LinkedIn's Path to $2.6M Savings and an Improved Employee Experience

In the workplace, wasted time and confusion cost more than just frustration—they cost millions. To tackle this, LinkedIn partnered with Pointr. By implementing Pointr’s advanced indoor mapping technology, they improved the employee experience and set a new benchmark for workplace efficiency.

Results at a glance:

Challenge

With a hybrid working policy, LinkedIn’s team of around 20,000 employees needed to be able to plug into a workplace as and when they wanted to. Every employee needed to access one of its global offices and for that office to feel familiar, accessible, and collaborative.

“The goal of our Hybrid Clarity policy is to remove ambiguity and promote connection, care, and delight in our offices.”

• Daniel Hampshire, Senior Manager, Workplace Technology, LinkedIn

As Daniel's team assessed LinkedIn's global footprint, they identified three critical barriers to workplace excellence:

• Navigation Friction: With 60% of employees joining post-pandemic, most were unfamiliar with office layouts. Static signage and kiosks were confusing, outdated quickly, and led to negative feedback.
• Disconnected Tools: Booking, wayfinding, and community discovery were fragmented. Employees needed to switch between systems, making it harder to navigate the day.
• Lack of Visibility: Without clear insights into how space was being used, LinkedIn couldn’t promote underutilized areas or optimize office layouts based on actual employee needs.

“You can conduct thorough research and invest a lot in creating these really cool spaces, but people aren’t going to use them if they don’t know where they are, they are poorly promoted, or if they are difficult to book.”

• Steve Parlin, GM of North America, Pointr

Solution

LinkedIn turned to Pointr to integrate cutting-edge mapping and wayfinding technology. Pointr digitized over 3 million sq. ft. of LinkedIn’s global campuses and embedded its interactive, real-time blue dot navigation directly into OLA. 

This was done through Pointr’s AI mapping engine, MapScale®, which creates precise 2D and 3D interactive maps within minutes, ensuring accurate, real-time navigation. Pointr harnesses LinkedIn’s existing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to enable real-time, interactive navigation.

With Pointr, LinkedIn employees now have access to:

• Interactive Digital Campus Maps: Employees use their mobile app for blue dot navigation through LinkedIn’s complex office environments, guiding them to rooms, desks, amenities, and colleagues with ease. An intuitive search function helps locate office resources such as printers, cafes, and restrooms.
• Accurate & Accessible Navigation: Continuous map updates ensure accuracy, and accessibility features provide customized routes and modes for employees with disabilities.
• Integrated Booking & Navigation: Employees can book meeting rooms and desks through the workplace app and get turn-by-turn directions via Pointr. Real-time availability from Density’s occupancy sensors, shown through a simple green/red light system, makes it easy to find and access available spaces quickly.
• Usage Analytics: Pointr provides data-driven insights into office usage patterns, helping LinkedIn optimize space allocation and improve the employee experience.

“It's amazing to see how accurate and responsive blue dot navigation is. It truly enhances our employees’ ability to move around the office effortlessly.”

• Daniel Hampshire, Senior Manager, Workplace Technology, LinkedIn

Outcome

With Pointr in place, LinkedIn has turned its hybrid workplace into a space that’s not just efficient, but also more connected and collaborative—raising the bar for workplace innovation across the Fortune 500.

• Team members are now saving precious time (about 5 minutes per meeting) thanks to improved wayfinding. This small daily win adds up quickly, translating to a projected $2.6 million in annual savings for the company. This figure is based on the cumulative time saved across thousands of meetings, multiplied by average employee hourly rates and meeting frequency throughout the year.
• NPS score for wayfinding improved from -23 to 73 since adding indoor mapping through OLA. The mobile map feature is used 2.5 times daily on average by employees, contributing to increased adoption and retention of OLA. Retention of OLA is at 80%, exceeding LinkedIn’s internal target of 70%. 
• 71% utilization rate across LinkedIn offices, reaching 88% in South Bay, California. According to Density, a workplace analytics company that collects office utilization data from Fortune 500 companies, LinkedIn is in the top 1% of companies in terms of utilization.
• 20% increase in office utilization within three months by identifying underused spaces and promoting them to employees. LinkedIn now has a 71% utilization rate across its offices, reaching 88% in South Bay, California. According to Density, a workplace analytics company that collects office utilization data from Fortune 500 companies, LinkedIn is in the top 1% of companies in terms of utilization.

“Our team feels so much more connected, and there's this amazing energy throughout our workplace. Whenever I visit our offices, I come away feeling incredibly energized and reconnected to what we're all about as a company.”

• Daniel Hampshire, Senior Manager, Workplace Technology, LinkedIn

What's Next for LinkedIn?

Over the next 6–12 months, Daniel and his team are focused on enhancing OLA, LinkedIn’s workplace app, to deliver even more personalized, location-aware support. 

Today, LinkedIn already reports a strong sense of belonging among its workforce, with positive responses to questions like "I feel like I can be myself at work." But there’s more work to be done. The team’s objective is to continue addressing challenges around isolation, loneliness, and belonging — key issues in the evolving world of hybrid and remote work.

A major focus is LinkedIn’s Gen Z workforce, which now dominates the company's demographics. Gen Z employees are more comfortable building trust virtually first — and OLA is being reimagined with this behavior in mind.

Daniel’s vision for OLA includes:

• Boosting the discoverability of virtual communities on the app, making it easier for employees to find and connect with groups like LGBTQIA communities, Women in Tech, Cycling clubs, and more. The goal is to help employees answer the question, “How do I make my first 10 friends at work?” and foster deeper connections from the start.
• Introducing a multimodal AI chatbot experience that offers natural language recommendations based on each employee’s habits, interests, and calendar. For example, an employee might have "strength training” and “paleo diet” as preferences, and OLA would respond with tailored suggestions like, “Here’s what you can eat that’s paleo on campus today, plus strength training classes when your calendar shows you’re free.” A new playlist mode will further optimize the work/play balance, helping employees reduce the number of unnecessary meetings and make smarter use of their time.
• Boosting space discoverability and increasing the use of open spaces is another key focus. Daniel plans to introduce proactive recommendations so as to match employees with outcome-based spaces — brainstorming rooms for creative work, or quiet zones for deep focus — recognizing that different types of work require different environments. This will also help balance the use of bookable vs non-bookable space better on the campus. 
• Finally, deeper integrations with Co-Pilot will make scheduling and collaboration even smarter. Today, Co-Pilot already summarizes calls, reducing the need to attend every meeting. Looking ahead, with a Co-Pilot and OLA integration, OLA could intelligently manage schedules — for instance, clearing half a day for focused work when needed.

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