Q. Are there any departments or clinics on the Health Science Campus that will be closed during winter break?
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There are multiple ways to craft your out-of-office message, but there are a couple of standard best practices to follow that will ensure you don’t come back to angry or confused customers, coworkers, or vendors.
On the funnier side, my vacations tend to be trips to either see my favorite band in far flung places or going to conventions for my hobby, so for a while I added a checklist at the end of my OOO that said:
Not just that, but some e-mail systems (Gmail comes to mind) have taken to hiding the signature underneath a little expando-button. You don’t see it unless you go looking.
This is what I’ve seen most often in my career. Problem is, the contact is almost always the admin. I’m the admin. Everyone’s idea of assistance is different. Often, I didn’t have the knowledge about the issue in order to be of any assistance. I wound up spending more time running around looking for answers than actually working on what was on my own plate. It’s exhausting. Otherwise known as “please don’t call us for unicorn problems when we handle llamas. Literally, we can’t do anything for unicorn problems.”
I want to be clear that I don’t think OOO responders are the solution to the larger problems of worker inequality or the broad American cultural attitudes that celebrate and encourage overwork. That would be silly. The big remedies for what ails modern work will likely require workers organizing and employers recognizing and granting protections. Large companies will have to stop prioritizing shareholder at the expense of their workers. I’m aware how unlikely this feels in practice and how a thoughtful auto reply email feels like applying a band-aid on a gunshot wound. I get it.
As long as you’ve covered the basics—dates of your absence and who to contact in your absence—you should be good to go.
I say I’m off-duty, or in non-working status, but I come from a DOD background. I no longer like to say out of the office. Unavailable is good too.
[BUSINESS] is in no way endorsing or not endorsing said holiday, nor encouraging or discouraging employees of all demographic clusters to engage in celebrity activities. Thank you for your consideration during this festive or not-festive time.
We are closed today for the [public holiday name]. Our office will re-open tomorrow at am.
I had a colleague that managed to set up a rule for an OOO that would only get sent if you cc’d or bcc’d him, which basically said that all those cc mails would get automatically put in a separate folder and he may or may not ever read them – may the odds be ever in your favor basically.
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I use a basic OOO message – “Hi! I’m out of the office x date(s). I will return your email when I’m back at my computer on x date. If you have an urgent matter, please contact x or y. Have a nice weekend/holiday/etc!/Thanks!” My office WANTS us to use more personal and witty OOO messages like this article’s message. And that stresses me out. I don’t want to spend time worried about whether my OOO is witty. I don’t want to annoy other people just looking for basic info like when am I back and who they can contact in the meantime. I correspond a lot with third parties on serious matters (legal), and I don’t think a message like that is appropriate. So, I just keep using my basic message and hope my supervisor’s supervisor doesn’t email me and see that I’m not “trying.” Ugh.
A standard OOO responder email simply needs to inform the sender that you are out of the office and when to expect a response. Like this: Hi there, Thank you for your email. I am currently out of the office until [date] and will have limited access to my email. If you require immediate assistance for any urgent matters, please contact [name] at [email] or [phone] in my absence. Best,
And although my colleague had mixed feelings about her own parents joining that population in Florida, she couldn’t be too upset when her dad suggested flying down from Boston for a Red Sox spring training game.
This is too much. If someone said something like “I’m at the beach until Jan 5!” instead of “I’m out of the office until Jan 5,” I’d appreciate the slight personal touch. But don’t share too much. We just need to know that you’re not gonna answer our email for a while.