Average budget for gift experiences for employees: 30 euro/ person
When you say Christmas bonus, there are few people who can think of an experience in a flight simulator, a cooking class with a well-known chef, a DIY Christmas decoration workshop or a coffee masterclass with your team. And yet, such experiences are those that contribute to the happiness of employees and are the choice of more and more companies for showing appreciation, loyalty and recognition of their results, according to Complice.ro, provider of experience gifts and solutions of reward, recognition & incentives for companies
Gift experiences are becoming more and more popular for companies in Romania, which have replaced the classic teambuildings or Christmas parties with such unique experiences. They can be run both offline and online. Most requests for experience gifts come during this period from companies in the area of IT, banking, security, but also small businesses, entrepreneurial projects, explains Oana Pascu, founder of Complice.ro.
According to an internal survey of the company, 71% of employees feel more appreciated, and 43% feel more motivated when the classic gift offered by the employer is replaced by an experience.
Experience gifts that compensate the lack of … experiences
Depending on the reason for the award, the experiences are either personal – individual, couple or family – or dedicated to the whole team. The first category includes hundreds of variants of experiences, from adrenaline, driving or sports, to relaxation, gourmet, personal development, etc. The average for such an experience, usually given as a year-end bonus, is 30 euros, but the values range from 17 to 100 euros per person and even more.
FlexiBox packages also have an increased adoption rate, which includes dozens of experiences from the most popular categories – adrenaline, driving, gourmet, play-, from which the recipient chooses his own desired experience. In the corporate segment, FlexiBoxes are customized according to the client’s budget. In fact, more than 50% of the FlexiBox packages purchased in 2021 were intended for customers in the corporate segment, who offered them to employees with special performances or business partners.
The uncertainty that marks the social and epidemiological context puts its mark on the time spent by teams together, on collaboration and the quality of socialization. With most teambuilding events and Christmas parties canceled, employees feel more and more physically distanced from colleagues. That’s why companies are allocating increasing budgets to wellbeing projects, especially for unique team experiences.
Experiences dedicated to teams are more exciting, and they involve either escape rooms or treasure hunts, virtual cocktail parties or meetings with celebrities, or personalized interactive magic or improvisation shows. In some cases, activities involve the delivery of certain materials by courier to participants right at home (e.g. cooking workshop, private craft beer tastings, private decoration workshops, virtual dinners, etc.), and adaptation to the pandemic context has led to an efficiency of these operational costs. . In other cases, the activities can be carried out without props (e.g. espionage games, music contests, etc.). In general, the budget for such initiatives is between 15 – 75 euro / person. However, we notice an increasingly outlined desire to do something together, regardless of whether this experience is delivered online or offline, says Oana Pascu
Based on this trend, Complice.ro estimates that the last quarter of 2021 will represent at least 30% of annual turnover.
In the uncertain conditions of the pandemic, we remain at the estimate from the beginning of 2021, when we set out to return to the turnover at the end of 2019, which would represent an increase of over 15% compared to 2020, almost 150,000 euros . In the first 9 months we were even above this growth trend, but the gift season has the biggest impact on our figures, and the restrictions in November slowed down the upward trend. So far, the average value of gifts purchased in the residential segment is 190 euros, and in the B2B segment of about 800 euros, concluded Oana Pascu.
