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Create a highly innovative team

How to make ‘secret Santa’ not suck

The Aim

To make your secret-Santa way less boring (and create fun and lasting memories for your team)

Resources

    • Drawnames.com (or drawing names out of a hat will do the same trick)
    • A gift exchange time (before your Christmas party works well)
    • Santa’s Helper (a facilitator)
    • A budget of no more than $30 per person (this can be company- or individually-funded)

Method

  1. Lock in a gift exchange date in the calendars. If you are meeting face-to-face, a month’s notice is ideal. However, if you are doing a virtual exchange, you might need a longer lead time to allow for postage.
  2. Use drawnames.com to allocate everyone a Secret Santa.
  3. Each team member is responsible for creating/procuring/purchasing a gift specifically for that person. Here’s where the ‘Inventiumised’ part comes in – via these guidelines:
    1. Clever, well-executed and personally made gifts get tons more laughs. Encourage your team to really (and stealthily) get to know their person and pick up on something clever to use as a gift base.
      1. EXAMPLE: Gifting a vegan teammate a tray of farmyard animals carved out of fruits and veggies.
    2. $30 is the maximum. However, some of the best gifts we’ve seen over the years were totally free.
      1. EXAMPLE: Gifting our Finance Manager a massive box of receipts for all the times she’s spent chasing receipts.
    3. Think about a ‘pre-amble’ to your gift to build suspense. For example, is there an opening story, some special instructions, or even a poem leading up to opening your gift?
      1. EXAMPLE: Gifting our Founder (Amantha) a hamper built up to be the ‘latest and greatest food fad’, but eventuated to be a ‘box of air’ – Amantha has been known to change her dietary requirements as often as she changes her clothes.
  4. Exchange the gifts at the chosen time and be ready to capture the funny moments.

The Outcome

Hopefully a significant increase in laughs and good memories! So often, teams resort to tried and tested versions of gift exchange. We encourage you to get your team’s creative juices flowing while getting to know your gift-exchangee. At Inventium, many of us can recall gifts and hilarious moments from years ago – bringing us much closer to each other and driving loyalty.

Other ways of creating a highly innovative team

Forge an exceptionally innovative team by harnessing collective intelligence through shifting. Elevate success rates with pre-mortems, reclaim time via zombie campaigns, validate ideas through experiments, and uncover lucrative business prospects, fostering a culture of continuous and transformative growth.