A leaving gift without the email chain

Someone is leaving on the 30th. By the 20th there is an email chain with fourteen replies, a card circulating in a drawer, and one person quietly out of pocket by sixty euros.

Nobody designed this. It just happens, every time, in every office.

Why the email chain fails

One person carries everything. They pick the gift, front the money, chase the contributions and get thanked with “oh, I’ll transfer you”. Two of the fourteen never do.

Nobody knows what has been paid. Contributions arrive by three different methods over ten days, and the organiser is now doing accounting they did not sign up for.

The amount becomes visible. Someone asks what everyone is putting in, and now there is a number people are measuring themselves against.

The card goes missing. It always does. It reappears on the 31st.

Say the amount, once, in the first message

The single biggest improvement is a fixed figure. Not “whatever you like” — five euros, or ten. A fixed amount removes the comparison entirely, and it removes the awkwardness for the person who cannot spare more.

Say it in the first message, along with the deadline and the one way to pay. Not three ways. One.

Where a draw does and does not belong

This is worth being clear about: a leaving gift is not a draw. Everyone is giving to the same person, and there is nothing to assign. Drawing names for a farewell would be solving a problem that does not exist.

Where a draw belongs is the other half of the same office: the exchanges where everyone gives and everyone receives. Christmas, birthdays, the end of a project. Those have the arithmetic problem — eight people, fifty-six gifts — and that is what an assignment solves.

Knowing which one you are organising is most of the job.

A leaving gift that works

1. One organiser, named. Not a committee. The person who suggested it.
2. A fixed amount and one payment method, both in the first message.
3. A deadline three days before the last day, not on it.
4. One gift, or two: something practical and something personal. A voucher and a photo beat a voucher alone by a long way.
5. The card, digitally. A shared document collects messages from people who are working from home, and it does not get stuck in a drawer.
6. Hand it over at a fixed time. Otherwise it happens at the door, with coats on, and nobody says anything they meant.

The part people forget

Ask the person leaving nothing, but ask their closest colleague everything. What they are moving to, what they will actually use, what they have been complaining about for a year. A sixty-euro gift chosen from a year of noticing is worth more than a two-hundred-euro one chosen from a catalogue.