Many businesses have policy manuals, HR manuals, and those policy manuals are important. They're important for letting people know what is expected of them. They're important for letting people know what um they are entitled to as say an employee of the business. What are their benefits? Um what are the expectations of them? How do they need to you know negotiate everything? You know, policy manuals are very important. But sometimes policies can also be dehumanizing. There are all kinds of situations in businesses where the strict enforcement of the written policy would be cruel or unkind or not take into just account like the complexities of the situation.
And so that's I think where I mean usually the manager is the one in the role to say I know that's the policy. We're going to depart slightly from the policy right here. And you have to do that in sensitive ways because there are issues of justice and was this employee treated in a similar manner to this employee, right? But where the situations are genuinely different, right? I think there is room for grace in the situation so that you can accommodate the human needs in a situation.
So that could be one example I think of where gift or gratuitity can be displayed when you thoughtfully maybe set aside a policy in order to take into account the complexities of who you're dealing with and what what you're dealing with. There's also though like gift and gratuitity and dealing with customers, you know. Um you might not think of as gift. You might just think of it as like standard business practice, but when companies agree to um accept returns products that were bought and then they just deal with the fact that they come back, there's a certain amount of gift in that.
Um I actually think that employees can display gift in gratuitity, too. um and not maybe given the situation, given the needs of the moment, not demanding or insisting on you know their exact rights. But I think employees actually do this quite a bit even if you're not a salaried person like do you give to get the job done? Not technically required. You've gone be when when you've gone beyond justice, when you've be gone anywhere beyond what is precisely owed, you are in the realm of gift.
You're in the realm of gratuitity. And actually, no business would actually work very well if everyone was constantly guarding their boundaries and insisting on not giving any more than they are required. One because sometimes those boundaries are a little bit fuzzy, but two just because life is life, right? And so there's a lot of ways in which employees exhibit gift to make the enterprise productive and efficient and you know you go the extra mile. That's gift.
