I have a colleague who directs people to email an alternative email alias when she’s on leave. This alternative email alias? Yup goes to her. Don’t know why she does it. She’s also set a rule in her team that they have to answer each others’ phones of someone is away from their desk. Inevitably, the person answering the phone can’t help and tells the caller to send an email. It drives me up the wall.
Again, this will depend HUGELY on what sort of role it is (an external-facing vendor, for example, should probably not use something like this). But for many internal requests, it is not power-tripping to ask someone to either redirect their email or wait until a later date to send it.
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These messages are generally formal in nature and have the information about the unavailability of an individual and also the details of the person who can be contacted in his/her absence.
I am on vacation. I cannot read your email. Your email is being deleted. Please contact Hans or Monika if it's really important, or resend the email after I'm back in the office. Danke Schoen.
I appreciate your message. I am out of the office currently with no office email access. However, return on the following [date-of-return].
Former boss used to put an OOO for EVERYTHING. Like, “I’m doing interviews today and will reply tomorrow.” Nothing was ever on fire so it could have indeed waited until tomorrow without the OOO – people probably wouldn’t have noticed.
In my office, most of the phone lines just didn’t even have voicemail, because we already got enough abuse in regular phone calls (university parking office). When we switched to VOIP, that went away, but at least now they get *badly* transcribed into our email boxes…
I can see how it would be annoying to some people, but at least it has a bit of personality to it. Maybe I’m just tired of sending so many rote emails in business speak, but I do find it kind of refreshing if only because it’s a different kind of artificiality than I’m used to.
I would follow up with my coworkers before I follow up with an outside client. “I see an email from Wakeen asking for a copy of the 2020 TPS report. Before I follow up with him, did anyone get him the copy?” It just make a department look dysfunctional if they can’t communicate internally and get their act together before contacting an outside person.
This list of 25 out of office message examples for holidays are perfect to use for your autoresponder. ----- Hello, Thanks for your email. I'm currently out of the office, returning on [date]. I'll respond to your message then. While I won't be quite as far as the North Pole, I will still be completely disconnected from my inbox until my return.
You can get quite creative and figure it out by yourself. However, here’s an example.
While you certainly don’t want to go on and on in your message, there is an opportunity to engage or educate while you’re away. Here are a few options to potentially include.
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I get why that would bug the hell out of you. But on the flip side, having worked with a lot of European colleagues who do this, it’s not that they’ll have to 8 hours of work on vacation, it’s that they won’t be working at all. So if your bit isn’t done by X date, then their bit won’t get done until they return. That’s just the culture there.
I have a deep paranoia about out of office messages ever since a previous (bad) job. Every year I worked on a huge project that took nine months, and three separate weeks (or more) of that involved correcting, editing, and reviewing a dense 300 page document.
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Given free rein, I’d absolutely love to tell people that needing me to show them how to do X in Excel is actually not a vacation-interrupting emergency and there are tons of free videos that would explain that, if they did not want to contact the actual departments who handle tech support and training. Or that this project they’ve known about for a month but decided to keep under their hat until it became an emergency is something they’ll need to resolve themselves. But that would not fly at all.