A noticeable shift in Indian corporate gifting over the last few years: companies extending Diwali gifting beyond the employee to include their family, usually in the form of a kids' gift alongside the employee's own.
This doesn't need to be expensive to land well. A small, genuinely useful add-on — a kids' gadget, a sweet box sized for a family rather than one person, or simply a slightly larger hamper framed explicitly as 'for you and your family' — creates outsized goodwill relative to its incremental cost.
The practical way to budget this: treat it as a 10–20% addition to your per-employee gifting cost rather than a separate line item, and make the family framing explicit in how the gift is presented (a note, specific packaging) rather than just adding a generic extra item.
This approach tends to resonate particularly well in manufacturing, retail, and other sectors where a large share of the workforce has single-income households — it's read as the company genuinely extending the festival to the whole family, not just the person on payroll.