Having had the pleasure of playing an active role in leadership at technology and creative startups most of my career, I’ve experienced (and been responsible for) all sorts of holiday celebrations and gift-giving —the good, the bad and the just plain weird. My memories of company gift-giving run the gamut from simple company-branded hoodies to lavish games of darts in which you could win anything from $20 or a trip to Costa Rica. I even recall an Oprah-like moment where the entire company unwrapped new iPad 3s at once, and there was that time we made up a game called “Evil Santa.”

Fond memories – all of them – and I wouldn’t trade them for the world. However, lately, I’ve been reflecting on what gifts employees really crave from their leadership team. What can we give them that has a lasting impact and inspires them for years to come?

Here are three suggestions for non-traditional gifts your employees may never forget.

1. Celebrate Failures

As leaders, most of us are great at celebrating successes with our team. In a startup culture, you often live in a world of extremes. The peaks are high, the valleys are low and the climate changes daily, if not hourly. In an effort to keep our teams motivated and inspired, we loudly celebrate successes, even the small, seemingly insignificant ones. Each success is a step forward in our path to world domination, right?

Celebrating successes with your team is critical, and I’m not advocating you stop. However, I am urging you to consider whether or not you’ve spent enough time sharing and celebrating failures with them.

“I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

There are few quotes that ring truer with me than this one, and I’m incredibly thankful for it. Failure is powerful – a powerful teacher, a powerful motivator and a powerful calibration in your success-o-meter. Failure and success are polar opposites and therefore exist on the same scale. If you don’t recognize both, you can’t expect your team to truly recognize either. By not acknowledging the possibility and existence of failures, you create doubts of success within your team.

What to give: Consider an annual presentation in which you celebrate failures with your team. Make it fun, approach it roast style or as an “airing of grievances” if you like. Spend next Thanksgiving giving thanks for failures with your team. The important thing is that you learn from your mistakes together and build trust in one another. Success does not come from playing it safe, and failing to share failures with your team is perhaps the greatest failure of them all.

2. Honest feedback, frequently

Got the annual review blues? We all know the drill – hunker down in your office for the next two days drinking Red Bull, and painfully rate team members on everything from their organizational skills to their ability to put coffee mugs in the dishwasher. Perhaps you’re at the other end of the spectrum and feel you don’t need to deliver structured feedback to your team. After all, you’re a fairly small team, and your team members know how you feel about them, right?

Wrong. According to this study, 51 percent of employees do not know if their job performance is “where it should be”. According to The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, more than 60 percent of employees, especially younger ones, feel they don’t get enough feedback.

What to give: Consider the gift of employee scorecards. In CrowdSource terms, a scorecard is not an annual review but a structured way of providing frequent feedback to our team members. They are not based upon an exhaustive employee performance review template but based upon values that matter most to our leadership team. They are executed in a very lightweight format, in Google Docs.

The key elements of the scorecard are:

1. Transparency – They provide transparency into what matters to our leadership team.
2. Efficiency – Rating a team member takes less than 10 minutes.
3. Consistency – Scorecards are reviewed quarterly, in a 1:1 environment with the team member and his manager. Team members can also ask for an on-the-spot scorecard at any time if they feel they need additional feedback.

Here is a starter template based on a scorecard we designed, complete with a dashboard that displays the distribution of team member scores – a gift for you.

3. Uninterrupted Productivity

Perhaps the greatest gift we gave our team members this year was the gift of uninterrupted productivity. Developing software that distributes work to hundreds of thousands of freelancers via multiple channels around the globe requires constant attention, rapid decision-making and continuous team collaboration. While we consider collaboration one of our strengths, it can also spawn a culture of meetings. To achieve our company vision and be the best in the world at cloud-based talent management, team members need time to focus and simply get work done.

What to give: About six months ago we implemented “No Meeting Mondays.” There are a few exceptions, but we encourage team members to adhere strictly to the rules. No meetings – you, and you alone, own your Monday.

I have been told by more than one team member it was the “single most game-changing contribution our executive team made to the team this year.” I trust they were joking on some level, but appreciate the gratitude anyway.

In summary, here are a few gifts that are sure to be a hit with your team:

• Fail fast, fail often and, most importantly, share your failures.
• Give honest, frequent feedback on what matters.
• Give the “game-changing” gift of uninterrupted productivity.

These are just a few of the gifts I’m committed to sharing with our team for years to come. What others would you add to the list? Let me know in the comments!