German vehicle-maker Daimler has an innovative approach to holiday email, which many people about to return from holiday may well wish their company would copy, writes William Kremer.
Don’t know if those happen due to bad software, or a bad configuration decision, or just careless users, but those exhaust me.
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As you may have noticed, the holiday season is around the corner. We hope that you and your family are safe and in happy holiday spirits!
One thing that really bothers me in out of office messages is “contact my supervisor” without listing the supervisor’s name. I work in a company with 4 large service departments, and each department is broken into multiple smaller teams. I don’t have a great grasp on who is on or who leads which smaller team, and we don’t have an org chart with that much detail readily available. If you’re saying to contact someone, I think you should always include the person’s name and contact information, not just “my supervisor”, “one of my team members”, etc. !
I used to work with someone who had a message telling people she only checked her email twice a day. You pretty much needed to call her if you needed anything outside of those times. (She worked in a remote office.) I think she had read one of those books on efficiency that recommended scheduled email time. But there were problems with this: 4. My department often had to email attachments or text to illustrate our questions/concerns. And we were on deadlines. Reading a page of text over the phone was not an efficient use of anyone’s time 5. She did outreach & was often out of the office on site visits, trainings, or travel to these places, but never ever set her OOO for these, because she was “working.” However, she was effectively not available to read emails from other staff until after hours on those days.
I’ll return on [date] or after I watch [favorite holiday movie] one too many times (whichever comes first)—and will respond to your message at that time.
It’s possible I might quote from some responses to this in an upcoming column, so please note if you don’t want me to do that with yours!
This is hilarious. I always read those kinds of efficiency hacks and think “wow, I wish I had the kind of job that let me set hard, weird boundaries for myself that inconvenience everyone else,” and now I learn that I apparently could have just asserted it without it being appropriate at all.
(Depending on your email host, the process of setting up your out of office assistant may vary. You can find a guide on how to access your out of office settings in Outlook here.)
Education Details: 15 Out of Office Messages for Professionals. February 26, 2021. Out of office messages are automatic email replies, or autoresponder email messages, that go out to colleagues, customers and clients when you are away from work. They let others know you are unavailable for contact and when they can expect a response to their emails.
1. Sign in to Outlook.com. 2. Click the gear icon on the upper right corner beside your name. 3. Select More mail settings. 4. Under Managing your account click Sending automated vacation replies. 5. Enter the message you'd like to send while you're away.
Running away from your inbox or your work responsibilities doesn’t solve problems, it merely delays them. What boyd suggests, though, is something different. Her strategy asks us plan ahead of time: to construct an off ramp from our jobs as well as an on-ramp for the eventual re-entry. Her asks aren’t Herculean but they require some foresight — and they demand that a person be very upfront about what they want from their time off, and that they commit to protecting their time.
Confirm any expected deliveries will not be left at your door or unattended. Reschedule if necessary.
Here is a quick checklist of 65 messages that will be useful to make your holiday closing smooth and efficient, from setting gone-for-the-holiday notifications to resetting thermostats.
This works fine but I notice it also adds after your auto-responder at the bottom an option for them to reply “urgent” to ensure I receive notifications which seems damn pointless if you ask me. Is there a way to switch that off because it seems to be counter-intuitive to setting the auto-responder that you’re not there or on leave? Thanks Trace
Keeping It Real. I am currently out of the office on vacation. I know I’m supposed to say that I’ll have limited access to email and won’t be able to respond until I return, but that’s not true.
Auto (I mean auto not manual sms send out) sms reply does not work for incoming calls only for messages. I see this issue is getting ignored though pointed out several times. Has anyone cracked this one?