Working hours tell the platform when you're open. On their own they change nothing — they're the schedule your automation rules read when they decide whether to greet someone or tell them you're closed.
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What working hours actually do
This is the part the screen doesn't tell you: saving working hours does not, by itself, make anything happen. Nothing sends an away message because you closed at 17:00. What working hours give you is a definition of "open" that your automations can ask about. Two rules are created for every account and are built around it — Welcome Message, which greets people who message you inside your hours, and Out of Office, which replies to people who message you outside them. Both arrive switched off on purpose, so nothing auto-sends until someone has read the wording and turned it on. So the full recipe is two steps: set your hours here, then go to Automations and enable the rule you want. Set the hours and skip the second half and you'll be left wondering why the replies never came.
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Describing your week
Manage working hours opens the week a day at a time. Each day has its own switch for open or closed, and each open day carries one or more time ranges — the + adds another range, which is how you describe a lunch break: 09:00–13:00 and 14:00–18:00 leaves the middle of the day outside your hours. The first range of a day can't be deleted, so an open day always has at least one. A range that ends before it starts, like 22:00–06:00, wraps over midnight and works the way a night shift should. Ranges stop at their end time rather than including it, so a message landing at exactly 17:00 on a 09:00–17:00 day counts as outside. A new account starts out Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 with the weekend closed, so usually you're correcting the days that don't match how you actually work rather than building the week from nothing.
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Holiday mode
Holiday mode is the switch at the top, and it's blunt on purpose: while it's on, your account counts as closed at all times and the whole day grid greys out. Your hours aren't lost — they're still saved underneath and come back untouched when you switch it off. It's the fastest way to cover a shutdown week without dismantling your schedule. Two things to know before you rely on it. It has no dates, so it stays on until a person turns it off — there's nothing that ends it for you. And it flips the outcome of both built-in rules: while it's on, Out of Office answers everyone and Welcome Message never fires.