Don’t stress about what to say in your out-of-office messages. Keep it simple, concise, and the people reaching out to you will know exactly what to do or when they’ll hear from you. And, most importantly, enjoy your time off! By Erin Ollila / May 16th, 2021 / Categories: Professional Development / Tags: holidays, out-of-office, time off, vacation, work, work from home, work life balance
For non-urgent inquiries, I will return your message as soon as I get back in the office.
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I say “as soon as possible,” which to me means “as soon as possible after I get back to the office, make myself a coffee, throw out the milk I forgot in the fridge, chat with my colleagues a bit, check in with my boss, and triage all the new emails and VMs that came in while I was away.”
Thank them for their email. Even though you're not actually responding to the email, you still need to mind your Ps and Qs. After your greeting, add "Thanks for your email."
While creating auto responding emails it is vital to focus on the tone and language. It means:
Don’t know if those happen due to bad software, or a bad configuration decision, or just careless users, but those exhaust me.
Of course that all depends on if you have employees, etc., but i’ve seen those dynamics recently and think it’s interesting to see who someone leaves as their OOO contact. What do you guys think? Am I reading too much into it?
With technological advancements, you always have access to your work and contacts, making it difficult to be offline even when you are not physically present in the office. However, it sometimes becomes a necessity to step away and treat yourself to a vacation.
Hi! I will be out of the office this week. If you need immediate assistance while I’m away, please email (COLLEAGUE NAME).
That’s my practice, too, though I only use it for times I’ll be out for a day or more. Some of the work I do and support can be very time sensitive and it’s really the most efficient use of *everyone’s* time if I spend two minutes before I leave setting up OOO so that they are quickly directed to the right person instead of having to go check my calendar, see I’m out for a week, try to remember who it is that’s my backup, etc.
I once worked somewhere that required an all-office email if you were going to be late, if you had an appointment, etc. I hated that. No one needed to know I was going to the dentist, but it was policy so I did it.
In the normal times, my friends and I used to do “Crawl 4 Cancer” which is a bar crawl (aka debauchery day) where all proceeds go to cancer research. It’s great! But…yEEah, we’re not crawling FOR cancer…we’re very much against it! We laugh about it every year and the jokes never get old.
I’ll get back to you when I return to civilization. Or to an area with WiFi. Or to the office on May 10th. Whichever comes first.
i am 100 percent in favor of using email signatures and out of office messages to be more blunt about how you want other people to use/respect your time. from this: politico.com/newsletters/we…
To be honest, if it wasn’t for the bloody flashing red light I’d never bother with it. Can’t stand the flashing light.
Give complete details of the person they can contact if there is an urgency. If you are in charge of multiple departments, you can add more people along with their expertise area so that customers know who they should reach.
Also, you need to know your audience if you are going to go eccentric. Alison mentions that this message is fine in their culture, but it wouldn’t npbe appropriate for my somewhat formal field. And even if your workplace in general is casual, you might be contacted by someone outside. (In a tiny provincial courthouse I served in the past, there is a story going around that in the 80s a junior but elderly clerk used to address phone callers as hun and sweetheart and generally speak very informally. Most people thought it was funny, and then the President of Supreme Court called and… he didn’t).