Work location in Microsoft 365: make office or home office visible to everyone
Hybrid teams rarely fail because of technology, but because of one question: “Who is where today?” How to maintain the work location in Outlook and Teams, why it pays off, and how it turns into availability on the dashboard.
In hybrid work, the most common question is not “Are you available?” but “Are you in the office?” Quick huddles, mail, visitors, keys – a thousand little things depend on it. Microsoft 365 has a dedicated field for it: the work location.
Recording the work location
In Outlook, under the settings for working hours and location, you define on which weekdays you work in the office or remotely. The plan recurs and can be overridden for individual days. In Teams, the profile card shows the work location, and when signing in, Teams asks for today's location if configured accordingly.
The effort is small: enter the weekly plan once, change exceptions as needed. The benefit is big when everyone joins in – which is why it pays off to introduce the work location as a team rule, not as an option.
Why the profile card is not enough
As with the presence status, Teams shows the work location per person. If you want to know who is in the office today, you click through profile cards or ask in the chat. For office coordination, reception, and team leads that is too slow.
A presence dashboard shows the work location for the whole organization at once – as a badge on every person, as a filter (“office only”, “remote only”), and as a column of its own in the list view. Combined with the live status, this gives you the information you actually need: who is in the office today and available right now?
Three use cases
Office coordination. How many people are in tomorrow? Are there enough desks, is the team lunch worth it, who accepts the delivery?
Reception. A visitor asks for Ms. Müller. A glance at the monitor: working from home, available, number right next to it. Instead of “Let me check” it is “I'll put you through”.
Team leads. Everyone in the office joins the quick huddle in person; everyone working remotely gets the meeting invite. No asking around.
The work location stays under your control
The work location is information that each person maintains themselves and can change at any time. TeamsDashboard reads it from Microsoft 365 and displays it – without storing it on its own servers, without history. Which people appear in the dashboard is controlled via visibility groups in the customer portal.
Try it: live demo without sign-in or 14 days free with your own organization. All features in detail: feature overview.