Hybrid work policies

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
2. Edit / delete existing policies
3. What do managers / employees see?
4. FAQs

1. Create a policy

💡 Note: Only global admins can create or edit Hybrid work policies.

Set rules for a policy

When creating a policy, you define how employees are expected to work:

• On-site days: Set minimum or required days employees must work from the office.
• Remote days: Define how many remote days are allowed.
• Flexible range: Let employees choose their in-office days within a defined minimum and maximum.
• Duration: Choose whether the policy applies on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

⚠️ 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.

Assign users and groups to a policy

Assign to user groups or individuals

• 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.

Assign to the entire company

• Apply a single policy organization-wide.
• Use exemptions to exclude specific users from the company-wide policy.

Set activation date

Decide when the policy should go into effect:

• Immediately
• At the beginning of next month
• On a custom date

Choose an approval workflow

You can decide whether the employees' weekly schedule requires the approval of the manager.

• No approval: Attendance is tracked automatically.
• Approval required: Managers review and approve employees' schedules.

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:

1. Go to the Hybrid Work Policies tab.
2. Click "Custom Status Settings".
3. Decide whether each status should count as on-site or remote.

💡 Need new or custom statuses? Contact our team at support@deskbird.com to make changes.

Download a policy report

You can download an Excel report to track compliance for an active policy. 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