A. Around the end of November, many employers are considering what benefits they can offer staff to celebrate Christmas with likely options including a works party, a meal or a gift for each member of staff. There are, inevitably, some areas of contention with gifts so although your client has the best intentions they could cause some upset with their employees.
Giving gifts will only be classed as bribery if the intention of the giver is to induce or reward improper behaviour. This means that, so long as your client is purely intending to give the gift to thank and reward staff for their hard work, this will not be classed as bribery. This remains so even if your client chooses to give expensive presents as the offence of bribery depends on the reason why they are giving the gift and not the gift itself.
When considering the financial impact of handing out gifts, your client should make sure they are offering gifts to all staff regardless of how senior or junior they are. This will help to reduce possible complaints about unfairness or bias towards some staff. This is even more important if your client has members of staff with protected characteristics as they could go on to claim that the reason why they didn’t receive a gift was because of this and, therefore, they have been discriminated against.
Your client may think they’ve solved the problem by giving all employees the usual present of a bottle of wine. Unfortunately, this has the potential to offend those who don’t drink or those with certain religious beliefs and other gifts can have similar issues. Your client may decide that the best route to take is to lay on an array of gifts for staff and allow them to choose the gift themselves. So long as the options are of similar price and value, this will hopefully remove the opportunity for complaints to be made.
