With Hybrid work policies, deskbird removes the need for time-consuming and manual calculations of how many days employees have been at the office or at home. Employees' attendance is automatically tracked, saving time and minimizing human errors so managers can focus on other tasks. When you set minimum or maximum days for working from home or coming to the office, you encourage employees to plan their week autonomously while providing a clear framework.
1. Create a policy
💡 Note: Only global admins can create or edit Hybrid work policies.
⚠️ Plan limits: On Desks Free and Business plans, your company can have one Hybrid work policy in total. Active and scheduled policies both count, so you cannot schedule a successor while a policy is active. Approval flows that involve managers are not available on these plans. Desks Professional and above includes unlimited policies and all approval flows. See Feature Availability for details.
To create a policy, go to Admin > Workforce > Hybrid work policies and click Add policy. Setup has three steps: Configuration, Assignees and Additional info.
Set rules for a policy
In the Configuration step, you define how employees are expected to work:
- On-site policy: Set the minimum number of days employees work from the office.
- Remote policy: Set the maximum number of remote days.
- Add policy rule: Combine two rules in one policy, for example a minimum of on-site days per week and a maximum of remote days per month.
- Period: Choose whether a rule applies per week, per month or per year.
⚠️ Important for yearly policies: Attendance data is anonymized after a defined period. The default is 180 days, and this is the recommended setting: personal attendance records are kept only as long as they are usually needed. The records themselves are not deleted, but the link to the individual user is removed.
A yearly policy needs a full year of user-linked data to count correctly. With the recommended 180-day period, days from the first half of the year drop out of the calculation as the year progresses.
If you want to run a yearly policy, the anonymization period has to be extended to at least 366 days. Before requesting this, confirm with your data protection officer or whoever owns data retention in your organization that you are permitted to store personal attendance data for that period. Keeping the data longer than the recommended default is a decision your organization needs to take deliberately. Once that is clarified, contact support@deskbird.com to adjust the period. The change is not retroactive: user links that have already been anonymized cannot be restored.
You can also define fixed in-office days to ensure collaboration and optimize workspace usage.
Under Half day schedules, choose how half-day schedules count toward the policy: Count half days as 0.5 days (default), Count half days as 1 day, or Don't count half day schedules toward policies.
Assign users and groups to a policy
In the Assignees step, choose who the policy applies to.
Teams/Users
- Apply policies to user groups (e.g. departments or teams).
- Set up groups manually, via HRIS, or through SCIM.
- Add exemptions for specific users in a group with Remove users from this policy.
Company wide policy
- Apply a single policy organization-wide.
- Use exemptions to exclude specific users from the company-wide policy.
Set activation date
In the Additional info step, name the policy and decide under Activation date when it should go into effect:
- Immediately
- Next month: at the beginning of next month
- Custom: on a date you choose
Choose an approval workflow
You can decide whether the employees' weekly schedule requires the approval of the manager.
- No approval flow: Employees set their schedule without approval. Attendance is tracked automatically.
- Missing on-site days approval (on-site policies) or Exceeded days approval (remote policies): Managers only review schedules that fall below the minimum on-site days or go beyond the maximum remote days.
- Full manager approval: Managers review and approve all schedules of the employees assigned to the policy.
On Desks Free and Business plans, only No approval flow can be selected. The other options are shown with an upgrade badge.
Configure custom status settings
Not all status types are clearly "Office" or "Remote". You can define how other statuses (e.g., Business Trip, Training) are counted.
To do this:
- Go to Admin > Workforce > Hybrid work policies.
- Click Custom statuses settings.
- For each status, select On-site or Remote, then click Confirm.
Office and remote statuses are always included. Unknown and Public holidays are excluded from the calculation.
💡 Need new or custom statuses? Admins can create and edit them under Admin > Workforce > Workforce settings in the Scheduling statuses section. See Workforce settings.
Download a policy report
You can download an Excel report to track compliance for an active policy: click the export icon (Export report) next to the policy in the list. The report is only available if:
- The policy has a weekly rule.
- At least one user is assigned.
- The policy is already active.
Reports help you monitor which employees are following the rules and spot trends in remote vs. on-site work.
2. Edit / delete existing policies
Edit a policy
- Active policies: You can only edit the policy name and assigned users.
- Scheduled (future) policies: You can edit all settings, including rules and fixed days.
Delete a policy
You can delete a policy at any time. Deleting it will remove it from all assigned employees and cannot be undone.
3. What do managers / employees see?
Manager view
Managers get access to a Your team tab in deskbird:
- View all team members' attendance in one place.
- Approve or reject employee workday requests.
- Monitor who is following their hybrid work policy.
This enables better planning and team coordination.
💡 The Your team tab is only displayed if the person has direct reports assigned, based on manager relations.
Employee view
With manager approval
- Employees submit a request for their workdays.
- Managers approve or reject the request.
- If approved, the status is confirmed.
- If rejected, the employee receives an email and the status is declined.
Without manager approval
- No approval is needed. Attendance is confirmed immediately.
Employees can view their compliance status at any time from the deskbird feed (web or mobile).
If certain weekdays are designated as office days under a hybrid rule (e.g., Monday and Friday), the system treats them as fixed office attendance days. If a different status is entered on one of these days, the system will flag it and display a warning. A 💡 symbol highlights the days on which the user does not follow the defined office days.
4. FAQs
It depends on your plan. On Desks Free and Business plans, your company can have one Hybrid work policy in total, which you can assign to the whole company or to specific user groups. Active and scheduled policies both count toward this limit. Once it is reached, the Add policy button shows a lock icon and opens an upgrade message instead of the setup. To unlock more policies, use Contact Customer Success in that message.
Desks Professional and above includes unlimited policies, so different teams can follow different rules, and all approval flows (Missing on-site days approval, Exceeded days approval and Full manager approval).
The Your team tab only appears for users assigned as managers for people covered by a hybrid work policy that requires approval. If no approval workflow is active or no direct reports are assigned, the tab will not be displayed. You can set up manager relations under Admin > User management > Manager relations.
No. Existing bookings are not affected when a schedule request is rejected. The approval workflow only applies to weekly statuses and scheduling, not to individual resource bookings. If a request is rejected, the employee should adapt their scheduling and submit a new request. Once the manager approves the updated request, the same bookings will continue to apply.
No. Each user can only be assigned to one active hybrid work policy at a time. If a user is part of a group that already has a policy, you can use exemptions to exclude them and assign a different policy individually.
If an employee is moved to a different user group that has its own hybrid work policy, the new group's policy will apply automatically. If the new group does not have a policy, the employee will no longer be covered by any hybrid work policy unless one is assigned individually or a company-wide policy is in place.
No. For active policies, you can only edit the policy name and the assigned users. If you need to change the rules (e.g. number of required days or fixed office days), you will need to create a new policy with the updated rules and assign it to the relevant users. Scheduled (future) policies can still be fully edited before their activation date.
On Desks Free and Business plans, a new policy counts toward the one-policy limit, so delete the existing policy before you create the new one.
Attendance data is separated from the individual user after the defined anonymization period. The default and recommended setting is 180 days, so a yearly policy gradually loses its oldest days from the count as the year progresses. Counting a full year requires an anonymization period of at least 366 days, which means your organization must be permitted to retain personal attendance data for that long. Once that is confirmed internally, the period can be adjusted on request via support@deskbird.com. The change does not apply retroactively.
If archived exports or data retrieved through the Public API are available, usage to date can be calculated outside deskbird. Create a temporary policy covering only the remaining allowance or requirement for the rest of the year, and return to the standard yearly policy at the next annual boundary.
Without a historical copy, exact per-user usage cannot be reconstructed. In that case, a monthly or weekly policy is the more reliable option for the remainder of the year.
Regular exports from Workforce analytics (for example quarterly) or a recurring extraction through the Public API work well as an archive and audit trail. Note that these exports do not feed back into the hybrid work policy counter, so they are not a substitute for a sufficiently long anonymization period.