How do I share my calendar, my remote work status or my standard schedule?

Owned by Whiteley, Kathryn
Last updated: Jul 20, 2021
4 min read

Sharing your remote work status & schedule


On this page:


How can I share my status to show I am working remotely?

There are a number of ways that you can let your PATH colleagues know that you are working remotely. A number of tools available to us from the Microsoft Suite will enable visibility of our schedules to our PATH colleagues. When you use all of these tools together, your availability is conveyed to colleagues wherever they may attempt to engage you.

Please visit Calendars: Work Schedules, Travel, Remote Work & Out of Office (sharepoint.com) for detailed instructions with screen clippings, or scroll down for a quick overview.

Set your standard schedule

Use Microsoft Outlook to set your standard work hours.

  • Go to Settings > Calendar > View and specify the days of the week and hours of the day that you are available for meetings.

If you will be working for some temporary period of time in another time zone, you can either update your time zone in Outlook, or you can add events to your calendar to block the hours in your regular time zone that you will not be available for meetings during this time period.

Please refer also to this Microsoft Article, Set the first day of the calendar week and change calendar work days

Timeframe

  • A - Add an event with start date on the first day of your remote work day or outage and end date as the last day of your remote work days/outage.

OR

  • B - Add a single event for the first day you will be working remotely or offline, and then use the Recurrence feature to repeat the event through your last remote work or out of office date, or to repeat the event on the same day(s) each week.


Remote Work or Out of Office calendar visibility

Update your Outlook Calendar to reflect your standard remote work days by setting up an event (or recurring event) designated as Working Elsewhere.

This same method can be used to block days/times that you will be out of office, traveling, or offline.




Free | Busy | Working Elsewhere | Out of Office

  • C -​​​​​​​ Set the event to Show As "Working Elsewhere" for Remote Work, or to the appropriate indicator (e.g. Out of Office if you will be offline).

Title the eventto let your colleagues know where you are (e.g. "Remote" or "Travel for Work: Nairobi")


Share Event Titles in your calendarto give your colleagues visibility (see instructions further below).

Automatic Replies / Out of Office messages

Turn on Automatic Replies / Out of Office messages in your Outlook email.

Use automatic replies to notify others that you are out of office, on vacation, or not available to respond to email messages. 

  • From Outlook Desktop, choose File > Automatic Replies (Out of Office).
  • From Outlook Web App, choose Settings (upper right gear) > View All Outlook Settings (bottom of right panel) > Calendar > View

Please refer also to this Microsoft Help article, Send automatic out of office replies from Outlook​​​​​​​

Out of office messages can now also be set from Teams. Please refer to this Microsoft Support article, Schedule an out of office status in Teams.

Set a Teams status message

In Teams, you can set your status message so that it will appear above the message entry box when anyone tries to send you a message.

  1. In Teams, click on your profile picture at the top right of the Teams window
  2. Choose Set status message, and type your message (e.g. Work travel in Nairobi till Friday)
  3. Check the box to Show when people message me
  4. Choose when you want your status message to clear
    1. You can use Custom to select the exact day & time 

Please refer also to this Microsoft Help article, Set your status message in Teams

Share event titles in your calendar

Share the titles and locations of your calendar events so that your colleagues can see when you are working remotely, traveling or otherwise unavailable. This will allow others to see the event titles in your calendar but not the details of those events. For any events that you don't wish anyone to see, set the Private attribute (icon that looks like a lock located in the event ribbon).

Outlook Web App steps:

  1. From Outlook Web Application, click the 3 ellipses next to the Calendar you wish to share
  2. Choose Sharing and Permissions
  3. Set Can view titles and locations for People in my organization

Outlook Desktop steps:

  1. From Outlook Desktop, choose File > Options > Calendar
  2. In the Calendar Options section, click Free/Busy Options
  3. With My Organization selected at the top, in the permissions section, choose Can view titles and locations > OK.