Awards for the office Christmas party that people keep

Plenty of companies end the year with awards at the Christmas party. Salesperson of the year, best newcomer, the person who kept the coffee machine alive. The speeches get laughs and the moment matters. Then the winner is handed a generic glass trophy with an engraved plate, and it ends up in a drawer by February.

The award is the one physical thing that outlasts the evening. It is worth making it something the winner wants to keep.

What makes an award worth keeping?

It is specific to the company. A trophy shaped like your product, your logo in three dimensions, a model of the office building, the team mascot. Something that could only have come from this company.

It carries the winner's name properly. Not on a stick-on plate, but as part of the piece.

It has a sense of humour where the category does. Serious awards deserve serious trophies. The "most creative excuse for being late" award deserves something that makes the room laugh when it comes out of the box — and gets kept for exactly that reason.

Serious awards and funny awards

Most award nights mix both, and they need different treatment.

Serious categories — performance, service, leadership — work best as a consistent set: the same design across all categories, with the category and name changing on each. That gives the evening a sense of occasion, and the set looks good together on stage.

Light-hearted categories are where one-off designs earn their place. The in-joke made physical is the most memorable trophy of the night almost every time. The principle is the same as in gifts for employee milestones: specificity beats price.

How do you personalise a set of awards?

Design once, change the details per piece. Because 3D printing needs no moulds, a set of twelve awards with twelve different names and categories costs close to twelve identical ones — the variation is a change to a file. That is the main reason printed awards suit company parties better than off-the-shelf trophies with separate engraving.

The base can carry the category, the name and the year. The top can be the same shape for every category, or vary by department.

What about secrecy?

Awards are usually a surprise, which creates a practical problem: the winners' names are often decided late, after the design is approved.

The workable sequence:

1. Agree the design and the category list early
2. Produce everything except the names
3. Confirm names in the final days and finish those last

Tell us at the start if names will arrive late. It changes how the job is scheduled, not whether it is possible. More on late timelines in last-minute Christmas corporate gifts.

How big, and what finish?

Desk size, generally. An award that fits on a desk gets displayed; one that needs a shelf of its own gets stored. Finishes range from a clean single colour to painted pieces in brand colours — see matching brand colours for what is realistic.

How do you make the awards part of the night?

A few things that help the moment land:

Display them before the ceremony. A table with the set lined up, names hidden, builds anticipation and gets photographed.

Give each winner a few seconds with it on stage. The photo of a winner holding a trophy that clearly belongs to this company is the picture that ends up on LinkedIn the next morning — which is free publicity for your workplace.

Keep the design for next year. A consistent award design, repeated each year with a new date, becomes a tradition. Colleagues start to recognise the trophy on someone's desk. Once the design exists, next year's set is a production job rather than a design job, so it is faster and cheaper too.

What we need from you

• The list of categories, even if names come later
• Anything company-specific that should feature: logo, product, mascot, building
• Which awards are serious and which are not
• The date of the party