In the era of hybrid work, knowing where a colleague is physically located is just as important as knowing when they are free. If you are planning an in-person whiteboarding session, scheduling it on a Tuesday when your key developer is working remotely from home is a waste of everyone’s time. To solve this coordination nightmare, Google Calendar includes a “Working Location” feature for Workspace users. This allows you to explicitly state whether you are in the office, at home, or traveling on any given day, making this information visible to anyone trying to book a meeting with you.
Prerequisites for Working Location
It is important to note that the Working Location feature is only available to Google Workspace (business and education) accounts. If you are using a standard, free @gmail.com personal account, this feature is disabled by Google, and the buttons described below will not appear in your settings.
Setting Your Default Weekly Schedule
If you have a fixed hybrid schedule (for example, you are always in the office on Mondays and Wednesdays, and always work from home on Thursdays and Fridays), you can set up a recurring default schedule so you don’t have to update your calendar manually every week.
- Open Google Calendar in your web browser.
- Click the gear icon in the top-right corner of the screen and select Settings.
- In the left-hand navigation menu, scroll down and click on Working hours & location.
- Ensure the checkbox next to Enable working location is ticked.
- You will see a list of the days of the week. Next to each day you work, there is a dropdown menu for “Location”.
- Click the dropdown and select your default location for that specific day (e.g., Office, Home, Unspecified, or Somewhere else).
- If you select Office, you can optionally type in the specific building or floor you will be on (e.g., “Building 4, Floor 2”), which is incredibly helpful in large corporate campuses.
Once set, these locations will automatically apply to every future week on your calendar.
Changing Your Location for a Single Day
Schedules change. If a snowstorm forces you to work from home on a day you usually go into the office, you can quickly override your default location directly from the main calendar grid.
- Look at the main grid view in Google Calendar. Just below the date number at the very top of each column, you will see a small, pill-shaped button displaying your current location (like a house icon for Home or a building icon for Office).
- Click on that location button for the day you want to change.
- A small pop-up menu will appear. Select your new location for that specific day.
This override only affects that single day; your default schedule for the following week will remain intact.
How Others See Your Location
When a colleague attempts to create a meeting and adds you as a guest, they will see your location icon next to your name in the guest list. More importantly, if they try to book a physical conference room for the meeting, Google Calendar will warn them if a required guest’s working location is set to “Home” on that day, helping prevent accidental in-person bookings for remote workers.