Creating a Culture of Generosity and Employee Appreciation

While many of us love to receive gifts, we prob­a­bly don’t spend too much time think­ing about the impli­ca­tions of gift-giv­ing. Some­one who does is Temy Man­cusi-Ungaro, CEO at Reachdesk, who has a vision to, ​“cre­ate a world with char­i­ty, where every busi­ness is loved by their cus­tomers, employ­ees and the planet.”

That’s the kind of vision that those of us at Fringe embrace and is why we recent­ly sat down with Temy on The Brag­Wor­thy Cul­ture to dis­cuss gift-giv­ing and its impor­tance to all stakeholders.

How It Started

Reachdesk was found­ed in 2018 and helps com­pa­nies deliv­er ​“moments that mat­ter” glob­al­ly, at scale. It pro­vides a plat­form for com­pa­nies to deliv­er gifts or direct mail at the click of a but­ton. These can help cre­ate deep­er con­nec­tions with cus­tomers, prospects and employees.

When they first start­ed they were send­ing hand­writ­ten notes. Soon they expand­ed into e‑cards and asked the log­i­cal ques­tion, why not include gifts? Cus­tomers loved that option, and soon, they were also using Reachdesk as a third-par­ty ful­fill­ment house for their own inter­nal swag.

They went from being UK-based, to all of Europe, then North Amer­i­ca and Latin Amer­i­ca. Dur­ing this glob­al expan­sion, they also start­ed to think about sus­tain­abil­i­ty and ways to min­i­mize the impact gifts had.

One way to deal with this was to cre­ate region­al hubs. Rather than doing a lot of long-dis­tance ship­ping, Reachdesk cre­at­ed ware­hous­es in dif­fer­ent coun­tries to reduce the dis­tance gifts need­ed to be sent. Addi­tion­al­ly, they leaned into local sourc­ing of prod­ucts, which not only was good for the local econ­o­my but for world­wide clients, as it offered hyper-local­ized selec­tion, be it hand­bags from Brazil or moon­cakes from Asia or choco­lates from Norway.

But sus­tain­abil­i­ty is only one part of the mes­sage that Reachdesk is try­ing to send. Real­ly, they’re about cre­at­ing a cul­ture of generosity.

Dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son, every­one under­stands the rea­son for gifts, and Temy isn’t going to dis­cour­age that think­ing. But if it’s the only time of year that a com­pa­ny thinks about giv­ing, that’s a prob­lem. ​“We want busi­ness­es to embrace lead­ing with gen­eros­i­ty.”

Leading with Generosity

Temy sees so many oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate ​“moments that mat­ter.” These include:

- Clos­ing a sale

- Anniver­saries, birth­days

- Major life events

- Recog­ni­tion

Busi­ness­es have to see that gift-giv­ing can be aimed at exter­nal and inter­nal stake­hold­ers. It’s just as rel­e­vant to sur­prise and delight team mem­bers as it is to do so with clients. These moments that mat­ter accu­mu­late and pay div­i­dends in cus­tomer and employ­ee retention.

Physical, Personal Gifts

While e‑cards and gift cards are a rel­e­vant part of a gift­ing port­fo­lio, Temy insists there is real pow­er in phys­i­cal gift­ing, and fur­ther, in per­son­al­iz­ing those phys­i­cal gifts. This is ampli­fied in a more remote work­ing world.

“Every time a pack­age comes to my home or office, I’m run­ning to grab a pair of scis­sors or knife to cut it open. I feel like there’s some­thing spe­cial for me,” says Temy, and he’s not alone in that sen­ti­ment. And those warm fuzzy feel­ings pay off in cold hard sta­tis­tics: Temy claims a 30X faster and high­er response rate to phys­i­cal gifts, rel­a­tive to dig­i­tal ones.

Per­son­al­ized gifts offer a dou­ble-wham­my: they indi­cate that you know some­thing that per­son loves, and putting their name on it shows that you care about what they care about. Per­son­al­ized golf balls, for exam­ple, are a real­ly fun gift for the avid golfer to receive.

Part of the impact of phys­i­cal and per­son­al­ized gifts is also due to tim­ing. Temy wants new employ­ees to get their wel­come pack­age as soon as pos­si­ble, for example. 

You can see how eas­i­ly moments that mat­ter can be built with just a lit­tle bit of thought and intention.

Tracking

These sorts of moments can’t be left to chance, and thank­ful­ly, Reachdesk allows its cus­tomers to track which gifts are going where, what gifts a par­tic­u­lar client has received (and when those gifts were redeemed), and even to auto­mate gifts to go along with cer­tain mile­stones across var­i­ous teams, be they sales or out­reach or cus­tomer ser­vice. Reachdesk also allows you to inte­grate with your own soft­ware, be it Sales­force, Salesloft, Mar­ke­to, Hub­spot, etc.

All of this track­ing allows com­pa­nies to see what they’ve spent, down to the pen­ny, so they can mea­sure the ROI of their gift­ing pro­grams. This also allows them to be pre­cise and adjust bud­gets to chase what’s work­ing and pare down what’s not.

Temy loves this track­ing, because it shows com­pa­nies how effec­tive gifts can be. Often a gift pro­gram can be up to 5X more effec­tive than any­thing else a com­pa­ny is doing before becom­ing a Reachdesk client.

Transparency

A final way to cre­ate moments that mat­ter is to give your team mem­bers the gift of trust, and that’s some­thing that Temy and his man­age­ment team do by shar­ing a lot of what is going on with the busi­ness direct­ly with employees.

It’s not some­thing most employ­ees are used to, but when they do expe­ri­ence it for the first time, they real­ly appre­ci­ate it, and get a bet­ter appre­ci­a­tion and under­stand­ing of how the com­pa­ny is try­ing to live what it is preach­ing. This leads to stronger cohe­sive­ness in the orga­ni­za­tion and people.

In fact, a cou­ple of times Temy has shared things with the team soon­er than he was cer­tain they would hap­pen, and then those events hap­pened ear­li­er than expect­ed. If he had wait­ed to share, it would have been too late alto­geth­er. Open­ness is even more rel­e­vant in a fast-paced world.

Check Out the Full Episode

If you’d like to learn more about Temy and his pas­sion for lead­ing with gen­eros­i­ty, lis­ten to our full inter­view by tun­ing into the pod­cast on Apple or Spo­ti­fy.

Look­ing to build your own Brag­Wor­thy Cul­ture? Fringe can help. Fringe is the num­ber one lifestyle ben­e­fits mar­ket­place. Give your peo­ple the pow­er of choice and save a ton of admin­is­tra­tive headaches by con­sol­i­dat­ing exist­ing ven­dors and pro­grams into a sim­ple, auto­mat­ed plat­form. Talk to our team to get started.