How Is Your Office Celebrating Halloween? — Experts Weigh In

Halloween is always a spooktacular good time in and out of the workplace! We love celebrating the holiday at our MyCorp HQ and seeing how creative our team gets with everything from costumes to desk décor.

How do other offices celebrate Halloween? We rounded up 23 small business pros to reveal all the chills and thrills that their team members bring to the celebration. Read on… If you dare…

1. Halloween movies all workday long!

We celebrate in three ways. First, we hold a beer pong tournament with a bracket and a prize awarded to the winners. Then, we do a costume contest. Best Costume, Scariest Costume, Funniest Costume, and Best Group Costume awards are all up for grabs. We also put on Halloween movies — Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas will be playing on the TVs and projector throughout the day! — Ashlene Larson, Director of Public Relations and Social Media, Planit

2. Annual costume contest!

We are holding our annual costume contest! The team with the best group costume wins. Last year, it was the content team, and we’re hoping to take the title again this year. — Catherine Giese, SEO Associate, Fundera

3. Eating candy is a must!

For Halloween this year, we are going to encourage everyone to dress up at the office, eat candy, and leave early so they can spend time trick-or-treating. — Justin A. Hill, Owner, Hill Law Firm

4. ALL the decorations!

This year, our company decided to go all out with decorations, making our office the only one decorated on our floor. — Arianna Halpert, Marketing and Operations, RateYourSeats.com

5. Costume contest with a seriously wicked reward!

We’re having a costume contest and the winner gets a trick-or-treat bag full of candy and $100 worth of gift cards. Since we’re an IT firm, we have to man the phones and can’t have a party for everyone at one given time. We’re taking everyone’s official contest photo in the morning, then voting via Slack throughout the day, and crowing the winner that afternoon. Doing the photo also allows the team to dress up more because they can take off masks, gloves, etc. to work, without it affecting their costume. — Perryn Olson, CPSM – vCIO and Marketing Director, My IT

6. Halloween themed potluck!

At our office, employees are encouraged to participate in an all-day costume contest with three voting categories and tiers of prizes. We also hold a themed potluck of ghoulish delights. In the past year, coworkers have brought spider deviled eggs and graveyard cake. This year, I’m planning on bringing a fountain filled with blood red chocolate — but maybe that’s taking the Halloween theme a bit too far? — Amanda Amezcua, DebtReductionServices.org

7. Sharing throwback photos from past Halloweens!

To get employees in the Halloween spirit and encourage them to get their costumes ready for our office-wide costume contest, we decorate the office with fall and Halloween decor and share throwback pictures from the previous year’s contest to remind everyone how much fun we had. On Halloween, people come to work in their costumes and throughout the day people post and share pictures of their costumes on Slack. We provide a Halloween-themed lunch, and then we send out a survey via Google forms to select the contest winner. — Mikaila Turman , Director, GoodHire

8. Going to a masquerade party!

We are leaving the office, getting our costumes on, and taking an excursion to the dark side. We are fortunate enough to live in Detroit which has one of the best kept secrets in the world… Theatre Bizarre Imagine an art installation and the world’s largest masquerade party now occupying 10 immersive floors of Detroit’s historic Masonic Temple.

This year’s theme, ‘The Great Deception,’ takes over 350,000 square feet of this spectacular building and is completely adorned with magnificent, grandiose, and handmade art — giant dioramas, demonic sculptures and signage, paintings, even handmade prizes… art, music, oddities, performance (acrobats, suspension, burlesque) that is designed to reward the truly curious… — Blake Moore, mo marketing + pr, Lessismo

9. Solving a murder mystery!

This year our office is starting a new Halloween tradition: a murder investigation party! Three of our team members have taken the lead with the planning of the party, from the decorations to the food, and picking the murder mystery game. The rest of us show up and have a great time together! — Jesse Silkoff, Co-Founder and President, Fitness Trainer

10. Hosting our annual Member Trick-or-Treat event!

At our family-owned company in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, we host an annual Member Trick-or-Treat event on the Friday of or before each Halloween. It’s a tradition our Best Place to Work team has organized for 10+ years, which allows families to bring in their kids to trick-and-treat at our main campus offices. There are usually a couple hundred of our members’ kids who walk through our main campus offices in costume – with their parent/s who work there – collecting treats from other members in their offices or cubes. It’s a tradition everyone looks forward to each year at Johnsonville.

Our members are also encouraged to join their sons/daughters in costume. Other members in the office bring in candy and treats to pass out from their cube or office. Nearly 100 of our members participate in handing out treats from their cube/office each year. Our internal mascot, BratMan also walks around, sharing treats. It’s probably the only time of the year we eat more candy than brats! — Stephanie Dlugopolski, PR and Social Media Manager, Johnsonville Sausage

11. Wear your costumes to work!

Halloween is a wonderful day and we make it so that it doesn’t feel like an ordinary day. We usually celebrate by asking everyone to wear their costumes to work. We also try to provide everyone we some sugary sweets throughout the day! — Ostap Bosak, Manager, Marquis Gardens

12. Group costumes!

Our office is having a Halloween costume contest, and my marketing team is dressing up as characters from Mario Kart! We will have Mario, Princess Peach, Luigi, Yoshi, and Toad. Additionally, we are going to make wearable karts out of cardboard boxes. We are turning our marketing room into a tiny haunted house with spider webs, warning tape, fake spiders, and cauldrons of candy at each desk. — Laurelei Litke, Digital Marketer, HealthLabs.com

13. Pumpkin decorating!

Halloween is a great time of year to do team bonding activities. We pick a day where we decorate pumpkins during lunchtime, giving people a chance to create a fun decoration for their desk while taking a break from work. We also hold an annual Halloween party where we encourage employees to bring their friends and families to enjoy food, games and a costume contest. — Adrian Ridner, CEO and Co-Founder, Study.com

14. Come to work dressed like your favorite superhero!

From Marvel’s Black Panther and Infinity War to Pixar’s The Incredibles 2, our office decided this has been a pretty potent year for superheroes. That’s why we are having our employees cast aside their mild-mannered alter egos for a day and come to work on Halloween dressed as their favorite superhero (or supervillain for those who prefer to lurk in the shadows). A costume contest will be held to judge who is best dressed to save the world from certain doom. — Armen Karoghlanian, Creative Director, Phonexa

15. Dress up the office pups!

For Halloween this year, our company plans to celebrate Halloween in style. It falls on a Wednesday so we are having a special Mean Girls, hump day themed Halloween with decorations, snacks, and costumes to match. We also have an office that allows dogs, so there will definitely be some dogs in Halloween garb. We always get catered lunch from our own company, Sifted, and Halloween will be no different, only we might get an extra fall-themed menu. Lastly, we are prepping with a shared Spotify album which among other songs will definitely include Monster Mash. —Emily Endara, Content Marketing Intern, Sifted

16. Movies, costumes, and trick or treating!

For Halloween we do a marathon of movies, like Casper and Hocus Pocus, on the projector in our office. Everyone dresses up and we have a few different costume contests. Categories include single person, group costumes, 2018 pop culture reference, and more. Prizes include nights in a hotel, Amazon Echos, and gift cards. We end the workday by bringing all families to the office to do trick or treating. — Ryan Skidmore, Digital Marketing Director, Big Leap

17. Spooky potluck!

This year, we’re having another office-wide Halloween potluck. Last year, we had memorable additions like sausage baby fingers, red velvet cinnamon roll guts, and cheese and olive eyeballs. We’re hoping to step up the spooky potluck and also host a costume contest. Some of the costumes may even include furry friends (like my pug Cooper)! We’re also participating in the Small Business Expo, happening on Halloween, so the marketing/sales staff will be heading over to the Phoenix Convention Center dressed in our costumes to make the day even more fun and festive. — Amanda Harvey, Marketing Manager, Optimum Technologies

18. Annual Halloween costume competition!

We do an annual Halloween costume competition with prizes for individuals and teams with themes. A previous year’s winner was Shark Week! — Nicole Fry, Communications Manager, DentalPlans.com

19. Pumpkin painting party!

My company has a couple of hours planned specifically for Halloween-related activities. First, we will have a pumpkin painting party. Then, we’ll have pizza for lunch before voting on our favorite costume, pumpkin design, and dessert potluck item. The winner in each category receives a gift card or another surprise prize. — Aaron Whitaker , Account Coordinator, The Hoffman Agency

20. ‘90s themed dress-up!

Our office will be celebrating Halloween with a dress up party. However, there is a twist to the theme: everyone has to choose a costume from the ‘90s. We are celebrating the ‘90s because it’s been twenty years since we first opened shop, so it’s in celebration of our 20th anniversary. We also invited all of our employee’s friends and family to join our Halloween celebration. — Lisa Chu, Business Owner, Black n Bianco

21. 31 days of Halloween festivities!

We love Halloween and our team takes part in the festivities all month long! This month, we’ll have had a jack-o-lantern carving contest, a pumpkin recipe contest, and a kid- and pet-friendly trick or treat day. We also had a costume contest and a private Halloween movie screening for the office at the local movie theater! Culture is a huge part of keeping our company – a 97-year-old, women-owned, marketing agency – thriving and retaining talent. — Kayla Eggenberg, PR Coordinator, Bozell

22. Spooky decorations, everywhere!

Our office is decorated to the nines. This year, one of our brilliant employees had the idea of creating a Technology Graveyard. We’re displaying ancient tech along with tombstones honoring the technology that got us to where we are today. (Pretty fitting for a digital marketing company, eh?) We’ll also be hosting our annual Halloween costume contest. — Bernard May, CEO, National Positions

23. Let’s throw a Halloween party!

We are having an office Halloween party. Since Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, we are having a potluck, playing various spooky games, and having a costume contest where three winners will receive gift cards. — Jenna Salerno, Content Manager, USB Memory Direct

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