Although Halloween isn’t a national holiday, it is in everything but name. Your employees and their families certainly treat it as such and it comes in a close second to Christmas as being everyone’s favorite holiday. With that in mind, why not embrace it and do something fun this Halloween?
4 Halloween Office Party Ideas
The great thing about this holiday in particular is the fact that you really don’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun. If you give your employees some latitude, you’ll find that they’ll happily do most of the heavy lifting for you. Here are some fun ideas you may want to consider:
1. A Halloween Themed Breakfast or Lunch
This is essentially the workplace potluck breakfast or lunch with a spooky twist. Encourage your employees to sign up to participate and award prizes for the most creative or best-looking Halloween themed dish. You’ll be flat out amazed at some of the ideas your employees come up with and you might just come away with some new recipes that will become traditions in your home.
2. The Office Cubicle Decorating Contest
If your office utilizes cubicles, and let’s face it, most of them do these days, why not give your employees the freedom to decorate their office spaces. Again, to encourage participation, turn it into a contest with an independent panel of judges deciding the winners and awarding prizes as appropriate for the best overall, scariest, most elaborate, and any other category you can come up with.
3. The Costume Contest
This idea usually fills business owners and HR departments with dread, but it doesn’t have to. Just establish some clear guidelines about what’s an acceptable costume in the workplace and what isn’t, and if you’re not completely comfortable letting your employees decide for themselves, pick a theme and have everyone dress to it.
This could be anything from prison uniforms to dominoes to superhero costumes – the sky’s the limit.
It’s more fun if you just let your employees come up with their own costume ideas, but even if you don’t, you can still turn it into a costume and award prizes for the best, scariest and most elaborate.
4. Bring Your Kids to Work
If you’re looking for a fun way to cap off the day, how about scheduling some bring your kids to work time? Start around four so that the workday is winding down anyway, and then bring in the kids!
There are all sorts of ways you can go with this. If several of your employees bring candy to work, you could set up a safe impromptu trick or treat route—minus the tricking, of course—or have a pumpkin carving contest, again, with prizes awarded, and then there are all sorts of games you could arrange that both the adults and kids alike will enjoy.
Where games are concerned, one fun, simple idea is pumpkin bowling! It only takes a few minutes to convert a pumpkin into a passingly good bowling ball and a sharpie and some rolls of toilet paper can be converted into ghostly bowling pins in mere minutes.
The bottom line is, it’s easy to turn Halloween into a fun office party with minimal effort. Try it yourself and see!