Five ways to celebrate the season while building team connections. Plus, dozens of fun Halloween team activities!
The Halloween holiday began in the Celtic Tradition of Samhain (SAH-win), a pagan religious celebration to honor the harvest and the end of summer and the beginning of winter. It is believed that on this night, the veil between the worlds is the thinnest and that the dead can more easily pass into our world. The Celts used bonfires and costumes to confuse and repel these spirits, thus protecting the people. Over the centuries, Halloween has evolved into a more secular celebration or community party, with children dressing in costumes and trick-or-treating.
Halloween is a time to celebrate the harvest and our local communities. People carve pumpkins to help scare off evil spirits. Halloween is a time for people to tap into their inner child, dress in costumes, and celebrate the changing seasons.
Gather your team for a costume contest. Challenge your team to create a unique costume representing each person’s idea of Halloween. You can also pick a theme and have your team dress according to it. You can have different categories for judging, such as Scariest, Funniest, Best Story to go with the costume.
Discuss with your team the traditions they have surrounding Halloween. Are there particular foods that they eat? Or unique traditions in their cultures? Have a potluck and encourage your team to bring foods they associate with Halloween to the event.
Take a team field trip to a pumpkin patch. Have everyone pick out a pumpkin and then work together to carve it.
Bring your team together to write a Ghost story or a Spooky story. Start the story with something like: “It was a stormy, moonless night, and…" Then have the person sitting next to you come up with the following line/sentence. Then, move to the next person. One or two people should be designated to write down each sentence. Continue going around the room, with each person adding a sentence until you feel the story is finished, and then read it back to them. Once the story is read, ask people to share what they experienced during the exercise.
Create a Halloween Trivia game. Gather Halloween trivia questions onto a sheet of paper and divide your team into groups of two or three. Then, ask the teams the different questions and keep a score of how many questions each team answers correctly. You can set it up like a Family Feud or a Trivia night game. The winners receive a prize. The prize can be a bag of candy, a bowl of fruit, or a small trophy.
We picked Halloween-themed team activities and experiences that can be customized with fall flavors!
