Team Automatic Out-of-Office Calendar
Free-
Teams - Business
- Enterprise
Ever been surprised by an out-of-office teammate or strolled over to a colleague's desk only to realize they're working from home that day? Clockwise automatically syncs your team's out of the office and work-from-home events to the team calendar, so you all can focus on your work, not your calendar.
Note: Clockwise's 3 week syncing will apply to the team availability calendar. You will see the out of office event syncing to your team calendar within 3 weeks of the start date of the event. Business & Enterprise plans will see events sync 7 weeks into the future.
In this article: |
How it works
Instead of updating your primary calendar and your shared team calendar, each teammate will only have to update their own calendar and the OOO or WFH days will automatically sync with your team availability calendar, making sure it is always up to date. From now on, you can use this calendar as your single source of truth for your team's availability.
Clockwise will sync your OOO status through keyword recognition for events your add directly on your calendar (Out of Office, OOO, PTO, Vacation, WFH) or through the default Google calendar OOO event type. You choose what's a more convenient way of letting us know and we will handle the rest!
Clockwise will also sync your OOO status based on event duration. Events that are blocked off on your calendar will be treated differently depending on the duration as follows:
| Duration of event block | Team availability calendar Sync |
| 0 hours - 5 hours | All day event with time range included |
| 5+ hours | All day event with no time range |
Turning your team availability calendar on
- Navigate to the Teams settings area of the Teams section on the Clockwise web app.
- Locate the team that you'd like the shared team calendar added to.
- Toggle the Subscribe to the calendar setting on.
You can access your team availability calendar from your list of My Calendars on the left pane of your Google Calendar.
Toggle this calendar on or off via the checkbox to change your view of the team availability calendar
There can be a delay (~24 hours) with the calendar showing up in the list of your calendars in Google the first time you enable it. Reach out to us if you are still not able to see the calendar 24 hours after enabling it
Turning on Slack sync for team availability calendar
In addition to having access to your team availability calendar, you can set up daily notifications in Slack to keep everyone up to date on your team's availability.
Navigate to your team in the Teams section of the Clockwise web app.
From here you'll need to decide which Slack channel you'd like to send the update to and what time you'd like the update to be sent on a daily basis.
Updates will include who is working from home, out of the office for a longer duration and out of the office for a portion of the day.
The Clockwise Slack integration publishes to the Clockwise app channel and one channel of choice by team, with a summary of team functionality in it for each user who belongs to the team.
Note: If you would like to post team availability in a private channel, first add the Clockwise bot to the private channel, then type the channel name into the Slack integration channel selector – the Slack authorization does not allow for auto-complete due to privacy reasons.
Out of office dates syncing incorrectly
If you notice that the dates you entered for your out of office event are syncing incorrectly to the team calendar, check the following:
- Your time zone
- Your Company's time zone (determined by the time zone with the most Clockwise users)
If the two of these are different, you may need to enter your out of office event by business day, including only your working hours. Either separate events, or a recurring event (every weekday, 1 recurrence max).
Example: My out of office event is scheduled for March 1st - 7th. I can set up a recurring event for that week to show I'm out of office from 9:00 - 5:00 each day.
Removing a team calendar from your "My Calendars" list
If your team decides to use the team availability calendar but you'd rather keep your list of My Calendars simple, each user has the option of disabling their own view of the Team Calendar. Your events will still sync so your team will still understand your availability, but you won't have access to the calendar in your list of My Calendars.
- Navigate to the Teams settings area of the Teams section on the Clockwise web app.
- Locate the team that you'd like to no longer receive notifications about.
- Toggle the Subscribe to the calendar setting off.
This update will only reflect on your own calendar, the team calendar will still be available to the rest of your team.
Stop syncing all events to the team availability calendar
To stop syncing your own events to the team availability calendar, you will have to remove yourself from the team. For more information on how to remove yourself from the team, click here.