Inside LinkedIn Canada’s colourful (and scooter-filled) office

Inside LinkedIn Canada’s colourful (and scooter-filled) office

WHAT: LinkedIn Canada HQ

WHERE: The Cadillac Fairview Building above the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas

HOW BIG: 38,000 square feet over one and a half floors for 128 employees

LinkedIn Canada employees are perpetually dodging scooters and Hoverboards. The office is full of them, people zipping down the halls, from meeting to meeting, at high speed. Jonathan Lister, LinkedIn’s first hire north of the border, started the ­Canadian division from his garage in 2012, and it just kept growing. After moving into and out of a couple of temporary spaces, the current office opened in September 2014. Along with the scooters, there’s the full complement of Silicon Valley–style perks: free catered lunches, a kitchen stocked with Clif bars, a game room with the latest Xbox releases, an in-house masseuse and a fully loaded gym (complete with yoga and fitness classes). Fun as it all sounds, there’s no dearth of work ethic at LinkedIn. Employees are more likely to wax on about their height-adjustable standing desks or the state-of-the-art teleconferencing equipment than the Xbox.

The 25th-floor office has spectacular, 360-degree views of Toronto.

Chicago-based IA Interior Architects designed the peak-roofed meeting nooks as a nod to Toronto’s row houses.

The mural of the skyline is by the local street artist Uber5000, a.k.a. Allan Ryan.

The IT department has a full-time genius bar where employees can go to get their tech questions answered or problems solved. Pictured is IT technician John Mulder.

The meeting rooms are named after Toronto neighbourhoods. Staff use the Annex beanbag chairs for private conversations or video-conferencing.

Every employee gets a height-adjustable standing desk.

“The scooters are great for productivity,” says Lister. “And the Hoverboards are really fun. But we did have to get rid of the unicycles. Those were a bad idea.”

The corridors just past reception have a punch-card motif.