IDEO North America Milestones Gifting Guidelines + End-of-Year Gift

ABOUT THE IDEO NA EMPLOYEE MILESTONES GIFTING GUIDELINES PROJECT

Before IDEO reorganized into regions in 2021, we had no overarching company guidelines for how to honor — or how much to spend on — employee milestones like birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, births, deaths, and other important life moments. Instead, we had patchwork “rules-of-thumb” that varied from studio to studio. This meant some people would receive multiple gifts and attention during these moments, while others would receive nothing. This was causing harm and confusion, negatively impacting IDEOers' feelings of belonging — not to mention blowing our tight operational budgets. The lack of clear rules was also anxiety-producing for those responsible for getting and giving gifts — namely, our Coordinators and Workplace Experience teams — who wanted to ensure everyone was honored meaningfully and fairly.

After we reorganized from four 40- to 250-person studios into one, 500+ person IDEO North America region, our Senior Workplace Experience Director group knew we needed to establish some very direct guidelines, and a new way of organizing, regulating, and delivering these milestone moments at scale — STAT.

Our goals:

+ Increase belonging. Have every IDEOer feel seen and celebrated no matter what role they played, what department they were in, or their seniority or status.

+ Increase fairness. Create and maintain consistent, equal gift budgets and gift options across North America and ensure on-time delivery.

+ Increase transparency. Openly share the decision-making logic behind the new guidelines with everyone in IDEO North America.

+ Increase internal operational efficiencies and divert spending to diverse-owned vendors more aligned with company values.

+ Increase individual autonomy and choice while reducing waste by allowing IDEOers to choose gifts they wanted or needed.

The result:

We spun out our first Milestones Guidelines, simultaneously launching the back-end operational processes to support them, in January 2022. Changes included:

+ Creating more "pings of belonging" in an IDEOer's early career journey by adding 3- and 7-year IDEOversaries into the mix along with 1- and 5-year anniversaries (average job tenure in design consulting being 3-5 years).

+ Moving away from placing responsibility for sourcing and purchasing one-off gifts from individual Coordinators and Workplace Experience employees to partnering with Loop & Tie, a premium, woman-owned, carbon regenerative gifting service platform. Loop & Tie's curated, on-brand gift collections allowed us to automate repeated gifting moments such as 1-, 3-, 5-, and 7-year IDEOversaries (the bulk of anniversaries in the company), while also having a one-stop shop for on-demand gifting moments like births or illnesses. IDEOers received just-in-time emails on their IDEOversaries (with their manager cc-ed so they could join in the celebration) inviting them to either choose a tangible $100, $300, $500, or $700 gift, donate the funds to charity, or purchase an experience. IDEOers who were celebrating tenures of 10-, 15-, or 20+ years, received one-time bonuses automatically deposited in their paychecks and bespoke emails from their manager and/or shoutout from the Office of the CEO (depending on years of service). The Loop & Tie gifting platform, along with automatic deposits via our Payroll team, allowed us to streamline operational workflows, lightening the workloads — and relieving the anxiety — of our Coordinators and Workplace Experience teams, and consolidate our gifting budget (now managed by one person, not dozens), saving us 65% in year one.

+ Creating one Airtable "source of gifting truth" for our Coordinators and Workplace Experience teams that integrated into our HR systems. This Airtable automatically updated birthdays, IDEOversaries, and removed employee names when they left, eliminating the manual updating of multiple Google Sheets, a task that was both tedious and prone to human error. Everyone on our operations teams could also see which employees were gifted what and when, preventing gifting "pileups" from multiple departments/budgets, a common occurrence before our reorg.

+ Transparently publishing our Milestones Guidelines, including the logic behind our decisions, on our internal Help Desk site so all employees knew what to expect from IDEO at these important life moments — and be able to give our team ongoing feedback on how to improve them.

+ A gifting AMA Slack channel for all Coordinators and Workplace Experience teams monitored by our Milestones team. When tricky gifting moments arose, these teams could post questions and get answers allowing all of us to learn together and iterate on the guidelines.

While our Milestones Gifting Guidelines were originally designed for our IDEO North America employees, colleagues in our EU and Asia regions, who were also operating under gifting "rules of thumb" vs. rules, asked to adapt our guidelines for their regions. Soon, our sister company, IDEO U, also adopted the guidelines as well as the Loop & Tie gifting platform. Qualitative feedback on the new gifting system from IDEOers was overwhelmingly positive: "What a surprise and delight! I love being able to choose a gift that's right for me!" "It's so cool to be able to donate to charity, thank you!" "Seeing all the thought that went into these guidelines is amazing! I appreciate all your team did to make IDEO a more equitable and inclusive place."

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ABOUT PROJECT THX: 2022 END-OF-YEAR GIFT

IDEO NA's 2021 reorg created various sub-communities called Craft Cohorts, Domains, and Locations. At the end of 2021, each of these sub-communities independently decided to send their groups' end-of-year gifts to say “thank you." While this gifting was done with the best intentions, it put a strain on our Coordinators, Workplace Experience, and Production teams, in particular, as efforts to find, purchase, create, and ship gifts from various parts of the company (and country) came to a head simultaneously, with little warning, which was very costly and inefficient. In addition, some IDEOers received multiple gifts because of their relationships across various communities while others received no gifts, which was unfair (a similar situation to what inspired us to create our Milestones Gifting Guidelines).

In the fall of 2022, spotting another opportunity to streamline and systematize gifting in ways that would be more equitable, sustainable, and flexible, enhance personal autonomy, and save IDEOers and IDEO both time and money — while still being magical and delightful! — another Senior Workplace Experience Director and I pitched Project THX: a single end-of-year gift experience for IDEO NA.

Project THX, done in collaboration with a communications director and software director, was a multi-part gifting experience. We partnered with Viledge, a Black Woman-owned gifting service founded by Zuley Clarke, that supported other Black-owned businesses, to curate three gift boxes with the themes of "Create," "Convene," and "Care." Since spending quality time with family and friends — or rejuvenating "self-care" time — are common end-of-year activities, the boxes featured items to support different rituals. "Create" was a morning breakfast box filled with pancake mix, artisanal syrup, and freshly roasted coffee. "Convene" was a game night box with Actually Curious conversation starter cards, non-alcoholic bevvies, and seedy crackers. And "Care" was a night-time ritual box with hand-sewn sleep mask, herbal tea, and diffuser. A fourth gifting option, "Community," was an in-kind donation to The Tender Foundation, a charity for single mothers and their children chosen by Clarke.

To make the gift selection more on-brand and interactive, we worked with the communication and software designers on our team to create a bespoke internal website with custom pages for each employee that featured unique, AI-generated artwork and a personalized thank-you message from their manager.

The gift was unveiled during our Winter Together All-Hands Community Meeting in December 2022 to much "oohs" and "ahs" (make sure to check out the video of the cool interaction below)!

Project THX ended up saving IDEO 37% in total gifting costs from the previous year and contained the workload to four part-time people over two weeks instead of dozens of part-time people over three to four weeks, saving the company precious time and money during a tight quarter. Most importantly to me, the money we did spend went directly to small, independent Black-owned businesses or charities instead of mass retailers like Amazon.