A short TV/radio segment in which leadership expert Beth Ridley discusses giving personal and experiential holiday gifts to coworkers to build meaningful connections and improve workplace culture. She recommends gifting items or experiences that reflect the giver (e.g., favorite documentaries with a streaming gift card, shared painting with bourbon, watch parties, virtual Airbnb Experiences like ramen tastings) and notes experiential gifts create anticipation, memories, and opportunities for stronger workplace relationships.
Chapters
And welcome back. Well, we often want to give gifts to our colleagues. So today consider more personal gifts that can create meaningful connections and positive relationships.
That's right. Beth Ridley is a leadership expert and workplace culture consultant, and she's here with us with great ideas. Hey, Beth. Always.
Hi. Good morning. Good morning.
Good to see you. Well, we love it when you're here. And I think this is the thing. This time of year, everybody wants more meaningful gifts. That's what we were chatting about. But when it comes to colleagues, I feel like sometimes it's even harder to do something personal. So what do you mean by doing a personal gift or more of an experience or something like that for a colleague, it's hard.
I think we fall back to like a bottle of wine or a fruit basket. Yes, we do. Yes. But you know what? It's a missed opportunity because the main thing at work is to build positive relationships with your co workers. It makes work more fun and more fun. So if you give a gift that's reflective of something that's unique about you, meaningful to you, or an experience gift, it just creates those bonding. So you might as well do that during the holiday season.
All right. So people are going to want to know more.
Talking about personal gifts. You're so I feel like you and your friends and especially your office here is really good at getting to know each other and giving nice personal gifts. But if you don't know someone in the office space so well that you know or you feel obligated maybe to get a gift for, how do you learn something about them to get a more personal gift?
It's actually really easy. You just think about something that you enjoy or something that's reflective of your heritage or your childhood or something and give that as a gift. I've got some really creative and fun examples because that opens the door for people to ask more questions and get to know you beneath the surface. And then it also opens the door for someone to share something unique or meaningful about that.
So something that I like and personal to me, I could gift to someone else that they enjoyed as well and explain why.
That's exactly right. It just sparks conversation and it sort of opens the door for someone to share something about themselves also.
So this is interesting because I think most people would hesitate to do it, right? They think, oh, giving a gift is about the other person. But this is truly a way to create connection, strengthen the relationship. So give us some examples of a way you could kind of gift yourself to.
Okay, so here's three really creative examples so someone and I put this challenge out to my clients. So these are their examples. Someone loves documentaries. So she gave the gift of her top five favorite documentaries and an Amazon prime gift card so that they could watch them.
That's lovely.
Isn't that cute? Yeah. And it doesn't have to be that big of a deal because if it's personal, I mean, that sort of makes it super meaningful to the other person.
Yeah.
Here's another example. Literally, as I was waiting to come on here, I was talking to someone in the green room and sharing what I was talking about. And she said, you know what? She always gives her colleagues a bottle of bourbon. And she said she's going to plus it up. She loves painting, so she's going to bring in paint and some paper and they're just going to sort of like paint together as a team, she said, with the bourbon also, which is fine. Get real creative. That's exactly right. But I mean, you know, it's really easy to get inspired when something's inspiring to you. Now, my husband, who you've met, an attorney, not the most creative, but he rose to the challenge. He loves cycling, road cycling. So he's going to have his team members come over and they're going to do a Tour de France watch party co.
Very cool.
And it's also experiential because you're saying in addition to the personalized gifts. Experience gifts. What do you mean by that?
Experience gifts? You know what, we're all trying to downsize. We don't need more clutter, we don't need more stuff. And experience gifts actually last longer than material gifts because you have the anticipation of the experience coming up, you have the experience itself, and then you have the lasting memories. And if you can create fun, lasting memories, especially around work colleagues and work it, you associate that with work and it just sort of uplifts the whole environment.
So I guess two questions on that. Can you save the gift for after the holidays? Because it's so busy for people.
100%. And actually I say do that. So my husband, he's not going to do the Tour de France watch party during the holidays, clearly. But he gave like a card and set a date, and so people are looking forward to that sometime over the summer.
And what do you do? Because a lot of people are still virtual. Not everybody's back in an office. A lot of people have stayed at home.
Yeah.
Working from home. Yeah.
Do.
Are you obligated or people should still gift those co workers?
I think you can. And one of My favorite virtual experiences is online through Airbnb Experiences. So there's people all over the world who have a passion or an interest, and you can do a private virtual session. So with my team, we did ramen tasting in Japan. So some dude in Japan walked us to his favorite ramen shops, and we were all in different locations, and I just sent people a grubhub. That's so cool thing to have ramen.
I've never heard anything like that.
Yeah. And you can literally travel the world as a team without having to wait.
So are you.
Yeah, we're like, wait, how does this work?
You know, sign up for address or anything like that.
Wait, everybody listens.
So how does it. How do you find these?
You just go online. You just go to Airbnb Experiences. Yes, I know.
This is amazing.
Yeah.
I never heard of that.
We could sign up for that and do that as well.
I know.
Why don't you check out Milwaukee?
Absolutely. I've done magic in, like, India. I did holiday traditions in Kenya. And so, yeah, you can do it virtually as a team.
This is the new hot gift. Beth.
That was it. Forget the rest of the segment.
That's it. Now I actually just need to be in partnership with Airbnb.
I know you do.
I'm, like, promoting a whole other company. Yes.
That's a really great.
That is so cool. I love it. Overall, just to kind of wrap it up, what do you think are really the benefit of giving the gifts and doing something personal? Doing sort of experiential things like that?
Ultimately, it just builds better connections at work, and that's the biggest source of joy in life. And oftentimes times, they are free or at least less expensive.
Yes.
So that's a benefit, too.
That's so great. We love it when you're here.
So useful.
I know.
The perfect time.
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Happy holidays.
