Schedule a team event everyone can attend

No calendar access required

Nobody connects a work account, which means the poll works across departments, agencies, contractors and guests who are not in your directory at all.

It also avoids the classic failure of automatic scheduling: an empty calendar slot is not the same as availability.

Offer times, not just days

For dinners and after-work events, add time slots to each date. An early and a late option often doubles attendance for teams with school runs or long commutes.

A full-day outing has the opposite problem: instead of splitting a day into slots, poll whole days and consider whether a Friday or a mid-week day gets better attendance, since some teams treat Fridays as informal work-from-home days that quietly reduce turnout.

Share the result openly

Export the grid to CSV or print the summary for the person booking the venue. Showing the numbers behind the date stops the outing being relitigated a week later.

Working around part-time hours and hybrid schedules

Part-time staff and hybrid workers with fixed office days are the group most likely to be quietly excluded by a date chosen around the majority's habits. Poll a spread of days rather than defaulting to 'whenever most of the team is in the office', and check the grid specifically for part-time rows before finalising — a date that scores well overall can still exclude the same two or three people every time if nobody checks.

Teams split across offices or fully remote

If the team spans more than one office, or is partly remote, decide up front whether the outing needs everyone physically together or whether some people can join a video call for the parts that translate to a screen. Poll the in-person date first among the people who would actually travel or commute in for it, since their constraints are usually tighter, and treat remote attendance as a separate, simpler yes/no question rather than folding it into the same date grid.

For a multi-office event where several sites will each host their own version of the outing on the same day, it can help to poll each office separately with its own local date options, then align the sites afterwards on a shared date only if the plan genuinely needs everyone doing it at once.