Gifts - yes, more of them please; all year round
"Please don't send our employees any Christmas presents" - this is what a German company wrote to its suppliers in mid-November, including the consultants, trainers and coaches who work for it.
This is because, according to the statement, "fairness, transparency, honesty and trust" are fundamental values for the Group's actions. And it also demands these values from its external suppliers and service providers.
Small gifts violate compliance requirements - aha!
The Group therefore asked its suppliers and service providers to refrain from sending its "employees gifts in the context of business transactions or on personal occasions or religious or national holidays such as Christmas and New Year". In addition: "Please also refrain from sending gifts to private addresses so that our employees are not embarrassed by having to refuse, reject or return gifts."
The Group sees this request or measure as "another important step towards strengthening and safeguarding our compliance standards". (Wow, presumably also in the fact that it consistently refers to its "employees" - but also "suppliers", "service providers" and "business partners" - in its letter).
The gatekeeper committed gross violations of the compliance rules!
This may well be the case for the Group. And this measure is probably even sensible and necessary due to the gifts that many companies' purchasing departments in particular have often been showered with in the past. Nevertheless, the letter seems somehow petty, ridiculous and embarrassing when you think of the serious breaches of the written compliance rules that have been made public in recent years, which
- either emanated from the top floors of some corporations (and not from their gatekeepers) or
- were tacitly tolerated by them in order to increase performance.
Without these compliance violations, there would have been neither the criminal interest rate manipulation and dividend trickery (keyword: cum-ex) that the judiciary is dealing with, nor the exhaust gas and Wirecard scandals. And I don't even want to know how many compliance violations were (and are still being) committed when applying for coronavirus aid and grants to overcome the energy crisis, technological transformation, etc. (However, I have a certain idea about this based on the stories of a tax consultant and auditor friend of mine).
We don't give a damn about compliance rules: We want lots of gifts!
However, we are always happy to receive (Christmas) presents every year. Sometimes we even eagerly await them - for example, the Advent calendar filled with high-quality marzipan chocolates from a customer in Lübeck. Or the delicious Christmas stollen from a publisher, which unfortunately didn't arrive this year, presumably because the publisher, like many specialist publishers, is suffering such a sharp drop in sales that it will be discontinuing most of its specialist magazines at the turn of the year. Year after year, we enjoy eating such small or large treats - such as the Sacher cake from our customer Sabine Prohaska from Vienna - as a team ... and then thank the generous "donors".
That's why one of our wishes for the coming year is: Please send us more presents again (... for example on the occasion of my birthday, the date of which is revealed to you by XING and LinkedIn, among others). We look forward to it, and although we eat them up - as far as possible - we "appreciate" them!
THANK YOU, dear customers and publishers, for thinking of us
For example, the plastic container with chocolate bars that we received from our customer Klaus Doll two years ago when we moved is still in our office ... and I regularly refill it, as it is "empty" every two or three weeks. And I still drink my coffee in the office almost every day from the mug I received from IDG-Verlag, which publishes Computerwoche magazine, among other things.
As you can see, dear customers and publishing house employees, we treat your gifts very "appreciatively" and use them very "sustainably", provided we haven't eaten them, because although our agency has no compliance rules, we do have one or two values that guide our actions.
Author:
Bernhard Kuntz is the owner of the marketing agency specializing in education and consulting providers The PRofil advisorsDarmstad. He is the author of the two marketing classics "Die Katze im Sack verkaufen" and "Fette Beute für Trainer und Berater".
