Your profile is reached from your avatar in the top bar, and it is worth ten minutes on your first day. Several settings here change how the whole platform behaves for you.
The screen has eight tabs. This piece covers the first one; the rest have their own.
Two halves, and only one is yours
What you control
Full name, your legal name, which is what appears on formal documents.
Display name, what colleagues actually see. A nickname belongs here rather than in the legal field.
Pronouns, shown alongside your name.
Phone and email.
A short bio, a line or two, shown on your team roster card. Worth writing. In an organisation past about thirty people it is the difference between a name and a colleague.
Your photo. Also worth doing, for the same reason: a wall of initials is harder to work with than a wall of faces, and presence dots read better against a photo.
What HR controls
Employee code, designation, department, hub, reporting manager, date of joining, employment type and work location are shown here and cannot be edited by you.
That is deliberate rather than an oversight. These fields drive real things: your hub sets your working days and time zone, your department decides which measures you see, your reporting manager builds the team views, and several of them feed leave and payroll.
If one is wrong, tell HR. It is a quick fix at their end and it will correct several screens at once.
Why the bio is worth two minutes
The roster card is the thing colleagues actually meet when they are working out who to ask about something.
A name and a job title tells them almost nothing: half the organisation has a title that could mean four different jobs. One sentence about what you actually do, and what you are the person to ask about, saves somebody a wrong message every few weeks.
The version that works is specific and short. What you own, and what you would be happy to be interrupted about.
The four settings that matter most
Buried at the bottom of this tab is a localisation block that has more reach than anything else on the page.
Timezone
This is the single most consequential setting in your profile.
It is not cosmetic. Your greeting on Home is computed from it. Your calendar's second time column defaults from it. The hour a meeting suggestion considers reasonable comes from it.
Set it once, correctly, and set it again if you move. A wrong time zone makes every time-related surface quietly wrong without anything ever looking broken, which is the worst kind of wrong.
Time format
Twelve or twenty-four hour, applied everywhere times are shown.
Date format
Same idea, and worth getting right in an international team where the same six digits mean two different days.
Working days and start time
Your working days shade the calendar and drive the work-week view. Your start time feeds the day's shape.
There is also a working-hours end used by Home: the countdown under your greeting appears only when you have set one and only while you are inside it.
Getting it wrong is quiet
Nothing here validates against reality, and nothing warns you. A person in Dubai with a London time zone sees a plausible product that is three or four hours out on every single time-related judgement it makes.
Two minutes on your first day prevents a fortnight of small confusions that nobody traces back to a settings field.
When something looks wrong on another screen
A surprising number of "this screen is showing the wrong thing" reports trace back to this tab.
Times an hour or several out? Time zone.
The working-week view showing the wrong days? Your hub, which is HR's to change.
No end-of-day countdown on Home? Working hours not set.
Your name appearing formally where you expected the short version? Display name empty, so the legal name is being used.
Check here before reporting anything time or identity related. It is a thirty-second check and it resolves most of them.
The other seven tabs
Connections for linking your own Google or Microsoft account.
Security for your password and multi-factor authentication.
Email signatures.
Appearance for themes, accent colour, sidebar mode and fonts.
Notifications for channels, sounds and quiet hours.
Shortcuts, a reference for every keyboard shortcut.
Keywords, the reference for every phrase the capture box understands: the at-verbs, the time expressions, the provider keywords. Genuinely worth reading once if you use the search box to create things.
Your status
Set from the avatar menu rather than from this screen, and worth knowing about because colleagues read it.
Most of it works itself out: you show as online when you are, in a meeting when you are on a call, and on leave when HR says you are. The two worth setting by hand are do not disturb when you need an uninterrupted stretch, and offline when you are around but not working.
Do not disturb does not hide you. Colleagues still see you and can still reach you; what stops is the interruption. That distinction is what makes it usable rather than antisocial.
What colleagues actually see
A short list, and it is smaller than people assume.
Your display name, photo, pronouns and bio. Your presence. Your job title, department and hub. Whether you are on leave.
Not your phone or personal details beyond what you chose to put on the roster card, and not your calendar's contents. Colleagues checking your availability see busy or free, never what you are busy with.
A reasonable first pass
Photo, display name, bio. Two minutes, and it is the part other people experience.
Time zone, formats, working days. Two minutes, and it is the part the product experiences.
Multi-factor authentication, in Security.
Connect your calendar, in Connections.
Everything else can wait until something annoys you, which is the right trigger for a preference.
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