'Participation Is Expected From Everyone' — Manager Makes Secret Santa With A $50 Gift Minimum Mandatory
This is wildly inappropriate for about a dozen reasons.
DC Studio | Shutterstock It's that time of year again, when everything is about Yuletide cheer, togetherness, and the forced pressure to spend money you don't have buying things nobody needs for people you don't even like. Ho ho ho!!
Okay, that's maybe a bit extreme, but probably not all that inaccurate when it comes to the office dynamics of the holidays. The forced socialization is bad enough, but between all the potlucks and gift exchanges, it can get a bit overwhelming. And one worker's boss is doing their level best to make it orders of magnitude worse.
The worker's manager is making office Secret Santa mandatory with a $50 minimum.
Nothing says festive like making it mandatory! The worker wrote in a Reddit post that their manager recently asked the entire team if they felt like doing a $50 Secret Santa this holiday season.
To get a read on how everyone was feeling, the manager sent out a poll where people could check "yes" or "no" depending on their preference. Why they went to that trouble is a mystery, because it quickly became clear they had no intention of actually honoring anyone's preferences.
"Some people said no because $50 is too much," the worker wrote. "Others for personal reasons. Totally normal right?" Not in this management team's eyes!
Management said 'participation is expected,' and if they decline, they aren't 'team players.'
Why exactly the manager went to the trouble of creating a poll with "yes" or "no" options is truly a mystery, because their reaction to the people who, in fact, said no was frankly insane.
"They called a meeting at the end of the day to figure out who would participate," the worker wrote, which is bad enough, putting people on the spot. But then! "[They] said that if we don’t join we are not team players and that participation is expected from everyone."
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No, seriously, what was the point of the poll?! And then it got even more insane. "When someone pointed out that this basically makes it mandatory the manager said yes it is mandatory."
And then it got truly out of control: "And even if you don’t attend the event you still have to buy a $50 gift," the worker wrote. "So our only real choice was whether we would physically attend or not."
This is basically harassment and completely inappropriate.
I feel like I am on hallucinogens. In what world is this normal behavior?! There are infinite reasons someone would say no to this: they can't afford it, celebrating Christmas is against their religion, they hate everyone in the office's guts and hope they all die of dysentery, the list goes on!
It is wildly inappropriate to force people in the first place, but to put them on the spot in a meeting is truly around the bend. "A few coworkers felt pressured to change their minds in front of the whole team," the worker wrote, adding that "it feels completely inappropriate for a manager to require employees to spend their own money like this."
That's because it is, and it's also illegal. My first question is, where on God's green Earth was this office's HR person, because this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. But even if nobody there would ever take it that far, it is, unequivocally, downright cruel to essentially bully people into spending money they may not have or be labeled the office killjoy.
The office is for work, and nobody is compelled to do anything else there besides their job, and if that kills your holiday spirit, that's a you problem. Secret Santa is dumb anyway: Most offices don't even have a chimney! What is Santa supposed to do, shimmy down the elevator shaft? Get a life!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
