The need of a gift policy in an organization has always been in debates. While a group advocates free hand gift system the larger group of people states that it is important for the company to offer guidance to its employee for what should or shouldn’t  be accepted as a present, offering, advertisement, award, or token of appreciation from a customer, vendor, supplier, potential employee, or potential vendor or supplier.

The gift policy offers some guidelines on whether the employees must accept gifts from inside or outside the organization and if yes, what must be the appropriate price of the value of the gift to be accepted. It also states what type of gift can be acceptable and who can offer gifts to the employees.

Additionally, under a gift policy, the organization can define the circumstances under which the employee can accept a gift and some exemptions to the policy; situations or instances under which employee may accept the gift which is otherwise not allowed in the policy.

Gift Policy; contribution to the Organizations Code of Conduct

The code of conduct of an organization is the supreme document. The gift policy ensures that the employees adhere to the code of conduct of an organization. While the code of conduct describes the way how employees must deal others in an organization, the gift policy lays further guidelines about the gift culture which is directly related to treating each other.

With a well-drafted gift policy, the employees are guided how to behave with the vendors, suppliers or customers of an organization and maintain high levels of ethics and morale.

A gift policy promotes equal treatment, unbiased professionalism, and non-discriminatory actions in their dealings with all vendors, suppliers, customers, employees, potential employees, potential vendors or suppliers or/and any other person, with whom they come in contact within the organization.

Gift policies in today’s scenario:

Not many years ago, gift policy was a mere idea written on a paper which was not paid enough importance. High-value gift baskets were freely traded between internal and external members of an organization without any scrutiny. However, with more structured Human Resource practices, today organizations have a set gift policy not only in books but duly imposed in the organization culture.

A comprehensive gift policy educates not only the employees but the Vendors and suppliers or any other external source of business about the gifting guidelines. This is indeed a fair method to treat inappropriate gifts in an organization. There is no way that some employees in an organization would get benefitted more than others due to personal influence or any gains due from a business deal or transactions.