The ROI of Indoor Navigation Systems for Workplaces and Offices

Introduction

Ever since 2020, when the global pandemic upended established working habits and standards, the global workplace conversation has centered on questions such as what the ideal balance between in-office, hybrid, and remote is; how workplaces can adapt to a world in which they are no longer viewed as the non-negotiable default of many roles; how organizations can invest in worthwhile workplace initiatives that deliver results, and avoid wasting money on new features or initiatives that don’t result in a significant improvement to the workplace experience; and how workplaces need to cater to a wide range of different needs and success metrics.

The answers to all of these questions can be linked to an intrinsic need to measure the in-office experience against key ROI metrics. Traditionally, this has been very hard to do. Measurement often relied on employee surveys or other rudimentary data-gathering methods that were subjective, or could only capture basic data points that don’t provide the full picture. However, one of the most rapidly adopted workplace technologies of the last few years lends itself ideally to establishing a true return on investment.

Workplace indoor navigation systems

One initiative that many organizations have invested in - and one which Pointr are global leaders in - is indoor mapping and navigation systems for their workplaces. These systems, which aim to provide ‘Blue Dot’ style location and wayfinding in indoor environments, can play host to a huge range of use cases within the workplace, including:

• Enabling guests or employees from other offices to quickly find exactly where they need to go for their next meeting
• Empowering employees at that office to quickly locate, and navigate to, free desks, meeting rooms, and even each other
• Syncing with HVAC and other building maintenance systems, to enable more efficient management of the building’s integrated functions and ensuring a more effective, happier working environment

Workplace navigation systems are exploding in popularity, thanks to the ever-increasing popularity of outdoor-based systems like Google Maps (meaning users increasingly want the same functionality available to them when navigate complex indoor environments), the presence of mapping and navigation tools within major workplace management platforms, and the desire for organizations to showcase the best their offices have to offer, and to use the spaces that they’ve often invested vast amounts of money as a true incentive for prospective employees to work there and existing employees to stay there.

Establishing an ROI framework for workplace wayfinding systems

One major challenge when it comes to building an ROI model for workplaces is that unlike many indoor locations, such as retail stores, the lack of a direct commercial goal means that what workplace success looks like to one person within an organization is very different to what it looks like to another.

With this in mind, it’s important to establish a number of success metrics that account for a variety of different stakeholders in the workplace:

Obviously, this is a wide reaching brief, and expecting a single system to check every box in order to be a worthwhile addition to a workplace is perhaps unrealistic. 

The data sources

As anyone who’s ever gone looking will know, getting concrete workplace ROI figures for any sort of initiative, technological or otherwise, is easier said than done. As we’ve already explored, with so many different conceivable ways of defining and determining what ‘success’ looks like in an office environment, it’s often extremely difficult to locate authoritative figures or studies that point to exactly the success metrics you’re looking for.

With that in mind, we at Pointr have decided to take the direct route and leverage our own data. In more than a decade of providing market-leading indoor location systems, we’ve worked with some of the world’s largest brands (including LinkedIn), integrated into some of the most popular workplace technology systems, and have mapped more than 7 billion square feet of indoor space. We’ve combined this with data from some of our main strategic partners.

Furthermore, we’re uniquely attuned to the varied needs and requirements of a vast array of different styles of workplaces. From classic commercial real-estate offices through to sprawling, modern campuses of interconnected buildings and zones, we have experience in mapping all sorts of workplaces - and demonstrating the value of indoor navigation systems to all sorts of people working in them.

The results

Across multiple deployments in a number of major workplaces, several belonging to Fortune 100 companies, here are some of the key results of implementing indoor wayfinding in workplaces:

1. Employees working on campus save an average of 12 minutes per in-person meeting that they would have otherwise spent searching for an available meeting room or spent. For the modern corporate employee, who average upwards of 3 meetings a day, the time savings add up quickly; an average of three hours a week, or almost 20 days a year of time previously lost can be reclaimed by implementing wayfinding.

2. An average employee will spend 20 minutes a week looking for colleagues in order to have an ad hoc face-to-face discussion. Although not as dramatic as the meeting room example, extrapolated across a year, this time saving adds up to another 17 hours of time saved.

3. All told, these time savings contribute to a calculated yearly reclamation of 390,000 productivity hours for the average workplace campus, which in turn translates to $1.46million in cost savings (based on average business costs) for a business annually.

4. Many workplaces fear that they will expend time, effort, and money in implementing a workplace app only for staff to never use it. However, one major customer of Pointr’s reported that, following the implementation of indoor navigation, employees who had downloaded their workplace app were using it more than 25 times a day on average.

5. 97% of workplace app users enhanced with maps and wayfinding revisit the app weekly, a return rate magnitudes beyond the averages for a whole host of consumer-facing apps.

6. Maps consistently prove to be one of the most popular features within workplace apps, with our data for usage rates between different organizations ranging between 20% and more than 50% of all users interacting with maps, demonstrative of the fact that maps have a tangible impact on app usage rates and the ‘stickiness’ of a workplace app. 

Of those using a workplace’s in-app maps, over 50% leverage a wayfinding system if available - a further testament to the enhanced app usage rates that wayfinding can encourage.