A Year of inDays

in-day: noun A day each month when LinkedIn employees take a break from their daily tasks and inspire each other, learn something new and give back to the community. inDay at LinkedIn began in July of 2010 and was the focus of Team Inspire (Meg Garlinghouse, MaryAnne Viegelmann, and myself) in 2011. Each month inDay has a theme which gives employees a suggested team direction and vision on how we could spend our day.

Themes in 2011 included Innovation, Play, Culture, Community, and Career. Some spend the entire day volunteering, some hosting a 90-minute workshop sharing their career expertise with others, while others spent the time hacking new product and productivity ideas. It's not about what we do or how long but just that we take a step back from the grind of the task list and choose a worthy cause we're most passionate about. Personally, my highlights for 2011 inDays are:

• watching nervous innovators present their entrepreneurial product ideas to our founder, Reid Hoffman, and our CEO, Jeff Weiner during our first Innovator Challenge in February
• hosting over 300 children of employees for Play inDay in June and watching the pride in their parent's faces as they introduced them to coworkers and showed them our office
• working with more than 10 nonprofit organizations to organize a day of volunteering across the Bay Area on July inDay
• creating a benefits fair for our employees in September where they not only learned about the company benefits, but also about how to live healthy, eat nutritionally, get involved in their community and have a little fun while doing it
• inviting a group of job seekers, including veterans, to campus in October with the goal of ensuring they get the most out of our products in their job search

This year played an important part our history with the creation of the LinkedIn for Good Foundation (LIFG). LinkedIn employees around the world are no strangers to charitable giving and volunteering through nonprofits in their community. Throughout the year employees continue to participate in the spirit of giving, from organizing a charity raffle and ping pong tournament to benefit Japan Tsunami relief, awareness and fundraiser efforts like Movember where employees globally grew mustaches and raised over $43,000 for prostate cancer research and donation drives like LinkedIn Omaha where a diaper drive provided nearly 6,000 diapers for Lydia House, a shelter for homeless mothers and their children.

At LinkedIn, our vision is to create economic opportunity for every professional in the world. We believe our products, data insights, and employees have the potential to do just that. Looking back on 2011 and feeling the momentum created through inDay this year, I can't wait to see the transformation of our people, our company, our communities, and thus, the world in 2012.