Trick, Treat, or Truth?

On our minds

Halloween is a fascinating holiday. It has roots in multiple ancient Western cultures, from Celtic harvest festivals to Roman Catholic celebrations of saints and martyrs. The modern-day kid-friendly version is actually a relatively recent invention. Long before anyone was doing the “Monster Mash,” Halloween was a racier, scarier, more spiritual, and more sensual holiday meant for adults.

Though each culture celebrates Halloween differently, there is a shared understanding of the season as a liminal time, when the boundaries that define the “normal” world become porous. Things, and people, are not what they once seemed to be. The seemingly innocuous can be sinister. The seemingly sinister can become fun.

Fun is something we could all use a bit more of.  We need fun and humor most when they feel hardest to conjure. Interestingly enough, researchers who study fear have found that terrifying experiences can actually lower stress.

Costumes allow us to be playful with identities and reimagine ourselves as we aren’t. Of course, there’s nothing stopping us from doing that any time of the year. But when everyone is doing it, there’s suddenly social permission to express our alter egos. Halloween is a time when we can stretch the boundaries of what is socially OK. Institutions like New York’s Halloween parade give us an opportunity to let our freak flags fly!

That freedom, to explore who we are and to express it without fear of judgment, is important at work. As our piece about bringing one's whole self to work describes: “...if a company’s view of a worker is that they’re just their job, that’s all they’re likely to get. On the other hand, organizations that recognize their people as whole human beings enable them to bring more to the table.” When companies embrace their people as full humans, including their eccentricities, fantasies, alter egos, and quirks, those people do better work.

Unfortunately, that is not always the norm. Deloitte research found that  most people deliberately adjust their behavior at work to meet expectations tied to their identity or group affiliation, a phenomenon psychologists call “covering” or even "passing." Such inhibition comes at a cost to team performance. The environment people find themselves in can either stifle their personality with a rigid culture or encourage them to share more of themselves.

When people feel they’re being watched or judged, they change what they do. People who think they are not good at something are less likely to want to do it in an open environment, even if no one is looking. If you think you’re bad at math, you might hesitate or perform poorly in an open office, even if no one is looking over your shoulder. While this has always been an issue at work, it now follows people home too. The social media era has brought a kind of self-monitoring that makes people change their behavior. This creates a kind of social cooling driven by the omnipresent pressure to conform.

It’s important to do everything possible to lower these inhibitions and to add some fun to the workplace whenever possible. Luckily, you don’t even have to sew a costume these days. Video chat platforms offer ways to add a little fun to the digital realm, with hats, horns, animal eyes, or full digital costumes.

Let’s all take the opportunity to share a bit of delight, play, and personality with our friends and colleagues. It will provide a welcome moment of levity and help build a culture where everyone feels comfortable being who they are.

From the archives

Halloween has a way of sneaking into our October issues. This month's thread, that people do their best work when they can show up as themselves, is one we’ve been pulling on for years.  We first ran a version in  October 2020, when most of our costumes were digital. In 2024, we took on the Sunday Scaries and asked why an office should ever feel like a horror movie. In 2023, as everyone was picking out their costumes, we parsed what we wear at work and what dress codes say about a culture.

Whether you use this Halloween to dress up as the outsider you admire or the insider you might want to be, we’ll leave you with People Are Strange. Let us know if you prefer The Doors' original or the  Echo and the Bunnymen version.