• Cyburbia is a friendly big tent, where we share our experiences and thoughts about urban planning practice, the built environment, planning adjacent topics, and anything else that comes to mind. No ads, no spam, and it's free. It's easy to join!

Gift Policy

michaelskis

michaelskis

Sawdust Producer
Messages
25,900
Points
74
AICP, IMCA, and others have ethics policies pertaining to the acceptance of gifts. But does your place of work?

Recently my community adopted a zero gift policy for all. It was put in place late last summer and a memo of explanation went out. There was some grey area in the policy and a recent explanation too a very hard line. Not only are we not allowed to receive any gifts from developers, contractors or citizens, no gifts from other staff. This means no secret Santa, no buying new staff on their first day, or staff on their last day.

The only exception was is potlucks or food that is shared with all staff in-house and paper cards. (No gift cards)

Does anyone else have a similar policy? I am trying to find ways to show appreciation for my staff, does anyone have any ideas?
 
Your policy is pretty strange--I haven't seen one that draconian. I'm honestly not sure I've seen one with a hard line on outside gifts like that, and I'm curious how meals out are treated. I have found that planners in general are about 50/50 on me buying lunch, and it sometimes varies based on whether there might be a project opportunity coming up. But the ones I do that with I'm tight enough to know to ask, or I'll actually avoid taking them out altogether if I think we're within a couple of months of bidding on something.
 
As individuals, we can accept gifts and meals up to a value of $20.00.



On the rare occasion somebody gets a gift worth more than $20.00, like the old school food baskets that you might get around the holidays, we give it to Corporation Counsel for them to determine what to do with it and they usually post a memo on it that it's been "approved for distribution" or whatever and then put in our kitchen for whoever wants to pick at it. Most of the developers and brokers and organizations that we work with have been working with us for years and know we cannot accept gifts as individuals. If they want to send us a year end thank you or a token of appreciation at the end of a big project, they now usually send it addressed to the department as a whole. According to our merit rules, Corporation Counsel does not need to sign off on those gifts (but we do usually send it up to them first).



About 15 years ago, when we still had a front counter, one of the clerks who worked up there would listen to a local radio station in the mornings and would call in all the time when they would have contests. I remember one time she actually won donuts for the office from Tim Horton's and the radio station had to fill out an affidavit or something that these were contest winnings open to everybody in the listening radius and not a gift. :r:
 
We can accept where I currently work following state policy which I believe is $50 or less. A developer always bring me a personal gift, usually stamped with their corporate logo. Been working with this individual for 28 years off and on between his various stops as well as mine. Previous place was zero acceptance (but golf with the ACM and a developer was :td:) and all gift basket type items were shared with the department/floor.
 
michaelskis said:
AICP, IMCA, and others have ethics policies pertaining to the acceptance of gifts. But does your place of work?

Recently my community adopted a zero gift policy for all. It was put in place late last summer and a memo of explanation went out. There was some grey area in the policy and a recent explanation too a very hard line. Not only are we not allowed to receive any gifts from developers, contractors or citizens, no gifts from other staff. This means no secret Santa, no buying new staff on their first day, or staff on their last day.

The only exception was is potlucks or food that is shared with all staff in-house and paper cards. (No gift cards)

Does anyone else have a similar policy? I am trying to find ways to show appreciation for my staff, does anyone have any ideas?
Click to expand...
That is a bit over the top. Most of the gifts are food. We typically just put any gifts out for anyone in the building to eat.

We can accept gifts up to $50. We can also accept up to two meals not to exceed $64 total within a year. They just moved them up a couple of years ago.

Occasionally, we get branded items like coffee cups, knockoff yeti cups, or bag. The state has deemed anything with a logo to have no value. So we can technically accept nice stuff provided it has been "defaced" with a company logo. We have a bunch of branded coffee mugs in breakroom kitchen. No one really wants to be seen out with a developers swag.

We had a lovely Korean lady opening a new donut shop. She kept dropping off dozens of donuts for the office from their other location while this one was getting set up. We finally had to ask her to stop bringing donuts. We said it was because of ethics laws, but really everyone was just gaining weight.
 
I forget what our gift limit is. I think $20. I just take it to the director's assistant. Ask if it needs to be recorded as a gift and then throw it on the communal table for the team to devour.
 
Back
Top