Halloween, the spookiest day of the year, is almost upon us. Always celebrated on 31st October Halloween is a fun day that everyone can get involved in. This year Halloween falls on a Saturday so for those who work a Monday to Friday week, HR teams can encourage some fun one day early on the Friday.
Employee engagement is at an all-time low due to the coronavirus pandemic and the reality of many employees having worked from home since March this year. Here is some fun and engaging ways HR can encourage teams to come together:
1. Virtual Halloween party – Encourage your teams to get together over video call to have a virtual Halloween themed party. Over lunchtime or at the end of the day arrange a video call to get everyone together, get each person in the team to make one or two song suggestions and have a playlist set up for the party. Get your teams to think of the best Halloween joke they have heard over the years and dust off their best Time Warp dance moves. Let’s get this spooky party started!
2. Get dressed up – Halloween and dressing up seems like the most obvious choice but encourage your employees to get creative and think outside the box, they could go all out scary or relive their childhood with their most favourite costume from when they were younger, they could recreate their favourite tv character or even dress up as each other. Let them know the more creative the better. They could have a live vote and offer a prize for the best costume. Something like a gift card would work as it could be posted to them.
3. Pumpkin carving contest – This is something that your employee’s families can get involved with too. Who can carve the best pumpkin? Encourage the team to get their thinking caps on and their carving tools out. Let them know to work on attention to detail to create something special, they could have one pumpkin for all the family or allow everyone to have one each and make it a mini in-house competition too. Post photos of the pumpkin creations on social media and have your followers vote for the best one. The bonus here is that your colleagues can then use these to decorate their house or front door when the spooky day arrives.
4. Decorate your home – If they don’t want to stop at just a few pumpkins outside their front doors and want to transform their homes into spooky settings urge them to do just that. They can focus on decorating both inside and outside their houses with as many scary and spooky items as they can think of. If they did go that extra step, then ask them to take their teams on a tour of their new surroundings during the virtual party.
5. Trick or treat a new way – Encourage your teams to treat themselves and ensure they buy in their favourite Halloween treats that they know they will enjoy the most. These can be enjoyed at the virtual party however remind them that on Halloween you need to earn their treat so those jokes or dance moves from above may just come in handy.
Using a holiday season is a great way to boost employee engagement especially as there are so many people still working from home. Encourage your teams to get together more often and use the seasons as we go through them to add a little something different to the teams get togethers.
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