The Impact of Gift Trees to Employees

Gifting trees to employees works when the gift is named, specific and traceable — a real tree with a location and the person's name on the certificate — and falls flat when it becomes a company-wide announcement that nobody can point to. The mechanics are simple and cheap; the difference between a gesture people remember and one they quietly ignore is almost entirely in the execution.

Why companies choose trees over conventional gifts

• Nothing is wasted. No packaging, no shipping, no item that ends up in a drawer or a landfill.
• It is genuinely inclusive. No sizes, no dietary restrictions, no alcohol policy problems, no cultural mismatches.
• It works for distributed teams. Delivery is digital, so a colleague in another country receives exactly the same gift on the same day.
• It scales without added logistics. Five people or five thousand takes the same effort, from £1.5 per tree.
• It aligns with what the company already says. If sustainability appears in your values, the gift reinforces it rather than contradicting it.

What employees actually receive

Each person gets a personalised certificate in their own name, linked to a specific tree with GPS coordinates, progress photos and field video from the planting team. That specificity is the whole point: "the company planted trees" is a press line, while "here is your tree, in this place, planted on this date" is a gift. All the trees can be collected into a single company forest that grows year on year — a genuinely good slide at an all-hands, and a better one on a careers page than another stock photo.

The execution details that decide how it lands

1. Give more than one tree per person. Five to ten reads as considered. One tree each can read as a rounding error.
2. Name every certificate. Individually named beats a collective total, every time.
3. Send it from a human. A line from someone's manager outperforms an all-staff email from a no-reply address.
4. Include the location. The map link is the part people actually click and forward.
5. Pick a moment that isn't December. A mid-year thank-you gets noticed; a December one competes with everything else.
6. Tie it to something specific. Onboarding, a work anniversary, a shipped project. A gift attached to a reason lands harder than a seasonal one.

Where it fails

Three predictable failure modes, all avoidable. The first is the substitution problem: a tree gift instead of a pay review or in the middle of a redundancy round reads as tone-deaf, and no amount of certificate design fixes that. The second is vagueness — a company announcement with no per-person certificate and no location, which employees correctly interpret as marketing. The third is inconsistency: gifting trees while the company's actual footprint goes unmeasured invites the obvious question, and someone will ask it.

Used honestly, none of these apply. The gift is a small, specific thank-you with an environmental side effect — not a climate strategy, and it should not be presented as one.

The reporting question

Gifted trees are a contribution, not a carbon claim. They should not be described as making anything carbon neutral, and they do not count towards science-based reduction targets. If your reporting needs audited tonnes, that is a separate purchase — certified Verra and Gold Standard credits, retired in your name with registry documentation. The distinction is set out in tree planting vs carbon offsets. What the gifting programme does give you is verifiable evidence of a real contribution, which is more than most engagement budgets can say.

Running it at scale

For larger programmes, Evertreen's API and Shopify integration can trigger a tree automatically at onboarding, on a work anniversary or on any other event in your systems, so the admin stays close to zero as headcount grows. You can browse the available trees and projects, see how the gift certificates look before committing, and read how other teams have structured it in our corporate gifting case studies. The wider version, covering clients as well as staff, is in corporate tree gifts for clients and employees.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to gift trees to employees? From £1.5 per tree, with the same price whether you gift a handful or several thousand and no per-recipient fees on top.

What does each employee receive? A personalised certificate in their name linked to a specific tree, with GPS coordinates and progress photos rather than a generic voucher.

How many trees should we give per person? More than one. Five to ten reads as a genuine gesture, and the total cost is still below most physical gifts.

Does it work for remote or international teams? Yes, and it is one of the main reasons companies choose it — no shipping, customs or addresses required.

Can we automate it for onboarding and anniversaries? Yes, through the API or Shopify integration, so trees are sent automatically when the event occurs.

Can gifted trees go in our ESG report? As a documented contribution, yes. Keep it separate from carbon-neutrality claims and from any reduction target.

What if some employees don't care about sustainability? Keep the note personal and the message short. Most of the appeal is that the gift is specific and named, not that it is environmental.