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Scheduling Meetings Now Made Simple!

maksymdudnyk
Community Member

Update 8/17/21: We started rolling this new feature out in limited release in July and are happy to announce it is now available to everyone!

Great news! We heard the Upwork Community loud and clear, you need more ways to streamline interviews and work meetings on Upwork so we’ve added a meeting scheduling tool and an option to sync with your Google or Microsoft calendar to help you do just that (Apple iCal is not currently supported).

 

How It Works 

 

This added functionality allows any Upwork user with access to messages to set up availability slots, send a meeting invitation so others can book a meeting with you, schedule a meeting using a link shared by another user, and optionally sync with your Google or Microsoft calendar to help keep track of your meetings. Other room participants can book, reschedule or cancel a meeting with a few clicks.

 

Send meeting invitations

 

To schedule a meeting, navigate to the specific message room and click “Schedule a Meeting” at the top of the page. If you have not linked a calendar, the “Connect your calendar” window will open and you will be prompted to do so. You can connect a calendar or click the “Skip For Now” button. 

 

  • Once you’ve added a calendar or skipped doing so, the “Select your availability” window will open. Select the timezone for the meeting and the days and times you are available. Note that if a time is booked in your calendar, even if you marked it as available while creating the meeting invitation, it will show as unavailable to other users.
  • Next, click the “Continue” button to proceed to the “Select the meeting length” window. You can select 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes.
  • Then click the “Send” button, which will send a meeting invite link to the message room. Everyone in the room will be able to access it.

Screenshot from June 28, 2021 5_38 PM.png

 

Screenshot from June 28, 2021 5_39 PM.png

Sync calendar (recommended) or skip this step

 

After selecting “Schedule a Meeting'' in the message room, click on “Connect your Calendar”.

You will be prompted to sign in with either a Google or Microsoft account to link a calendar. Once you’ve connected your account, you won’t need to resync to schedule meetings in different rooms. Currently, other calendars are not supported, but we hope to add additional calendars, like Apple iCal, in the future.

 

Screenshot from June 28, 2021 5_35 PM.png

Schedule a meeting

 

From “Schedule a Meeting” you can send availability slots in the room so all room participants can click on the shared link and book a meeting. Room participants can book, reschedule or cancel a meeting with a few clicks. Only room participants can be invited to a meeting created for that room.

 

  • After you send a meeting invite, other participants in the room can click on the automatically generated “Select date and time” link, which opens the “Select date and time” window. 
  • When the respondent has selected a day and time, and clicked the “Confirm” button, the meeting is automatically scheduled. The meeting sender will have the event automatically added to their calendar (if your calendar has been connected). 
  • All other participants will receive a system message with an “Add to calendar” link that they can use to manually add the meeting to their own calendars or sync their calendar with Upwork.

 

Screenshot from June 28, 2021 5_41 PM.png

The availability window is split into two sections: the left side includes a calendar with the invite sender’s available dates highlighted. The right side contains a selection of the sender’s available times. 

 

Helpful Tips

 

  • Change or cancel a meeting - After a meeting is scheduled, the message remains in the room and will include linked options to “Cancel” or “Reschedule”. To do either, simply click the link and follow the steps.
  • Join a meeting - Users with synced calendars, as well as those who manually added the event to their calendars, will be able to join the Zoom meeting via the link in the calendar event. You can also join via the link in the message room, or by using the Zoom meeting feature.

Happy scheduling! For more information about this feature, view our Help article.

74 Comments
wescowley
Community Member

Thank you, this looks promising and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

 

BTW, the help link at the bottom does not work.

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Thanks for your interest, Wes, and thanks for the flag about the link. It's now been fixed.

71a4ee34
Community Member

Is there a way I could be fast tracked for trying this feature? 🙂

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Hi Robert,

 

While we can't fast tack users individually into this experience, we understand that this is a very needed feature and we're working to make it available to everybody as soon as possible.

vipul_si
Community Member

Looks cool, I am awaiting this for a long time. Really this help and have better clarity about meeting timezones. Specifically for me when I confuse sometimes when the customer is not mentioning their time zone directly. 

Happy to use onwards.... 

melikee
Community Member

I was waiting for this too!

nhansen
Community Member

I decided to try out the scheduling tool this morning and it has completely disabled our ability to communicate or even invite candidates for interviews.

 

At first I skipped connecting it to my calendar and tried just scheduling some times and it worked.

 

But then when we went to a second candidate, we realized that it only offered one time range to be offered to all candidates, so we decided we wanted to expand the time range, and then we changed that.

 

After that we could not schedule with anyone else, only myself, which wasn't what I wanted to do, but I thought I would test it. But there was no way to get out of it, even though it asked me if it really was what I wanted to do.

 

Anyway, at that point I realized that some of the meeting times we had selected overlapped with other meetings I have every week and so I decided to connect it to my Google Calendar. But it failed after I entered my email address and said it couldn't connect and gave me the Google frowning face and now when I go to any candidate's chat, that's all I see and I can't even send a message at all to them.

 

When I search your help documentation, there doesn't seem to be anything on this feature.

 

How can I get out of this mess?

NikolaS
Moderator

Hi Nicole,

 

I am sorry to hear you've had a confusing experience using this feature. We'll escalate this to the team and they'll reach out to you directly as soon as possible to assist you further. 

 

Thank you for your patience,

hosainshahadat
Community Member

I like this feature pretty much, hope it will us to grow.

jshea74
Community Member

Woohoo!  I've been missing using Calendly to book interviews so this will certainly be a welcome addition!  I can't wait to see it as available in my profile!