Gifts for a Remote or Hybrid Team
Ask once, ask properly, and give people a way to say no. Everything hard about gifting a distributed team is the address list, not the gift, and the address list is a people problem before it is a logistics one. Get the asking right and the rest is an ordinary send.
What follows is how teams actually collect home addresses without it turning awkward, what to do with them afterwards, and what changes when a gift goes to a house instead of an office. Our gifts for employees range is the practical end of it.
The address problem, and the three ways teams solve it
There are only three approaches in practice, and they suit different sizes of team.
Ask each person directly. Fine up to about fifteen people, and it has the advantage that nobody is surprised. It gets slow after that, and the last four replies always take a fortnight.
Send one form to everybody. One message, one link, a stated deadline, and a line explaining what the address is for and when it will be deleted. This is the version that scales, and the explaining line is what makes people answer.
Let people choose their own delivery point. Home, an office they visit occasionally, or a colleague happy to be the drop point for a city. This is the kindest option and it produces the fewest missed deliveries.
Whichever you use, say what happens to somebody who does not reply. A gift held back with no explanation reads as an oversight. A gift held for the next time you are all in a room together reads as a plan.
Privacy, and what not to do with a home address
We are not the people to give you a legal position on this, and anyone selling you gifts who offers one should be treated carefully. What we can describe is what good practice looks like, because we see a lot of it every year.
Collect the addresses for the send, use them for the send, and do not fold them into a general staff record afterwards. Keep the list with the person running the gifting rather than in a shared drive the whole company can open. Say up front how long you are keeping it, and then do that. And make the opt-out genuinely free of consequence: somebody who does not want a parcel arriving at their house should not have to explain why, and should still get their gift another way.
None of that is onerous, and all of it shows. A team that is told plainly what is happening with an address hands it over without a second thought, which is the outcome you actually want.
What travels to a residential address
A house is a different delivery problem from an office. Nobody is guaranteed to be there in the middle of a Tuesday, so the gift has to survive sitting still. That rules out anything needing a fridge and anything with a short life, and it leaves the shelf-stable end, which is most of what people enjoy anyway: biscuits and shortbread, preserves and relishes, tea and coffee, savoury things in jars and tins.
Size matters more than it does at an office too. A large gift at reception is impressive. The same gift on the doorstep of a share house is a problem the recipient has to solve. For a distributed team, one well-chosen medium gift beats one enormous one, and it keeps the whole team level, which is the thing people actually notice.
If nobody is there when it arrives, Australia Post takes it from there. Depending on the service and the address, the parcel is either left in a safe place or taken to a nearby post office for collection, and the tracking shows which. It is not a failure, but it does turn your gift into a small errand, which is one more argument for letting people nominate the address themselves.
The person who is away
Every list has one. Somebody is on leave, somebody is between houses, somebody is working from another country for six weeks. Do not solve it by guessing at an address.
Two things work. Hold that gift and hand it over in person when they are back, which is often better received than the parcel would have been. Or ask where they want it and send it later, on its own, with a note saying it waited for them. What does not work is quietly leaving them out of the round. That is the single most reliable way to make a gifting exercise backfire, and the person it happens to remembers it for years.
Timing, when the team is spread across states
A distributed team means every parcel takes a different journey, so they will not all land on the same day. Planning as though they will is how somebody ends up opening theirs a week after everybody else has posted a photo of theirs.
Two things fix most of it. Order earlier than a single-office send would need, and think in delivery weeks rather than delivery days. If you are sending to a whole list, give us the spreadsheet and we handle every address from one order: each address entered and validated up front, a week-commencing delivery choice rather than a date anybody has to guess at, anywhere in Australia, with tracking to the door. Same-day dispatch is available on orders placed before 1pm AEST/AEDT on weekdays, excluding public holidays, and shipping is charged at standard Australia Post rates for each address, with no handling markups.
Where the spread itself is the story, our Australia-wide delivery page covers the general version, and the corporate hampers range is where the larger sends start. You can also place a corporate order and have one person carry it from the first quote to the last delivery.
Where to start
Ask once, ask properly, let people choose the address, and give yourself a week more than you think you need. Our gifts for employees is the place to browse, one order covers every address on the list, and we issue a proper GST tax invoice, which keeps it simple for your finance team. If the list is larger than a handful, gifting to a team of 10, 50 or 200 works through what changes at each size. The Australian workplace gifting handbook is the guide above all of it, and 7 tips for working from home is a useful reminder of what the year actually looks like for the people you are sending to. Everything is hand-packed in Australia and sent Australia-wide, and you only have to give us the list once.
Frequently asked questions
How do you get employees' home addresses without it being awkward?
Ask once, in writing, and say what the address is for, who will see it, when it will be deleted, and what happens if somebody would rather not give it. Most of the awkwardness comes from an unexplained request rather than from the request itself. For a team of up to about fifteen, asking each person works well. Above that, one form with a deadline is faster and fairer. Always offer an alternative delivery point, and make declining cost nothing: a gift can be held for the next time you are in a room together.
Can gifts go to residential addresses?
Yes, and for a remote team it is usually the only sensible option. Choose something shelf-stable, because a house cannot be relied on to have somebody in it on a weekday, and keep the size sensible so the parcel is not a burden on a doorstep. If nobody is there, Australia Post either leaves it in a safe place or takes it to a nearby post office for collection, depending on the service and the address, with the tracking showing which. Letting each person nominate their own address removes most of that risk before it starts.
What if someone does not want a gift sent to their home?
Give them somewhere else to send it and do not ask why. The usual alternatives are an office they visit occasionally, a colleague acting as a drop point for that city, or holding the gift until the next time the team is together in person. The important part is that the alternative is offered up front, in the same message as the request, so declining reads as a normal choice rather than an objection somebody has to raise.