking tools to be an effective shortcut to building your employees' trust. Providing the instrument for accurate work time calculations, you equip remote employees with effective means of setting up clear boundaries on work time, prevent burnout, leverage technology, and create accountability at both ends.  

The benefits of meditation are hard to overestimate: aside from bringing calm and clear vision, they include improved focus, increased attention span and anxiety reduction.

Hence, meditation apps or meditation classes top our list of gifts for remote workers this holiday season. To review the best options, choose here .

Moreover, mental health days in addition to PTO would certainly be welcomed by your remote workers and could stay as a reminder of your thoughtfulness throughout the year of 2021.

🎁🎄for perfection of digital workspace

Top Ideas 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣: enhanced communication solutions (messaging, calling, chatting noise-free) for easier work  

Most of remote workers had to adjust to changing circumstances quickly and embrace work-from-home routine on the go, which created new challenges like limited interaction with colleagues. Fortunately, there are great solutions that enable employees to perform to the best of their abilities without risking digital fatigue.

Communication with Slack will be everybody's favorite. It allows remote teams to share ideas, make comments in real time and manage remote work with ease through Slack channels including options for group voice and video calls for the price starting with just $6.67 USD per month.

For impeccable communication experience, remote workers need noise cancelling tools: you can consider Krisp  that mutes microphone noise as well as mutes speaker noise within support for over 800 (!) communication apps for just as much as $5 per month.

Turning virtual communication into simple-to-handle experience for your remote workers, there are full-fledged communication platforms supporting video and voice chats like join.me that is open for 250 participants per meeting while providing 10 webcam streams, recording, 50 GB cloud storage, toll-free numbers and making annotations.

🎁🎄for looking best

Top Ideas 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣: attire for comfortable wear, insulated bottle for feeling hydrated,  snack boxes for healthy WFH routine

Chic casual attires are official champions in the work-from-home world creating a comfy yet put-together look. In such clothes WFH experience will surely be both pleasurable and productive. Whatever style your remote team shows preference to, with high probability, you will easily find its great WFH version.

With myriads of options to choose from, from t-shirts and to hoodies and classic sweatshirt, you have a chance to say thank you to your remote workers in most elegant way.

While working from home, it is essential to stay hydrated and keep a steady supply of water at your side. With an insulated water bottle as a gift, you show care on a budget: most options that are perfect for keeping your beverages insulated inside cost up to $30.

Working from home has a lots of benefits that include flexibility of schedule and possibilities of more optimized daily routine. However, the temptation of unhealthy choices is also higher.

Why not send your employees a healthy snack box then?  They can contain snacks typical of various cuisines. And some companies offer not only delivery alongside the best choice of healthy snacks but also provide booklets of recipes and entertaining culinary stories.

🎁🎄for feeling best

Top Ideas 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣: phone sanitizers for addressing health concerns, desktop plants and art gifts for beauty of workplace, cooking classes for unforgettable experience  

Help your remote workers to keep their phones sanitized and feel safe.

PhoneSoap is the best gift to imagine.It is a simple, great-looking charging case that uses UV light and eliminates 99.99% of germs on the phone surface. It also has a built-in acoustic amplifier so that your remote workers do not miss any important notifications.

Another rewarding idea pertains to organizing WFH workspace at best. Results of the researches confirm that workers feeling in full control of their workspace are 32% more productive.

To enhance remote work experience with easy-to-make gifts, employers may enrich employees' workspace and make it more sensory and stimulating by presenting plants or artsy desktop objects that are portable and perfect for decorating space.  

Contrary to common beliefs, experiential gifts successfully oppose material gifts because they enable the recipient to master new skills and enjoy an experience, which usually makes such gifts valuable and memorable.

Presenting your team with invitation to the cooking class that can be either virtual or allowing a physical presence, you can’t go wrong with introducing them to a new exciting experience that can be surely come useful with all the holiday season celebrations coming.