With burnout on the rise, how you reward employees with holiday gifts this year is more important than ever. An Indeed survey reveals millennials, who will comprise 75% of the global workforce by 2025, are the most affected group, with 53% burned out pre-COVID and 59% experiencing it today. While your holiday gift won’t be the end-all, be-all solution, understanding what your millennial employees appreciate most will go a long way in showing how much you value them. We recently conducted our own research into holiday gift preferences among millennials. Here’s what we’ve found and how you can apply it to your employee gift giving.
Research Into Holiday Preferences Among Millennials
We fielded a ten-question Google Consumer survey of U.S. adults over the age of 18. The data reveals why millennials find gift cards — giving and receiving them — so attractive:
- Millennials will do more than 50% of their holiday shopping online, and over 40% will use a mobile payment system for all purchases.
- Almost half of millennials prefer to receive, and nearly 40% prefer to give, virtual gift cards or Virtual Visa® cards.
- 30% prefer to receive instant rebates or incentives virtually as well, and 40% consider that to be important to their purchase decision-making.
The Benefits of Virtual Gift Cards for Employee Holiday Gifts
Given the preferences of your millennial employees, not to mention the supply chain disruptions and shipping delays that are plaguing the season this year, gift cards are a great option to give to your employees. Particularly virtual gift cards.
Even so, there’s often a perception from employers that gift cards are impersonal particularly now that there’s even less in-person interaction in the workplace. But there are definitely ways to give millennials what they really want for an employee holiday gift while adding that personal touch. You just have to be creative!
For example, if you’re not doing an in-person holiday party this year, you might consider a virtual one and have your gift cards focused on things employees could ‘bring’ to the event like drinks or food. Or, if your organization is too large for one party, break it up by teams and have the gift cards more personalized to the personalities of those employees who will be attending that particular event.
What’s more, with virtual gift cards through our platform you can customize every step of the redemption process by adding your branding and messaging. It’s a perfect way to personally thank your employees for all their hard work and make the experience unique to your brand.
From Amazon to Virtual Visa reward cards, Virtual Incentives offers you 1050+ brands, in 51 countries and 43 currencies to choose from for your employee holiday gifts this season. Contact VI to start rewarding your employees with virtual gift cards for holiday gifts today! Or learn more about Holiday Trends and Preferences Among Millennials in our white paper.