3 Tips for Purchasing Holiday Gifts for Coworkers

Holidays are joyous times of celebration, but many people struggle with how to approach the workplace gift-giving side of things. The last thing you want to do is send the wrong message to a coworker or go against the grain of established office gift-exchange traditions. To help, read these tips for purchasing holiday gifts for coworkers.
Know Your Work’s Unwritten Gift Practices
The single-most clarifying thing you can do is to pull someone aside to ask for a clear picture of how gift-giving works at work. No matter how hard you squint at your employee handbook, gift-giving practices probably won’t be in there. These traditions come into being with years of gradual change, depending on what colleagues you have and how they decide to celebrate. This is an aspect of work culture. Coworkers may organize a structured gift exchange, give small gifts, or not give at all. Knowing how gift-giving takes shape allows you to start looking for a gift.
Take Note of Their Interests
As you peruse stores, whether online or brick-and-mortar, knowing your coworkers’ interests makes the search for gifts much easier. Around a holiday, whether Christmas time or someone’s birthday, be attentive to the little things that coworkers talk about. You’ll know you have something to work with when you’re talking about a shared interest, and they exclaim about how much they want a certain movie or book or décor piece. Be careful, though—a surface-level interest they mention once may not be what they truly want. Invest in them as a person to know for sure.
As you cater to their interests, why not make reference to a memory or inside joke? This allows gift-giving to bring you closer to your coworkers and shows them that you care about the time you spend together.
Respect the Price Limit
One final tip for buying holiday gifts for coworkers—respect the stated price point for gifts if there is one. To prevent other people from feeling ignored, don’t give your closest coworkers an extravagant gift, at least while in the office. This creates unwanted drama that you don’t want. So, rather than getting your favorite temp that $400 iPod, challenge yourself to give a great gift within a budget.
As you search for a gift, look through what Quinn’s Mercantile has to offer. We operate a décor shop in Murfreesboro, TN, and pride ourselves on our artisan-crafted products. Our site and store feature hundreds of unique potential gifts that your coworker (the one with great taste) would love.