The Core Calendar Challenge of Hybrid Work
In a hybrid schedule, your physical location affects your availability in ways a remote or office-only schedule does not. A meeting that requires in-person presence cannot be scheduled on a remote day. A large conference room booking is only meaningful if you will be in the office. Colleagues need to know not just when you are free but where you are.
Google Calendar's working location feature directly addresses this. Setting your office or home status for each day makes your location visible without requiring you to announce it in Slack or email every week.
Setting Up Working Location in Google Calendar
In Google Calendar, go to Settings > General > Working hours and location. Enable working hours and set your schedule. For each day, you can specify 'Office' or 'Home' (or a custom location). This appears in your calendar as a label visible to anyone who views your calendar.
Google Workspace users can also set their default office location so it appears consistently without needing to set it each week. Some organizations configure working location at the admin level to track office occupancy.
Hybrid Work Calendar Habits
- Mark your office days clearly — use the working location feature or create a recurring all-day event.
- Cluster in-person meetings on your office days. Do not let remote meetings fill your in-office time.
- Reserve desk or room space in advance using your organization's room booking calendar.
- Protect at least one morning per office day for deep work — office days fill with spontaneous conversations.
- For multi-location teams, note your location in recurring event descriptions so attendees know whether remote colleagues can join.
- Use a consistent color for 'office day' events if you add manual markers.
Hybrid schedules often accumulate the worst of both worlds: office days full of spontaneous interruptions and remote days full of video calls. Intentional calendar structure prevents this — but it requires deliberate choices about which activities happen where.
Communicating Your Hybrid Schedule to Your Team
Beyond the working location setting, sharing your hybrid schedule explicitly — in a team document, a Slack status, or a recurring calendar event — prevents colleagues from discovering your location only when they need to schedule something with you. Proactive communication reduces friction at scheduling time.
How Schedule Calendar helps
Schedule Calendar's toolbar popup shows your upcoming events — including all-day events like office day markers — from any browser tab. On a hybrid schedule, a quick check of the popup shows whether tomorrow is an office day and what meetings are on it, without opening the full calendar view. This makes it easier to plan spontaneous in-office conversations around your actual scheduled commitments.
Frequently asked questions
Use Google Calendar's Working hours and location setting (Settings > General > Working hours and location) to specify office or home status for each day. This makes your location visible to anyone who views your calendar. You can also create recurring all-day events labeled 'Office day' or 'Remote day' for visibility in older Google Workspace setups that do not have the working location feature.
Cluster in-person meetings and collaborative work on office days, and reserve remote days for focused work and video calls. Protect at least one focused morning per office day before spontaneous office conversations fill the time. Pre-book meeting rooms on your office days to avoid the scramble of finding space when a spontaneous collaboration opportunity arises.
Yes. Informal in-office conversations that replace what would be a scheduled meeting should be reflected on the calendar, even briefly. If you know you will be spending an hour with a colleague on a project when you are in the office on Thursday, block that time. It prevents other meetings from being scheduled into that window and keeps your calendar accurate.
Block focused work time on remote days before meeting organizers claim it. If remote days are consistently consumed by video calls, the meeting hygiene practices that apply to any meeting-heavy schedule apply here: require agendas, default to async for status updates, and audit recurring meetings to see which ones are necessary. Remote days should have a mix of meetings and uninterrupted work.
Have a team-level conversation about which days are preferred office days for the team. Shared office days make spontaneous collaboration possible and make it easier to schedule in-person meetings without checking everyone's individual schedule. Some teams use a shared team calendar where members mark their office days, making the overall pattern visible without individual check-ins.
Working location is a Google Workspace feature that lets you specify 'Office,' 'Home,' or a custom location for each working day. Once set, the location appears in your calendar and is visible to teammates who have access to your calendar. It integrates with Google's desk booking and room scheduling features in some Workspace setups. It can be set daily or defaulted to a weekly pattern.