How to organise a fair office gift exchange

Office gift exchanges go wrong in the same three ways every year. Someone draws their own name and quietly redraws, someone spends nearly three times the limit, and half the team has forgotten the date by the time the cake arrives. All three are avoidable, and fixing them takes an hour in November.

Set the rules before anyone signs up

Pick a budget and write it down. Something modest, about the price of a paperback and a coffee, works in most offices. Below that people end up with novelty socks, and above it the colleague on a temporary contract feels the pinch. Say plainly whether gift cards and homemade things are allowed, and allow both. A bookshop voucher beats a desk gadget for the same money, and the colleague who bakes will bring better biscuits than any shop sells.

Make it optional, and make that easy. A sign-up list where people opt in works better than a message asking who wants out, because nobody likes being the one who declines in front of forty colleagues. Some people do not celebrate Christmas, some are new, and some are simply not in the mood this year. All fine.

Leave at least two weeks between the draw and the exchange.

Skip the hat

Drawing names from a bowl in the meeting room fails the same way every time. The last person draws themselves, the two people who share a desk draw each other, and someone who was at the dentist that morning has to be matched by hand, which means at least one person knows the whole table.

When you draw names online, everyone gets an email with the name they drew and the budget, and nobody can draw themselves. Nobody sees who drew whom either, unless the organiser deliberately looks it up in the settings. Colleagues working from home take part on the same footing as the people in the building.

Make it possible to buy for someone you barely know

The hardest gift in the office is the one for the colleague from the other floor. Ask everyone to add three lines when they sign up: something they like, something they collect or drink, and something they would never buy themselves. "Dark chocolate, crime novels, no candles" is enough to work with, and it keeps the number of mugs down.

Anyone who already has a wishlist on Happy Giftlist can share the link along with their three lines. A colleague who wants to buy something from it reserves it, and by default the owner sees nothing.

Run the exchange on a Friday afternoon

Pick the last hour of a Friday in the week before people start taking leave. Lunch is too rushed, and a Monday morning kills the mood. One room, everyone in it, gifts on a table, one person handing them out. It is all over in twenty minutes.

Reveal who gave what. An anonymous exchange spares shy people a moment of attention, but it also takes away the best part, like the receptionist finding out that the finance director knew about her thing for hot sauce. If someone really hates the attention, let them keep their own gift anonymous and reveal the rest.

Have two spare gifts in a drawer

Someone will be off sick, and someone will have left theirs on the kitchen table. Buy two spares within the budget beforehand. A Moleskine notebook and a book voucher suit almost anyone. The organiser hands one over, the missing gift changes hands privately the next week, and nobody is left standing there empty-handed.

Deal with a gift that is clearly over budget or in poor taste afterwards, one to one. Bringing it up in the room makes the problem bigger than the gift.

For a hybrid team, have everyone post their gift to the recipient's home a week ahead and open them together on a video call. It works less well than a room, and much better than leaving the remote colleagues out.

Once the date is set, the whole thing is one form and one email. You can organise a Secret Santa in ten minutes: set the budget, add the names, and let the draw do the matching.