Tip for Christmas Gifts for Bosses on a Budget
As a part of my Christmas shopping, I always like to get something to give to my bosses and other people at work who I regularly deal with at work. I don't normally get stuff for others on my own team at work, but I like to for other people who I regularly annoy ask for favors. For instance, our IT guy. He has a pretty demanding job, as he serves a lot of roles. He is always taking care of server deployments, management, migrations, etc, etc. Also, at my job, we have an "office mom" (she likes being called that). I don't work in the office, but she still does a lot for me, as almost anything HR-related goes through her. PTO, health insurance things, travel plans, expense reimbursement, etc.
On top of those people, I, like many others, have multiple managers. Even though the company has a laid out organizational chart, it isn't really strictly followed. We are pretty informal. Plus, I work on multiple projects at various times, for different people. For the most part, I have 3 managers. For some issues, I go directly to the CEO. For others, I go to the Director of Product Development, and for yet others, I go to the Project Lead for my product team.
A good way to handle a large number of Christmas gifts for people at work is to get together with other co-workers and to pool your resources. Almost everyone else at my company is in the same boat, and it can be very costly to buy gifts for people at work, especially when you are trying to stick to a Christmas budget. But by pooling your resources, you collectively get something a little bigger for them, at a lower cost to you.
In my case, there are 9 of us who are pooling, and we are looking at spending about $25 each. Both my wife and I allocated $30 in our Christmas budget for each of us to spend on work people, so this works out perfectly. So all together, we will have $225 to spend on 7 people. We are breaking it up as $40 ea for CEO/CTO/Director/Lead, and about $20 ea for other supportive people.