We Built an Office Maze

At Viking, we believe that the workplace should be a fun and inspiring place. That’s why we previously installed a giant office dragon to mark the new season of Game of Thrones and have done everything from turning our desks into a fort right through to building a computer game tribute out of Post-it notes. For our latest creation, a group of our employees wanted to take things to the next level and make something truly a-maze-ing… that’s right, we turned our office into a giant cardboard box maze! 

As with the dragon, we decided to keep this project completely secret, with only a small group of staff in on the idea, to give our workforce a surprise when they arrived for work on the Monday morning. No challenge then, just sneak 1,152 cardboard boxes into the office and build a giant maze around the office furniture over the course of one weekend! 

The Planning 

Our team decided to make our maze Winter Wonderland themed, helping their colleagues get into the festive spirit nice and early. In the weeks before we commenced the build, our team set to work measuring up our 247-square metre office and planning the perfect layout for the maze – this meant making something that was immersive and challenging but also allowed our employees to eventually find their way to their desks. Once our designer had expertly created a floorplan for the actual maze, we were onto choosing the decorations. 

We didn’t want our maze to simply look like one giant storage solution and a sea of cardboard, so that meant the decoration of our Winter Wonderland was just as important as anything else! This required some careful planning and a lot of creativity, we eventually landed on the idea of turning one of our meeting rooms into a giant ball pit, building Bavarian log cabins over desks, turning an area in an enchanted forest and an ice cave, as well as turning one of our team’s bank of desks into an elf workshop.  

The Build 

Building our cardboard box Winter Wonderland maze was an almighty task! It wasn’t just a case of moving a few office chairs and desks, it took our team of twelve people more than ten hours over the course of the weekend to tape up and stack the boxes in the perfect position to bring our maze to life. For our meeting room ball pit, we brought in 31,000 white and silver balls to create the illusion of a huge snowdrift, giving it an alpine mountain-range backdrop to really set the scene. Our Bavarian log cabins were constructed out of yet more cardboard boxes, complete with chimneys and fake snow on the roof for that cosy winter feel. 

Those members of our team who were in on the secret put in hours of hard work constructing giant trees out of cardboard, making cardboard box snowmen, fake fireplaces to sit on desks and putting together a giant North Pole centrepiece for the maze. The little details were all very important when making the maze, so we made sure there were plenty of fairy lights hanging, snowballs scattered around and more candy canes than you can shake a stick at! 

The Big Reveal 

As our employees arrived for work on the Monday morning, they were shocked and surprised (to say the least!) to find a wall of cardboard greeting them. As they followed the ‘Enter’ sign outside the maze, their Winter Wonderland adventure began and they were tasked with navigating their way to their desks in the office – accompanied by some of our favourite Christmas songs, of course! There were plenty of laughs as employees found themselves stumbling into the wrong team after taking an incorrect turn and members of staff could be heard hurling themselves into the ball pit meeting room. 

Everyone loved the ball pit, numerous meetings were held as normal with many winding up with a ‘snowball fight’ across the room. Despite the hilarity, our team did find that their creativity was well and truly sparked by their surroundings, helping them add an extra Winter Wonderland sparkle to their everyday work. Events like these are always fantastic for igniting creativity and getting people talking, teams that don’t normally cross paths found themselves lost in the maze together and discussing this a-maze-ing piece of office architecture! 

Our office maze was a great success and our staff had a brilliant time connecting and getting into the festive spirit! Share your thoughts on our maze by connecting with us on Twitter at @viking_chat or jump on the hashtag #VikingWonderland