Why use office hour series?
Office hour series are a way for experts in your organization to open their door to teammates, either virtually or in person, and especially to unblock people when they've run into something beyond their expertise. Office hours are designed to offer a quick ~15 minutes time slots for team members to get help from experts on stated specialties and technical questions.
Better than a chat system
Why use PlusPlus office hours when people can just ask questions on Slack (or similar chat systems)? Because an office hour communicates that an expert is ready/available to dedicate their time to help you get unstuck. You don't have to be in the dark about who can best help you or feel weird about tapping them on the shoulder. Also, office hours facilitate more human interactions compared to typically async conversations on a chat system. Most effective teams offer both chat-based and office-hour-based support to their internal customers.
Better than a calendar system
Why use PlusPlus office hours when Google Calendar (and similar systems) provides a convenient way to offer appointments?
The big advantage of office hours is that they:
are easily discoverable via tags
can be easily linked to any piece of content on the platform
allow the attendee to specify their agenda ahead of time (allowing the host to better prepare)
provide additional reminders
are automatically released when unbooked, freeing up time on the host's calendar
collect feedback about their effectiveness
provide aggregate reporting on their utilization
Solution
Here are the typical steps for offering office hour series.
Create an office hour series.
In this step, you create a template for your office hour series, configuring details such as topic, booking capacity, duration, and so on. Learn how to create and edit an office hour series.Schedule one or more office hours based on the series.
In this step, you schedule a date and time for the office hour based on the series created in step #1. You also set up the session location, host, and other details. Learn how to schedule office hours.Gather feedback from the office hour.
See how attendees rated your office hour. Learn more about gathering user feedback.Update the office hour series as needed.
Return to step #2 to schedule or duplicate more sessions for the office hour series when needed.
Go deeper
Office hour series in the big PlusPlus picture
Office hour series are just one of the ways PlusPlus helps you facilitate live, relational engagement that keeps your org growing and learning from its experts. We also offer live events and mentorship programs, as well as self-paced learning content, such as videos, articles, and courses.
For a closer look at all the content types available in PlusPlus for both live engagement and self-paced content, see PlusPlus 101: Content you can create.
Office hour series v. mentorship programs
We use the term session to apply to both office hours and mentorship programs. Mentorship programs are designed to offer a more organic, ongoing relationship between a mentor/coach and a team member.
Office hours, on the other hand, are designed to offer ~15 minutes time slots for team members to get help from experts on stated specialties and technical questions where you can engage one on one or hundreds of folks.
Office hour series v. events
Office hour series are designed to be smaller and shorter than live events. The smaller enrollments in office hours facilitate a more intimate setting in which team members can hone in on a topic of their choosing, learning from experts one-on-one or in a small group.
Office hour series & mentorship notifications
Uniquely accessible only in your global settings, sharing the same side menu of Mentorship & Office Hour Series, is Office Hour Series notification management, controlling these notifications both globally and at the office hours content item level.
While Mentorship notification settings reside both at the global and child content item levels, you can't manage office hour series notifications at the office hour series content item level.
Mentorship notification settings located at the child content level within the edit (3 dot) menu
Office hour series & Channels
Filter office hours by Channel
Please note that you can't move a session between channels - a session will not have a channel as it belongs to the parent series, and the series can be moved between channels.
If an office hour series is moved to a channel all the sessions automatically come with it.
Global settings location for Mentorship & Office Hour Series
https://YourTenantInstanceName.plusplus.app/a/system-settings/coaching/#notifications
Example: https://demo.plusplus.app/a/system-settings/coaching/#notifications
There's some caveats as well for these notification settings located in the global Mentorship & Office Hour Series menu - if they do not specify they are for Mentorship, they are used for both mentorship and office hours.
Examples of which notification setting mentions Mentorship and cannot be used for Office Hours:
Note that the Office Hour Series notification configuration location is on the roadmap to be updated to bring these settings to the local content item level.
See also