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The spooky season is upon us once again and that means only one thing: halloween themed office activities! But holding a halloween themed event isn’t just for fun; it can also be a great place to hold a number of team building activities. KDM has always said that the key to team bonding is through shared joy and experiences — especially when those shared joys and experiences are from outside of the everyday working environment.
While you can’t necessarily manufacture these experiences outside of the office, events like these allow you to do so inside the office. As a result, it’s very important that you take every one of these opportunities as they arrive.
What’s better is that your team doesn’t even have to know that you’re holding a team building event. As a result, all of your team building gains feel natural. To your team, they’re just going through a few fun games, not doing a very important activity.
As a manager, you want your team performing to the best of their ability and achieving fantastic results. While there are many ways of getting your team there, one of the best ways is by increasing your team’s synchronicity — your team’s ability to work together.
Not only will improved synchronicity make your team more productive on group tasks, but it will also raise your team’s morale — which is a good enough reason by itself why you should be promoting team building. But this isn’t the only reason why you should be looking into team building activities and events. For both remote teams and teams working face to face, they promote team cohesion and communication skills, both of which are essential skills — especially at the moment!
For our list of 6 great halloween-themed team building exercises that your team will love, scroll below!
For your first activity, we’re going to recommend that you hold a Murder Mystery Event.
To do this, you’ll need to plan a scenario for your team to play through: making up stories and a setting that you know your team will enjoy. Then, you’ll need to create characters for your team to play, as well as reasons why each character could potentially be the murderer.
Finally, you’ll need to create a way of randomising the selection of the murderer, so that no one (not even you) knows who done it. After that, it’s just a case of playing through the scenario and hoping that the killer is caught before it’s too late for everyone.
These events are always great fun and a fantastic source of synergy for team building. Your teammates will love being able to take an hour or so to pretend to be a character, and the excitement of trying to solve the mystery before they themselves are slain will add an additional layer of excitement and intrigue to the game.
The only downside to a Murder Mystery is the fact that it takes a long time to come up with a scenario and characters for everyone in your team to play as. While there are solutions and pre-built scenarios out there, you may find that these are ill-suited to your team, or find them impersonal.
Luckily, KDM has a Murder Mystery scenario pre-designed that would be perfect for your team. While our scenario may be pre-designed, we’ll work with you in order to make it as personal as possible for your team — thus ensuring that they have as much fun as possible.
The first group activity is one that should take place before halloween and run continuously through the season: desk decoration.
As a holiday, Halloween is often thought about as something that only children take part in, and it is heavily marketed as such. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it comes to team building. We make our strongest connections when we’re childish, after all. And it’s that sense of childishness and fun that we want to tap into for this event.
This event doesn’t have to be confined to office desks, either. For remote team members, you could ask them to decorate their home work stations.
Not only does having a decorated desk allow your staff a greater sense of personalisation than is traditionally encouraged in the office, but it also allows for a temporary feeling of informality that encourages out of the box thinking. It’s also a great way to discern who has leadership skills in such a way as to not make it obvious.
And what’s more, because all decorations must come down eventually, it’s possible to turn that into a team building activity, too. For example, you can offer rewards to the teams that manage to take their decorations down the quickest Or you could say that the team to make their desks look the best post-decorations — maybe even making it autumn themed?
There are a lot of options when it comes to desk decoration — both for you and your team.
The next team building activity that we recommend this halloween season has been a staple of the halloween season for decades, if not hundreds of years: pumpkin carving!
It’s really easy to turn pumpkin carving into a great team building activity. To start, you’re going to need to divide your group up a little bit so that you have some smaller teams. We’d recommend that you make your team sizes between 2 – 4 people, as smaller teams will make it easier for everyone to contribute.
Next, you’re going to need a few supplies. The first is enough pumpkins for your teams. The next thing you need is something to carve the pumpkins with. Traditionally, people have used knives for this, however, if you’re uncomfortable with knives in the office, you can easily find pumpkin carving kits in stores that will allow you to shape the face of the pumpkin without using a knife.
Group Pumpkin Carving Contents are loads of fun, and we know your team is going to love taking part.
Scavenger Hunts are great. Objectively, it’s just great to get out of the office every now and again and just take a look around. This is especially true at Halloween.
Going out of the office will allow your team to get to know each other better and explore the space around your office in a way that just isn’t possible during the work day. Free of KPIs and responsibilities other than simply ‘come back as the winner or loser’ your teams will relax, talk to each other about things that people just don’t do in the office, and come back an effective team.
If you don’t have the time to plan your own Treasure Hunt, KDM has the ability to create a fun and unique scavenger hunt that your team will remember for years to come. Contact us today for more information.
Office Trivia is a great team building game by itself, but the added fun of the spooky season adds so much to the event that you’ll barely be able to believe it.
Creating a Spooky Office Trivia Game is really easy. Firstly, all you need is to create a list of halloween themed trivia questions — who directed the original Carrie? What was the name of the city in the United States that was allegedly once home to a coven of witches? Who wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes?
Once you’ve got your questions — no more than 20 — it’s time to create some teams. If you’re doing this game company-wide, you should aim for teams of no more than 8 people and no less than 4, depending on the size of your company. If, however, only one (relatively small) group of people are playing, you’ll be fine having much smaller teams of only about 2-3 people.
Alternatively, if you’d rather your questions be focussed on your company, all you have to do is to create your teams and have then have each team submit a single question and answer. This does two things:
Once you’ve got a full list of questions, it’s time to quiz your team. Whether you do this in a specific quiz time or just have people complete it during work time is up to you — there’s not a bad choice to make here!
Although it’s not an activity suited for every team, Costume Parties are a great way of bringing in some fun and unique halloween spirit to your team dynamics. Because just as decorating their desks allows your staff to exercise their creativity and individuality in fun ways, so too does the Costume Contest.
To make the costume contest all that more fun, you could introduce a few different categories into the competition — Scariest would be a great one to try, as would Most Imaginative and Hardest To Do. You could even take it a step further, and organise a special team event to the competition — for example, a Best Monster Movie Team Up Competition, organised around specific department teams, would be a great way of bridging various teams together.
Just like Desk Decoration, there are a lot of variables with a Halloween Costume Competition. Your team is a unique group of people, and only you know just what your team will love.
If you’d like some more information on setting up a great team building event, contact KDM Event Management today. For over 25 years, we’ve been helping people put on first-class team building events. We’ve done fun events for everything from outdoor activities to remote team building.
We’d love to show you what we can do.
