Within Tactic, the concept of office hours & the ability to make a reservation go hand in hand. If an office is closed during specific hours, reservations cannot be made during that time period. There are two ways to set the hours that an office is open:
- Office Hours of Operation
- Office Custom Hours
Hours of Operation
When a new office is created within a Tactic organization, by default they are set to be open all day, every day. However, that's not always an accurate reflection of the real world. Maybe your office doors don't unlock until a specific time. Perhaps the doors can always be opened with badges but desk & meeting room reservations are discouraged at certain times.
Not only can you customize when offices are open within your organization, but there is full flexibility to customize the hours & times on a per-office basis, specific to that individual office.
How to set your hours of operation
To configure your office hours, follow the steps below:
1. As an admin, navigate to Settings > Buildings, Floors, & Workspaces
2. Choose the building you want to manage from the list or create a new one
3. Within the General tab, you will see a section called Hours of Operation.
4. Toggling Open will keep the office open/closed. Unchecking the All day checkbox will make open/closing time boxes to appear.
5. Save any changes made.
💡 Note: Office hours dictate whether or not reservations can be made. If an office is set to be open from 9:00 am - 5:00 pm, users will not be able to make reservations at the office outside of those hours.
Custom Hours
Adding custom hours enables an organization to override the default hours of operation. For example, if an organization has specific holidays when the office is closed, those can be added.
Adding custom hours
To add custom hours, follow the steps below
1. As an admin, navigate to Settings > Buildings, Floors, & Workspaces.
2. Choose the building you want to manage from the list or create a new one.
3. Within the Settings tab, you will see a section called Custom Hours.
4. Here you can either edit existing Custom Hours records or add new ones.
5. When editing the record, you can choose whether the office should be open or closed during the time period in question, a start date, end date and whether the time period within each of the days in question spans the entire day. If not, you can uncheck the All day checkbox and choose the hours during the days the office should be open/closed.
6. Drag and drop the order of the Custom Hours records to change the priority of the rules. The highest item on the list means it's the highest priority.
How is this useful?
Imagine for a minute that three things are true all at the same time:
- The office is open Monday - Friday, 8:00 am - 6:00 pm, closed on Saturday & Sunday.
- There will be construction at the office, closing the entire thing for the entire month of May.
- There is a Q2 planning session during May when the executive team wants to reserve spaces & do some collaborative zones restrictions while construction is ongoing.
Office hours can handle this use case without issue.
- Office hours of operation are set to Monday - Friday, 8:00 am - 6:00 pm, closed on Saturday and Sunday.
- There is a "Custom Hours" record created, closing the office all day from the first day of May to the last.
- There is an additional "Custom Hours" record created, setting the office to "open" during our desired hours during the week in May when the Q2 planning session is going to occur.
The one thing that needs to happen for this combination to work is dragging the Q2 planning session to the top of the Custom Hours list. This way it has the highest priority in the list of rules that get checked when attempting a reservation.
FAQ
Will reservations be canceled automatically if the office is marked as closed after users have already made reservations for the specified date?
- No. Any reservations made prior to the office being closed on the specified date will still exist. Creators of the reservation or an admin will need to manually cancel existing reservations.
What about remote meeting reservations? If the office is closed for construction but I want to send an invite for a remote meeting, will this feature affect my ability to send out an invite?
- Currently this feature applies to reservations of all types. If the office is set to be closed on a specific date, no reservations of any kind will be able to be created on that date within Tactic. We are working towards making Tactic reservations even more flexible and expect to support this feature soon.
How does this affect Google Calendar and Outlook integrations? Do meeting invites get synced to Tactic even if they fall outside of an office's hours of operation or during a custom hours closure?
- Events synced from any third party system are still subject to Tactic reservation rules. If you're not familiar with Tactic's system of reservation rules, please read our "Tactic Reservations: An Overview" article. Any reservation that doesn't meet any number of the rules implemented by your organization, won't succeed in being created within Tactic.
What about events where the office should be open? For example, what if the office is closed every Saturday by default but we are having a company hackathon on a Saturday. Can I turn on reservations for one single Saturday?
- Yes, you can add any day you need the office to be open within "Custom Hours" within the office's settings panel that will override the default office hours. Be aware of possible other conflicting "Custom Hours" records. The highest priority records supersede all others.
I’m an admin within Tactic. Can I override office hours to make a reservation either for myself or on someone else’s behalf?
- No. Currently office hours do not allow for an admin override. However, as an admin you have the ability to add a one-off office custom hours, change the priority order as needed, make the desired reservation, and then delete the custom hours record.