Prior to working with Gift Better Co., CIRA’s People and Culture team spent hours sourcing gifts from Canadian businesses, getting individual items shipped to their office or the homes of their team members, and then delegating a small team to pack gifts and ship them out on an ad-hoc basis. While the ritual was fun at first, the process could not scale to meet the needs of the growing team, particularly for recurring events like employee onboarding which happened continuously throughout the year. Purchasing the items on an as-needed basis made each gift very expensive, but buying items in bulk meant needing somewhere to store them all until they were ready to be shipped out. 

CIRA asked the Gift Better Co. team to curate a custom employee onboarding gift for new team members to welcome them into the organization and start communicating their corporate culture even before day one. 

Due to the volume of employees being welcomed on a regular basis, they also needed a streamlined process for placing orders so that no one person was responsible for managing inventory, tracking expenses, or keeping tabs on what was shipped out and when.

To simplify the sending of employee onboarding gifts, we set CIRA up with their own custom gifting portal which allowed them to easily access their inventory of pre-approved onboarding gifts. With the portal up and running, CIRA team members can now easily send gifts to the homes of new employees through their private portal in just a few clicks. 

Now new hires receive an onboarding gift a few days before their official start date so that they can get excited about their new company.

To start curating the perfect onboarding gift for new CIRA employees, our team did an in-depth discovery call to get a sense of the company’s culture and how they wanted to convey that to new team members. Two onboarding gifts were created for CIRA, one for part-time team members and one for full time.