There are some types of work or office cultures where I think this makes sense. Sometimes enough people use OOO messages for work travel, conferences, and similar that getting the OOO doesn’t really mean you won’t get a response until the date specified. It can help to clarify.
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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Thanks for your email. Please expect a delay in response due to a medical emergency. In case of urgent queries, please reach out to me on my cell or to my colleague at [email protected].
My trick though is to leave the out of office on for the first day after I return so folks know to expect delays while I get caught up/triage my inbox. Works for my company.
ContentsHow to Set Up an Out of Office Reply in the Outlook Desktop AppHow to Set Up Out of Office Replies in the Microsoft Outlook Web Version
What Should Your Vacation Message Include?A subject, with the dates you leave and returnWho to contact in an emergency (name, email, and phone number)Point of contact for non-urgent inquiries (name, email, and phone number)Keep Your Message Professional
Note: Outlook does not attach your signature when it sends automatic replies. If you have a signature, you might want to paste it below your message. If you don’t have one, learn how to add an email signature in Outlook.
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.
We’re not saying you’re boring but you do work in a fairly serious corporate environment. As a result, your out of office needs to be quite to the point but you also like to throw in a little pitch too, you cheeky sod.
At my old job, you used to nominate a contact for when you were out of the office and there wasn’t an obvious person to contact. One department was so small that they all just put the all team email so they never had to change it. Trouble is, it turns out Outlook team emails by default only accept internal messages :X
Which is why the workers who do have the ability, whether through place within the hierarchy or company culture, should not squander it. In fact, they should recognize the OOO as an opportunity to model and normalize organizational or even industry-wide guardrails (as opposed to bullshit feebly-maintained ‘boundaries’). It’s why, starting this summer, we need to embrace the blunt, descriptive OOO message.
But this is where it becomes a power thing. The OOO person says that everyone else wants stuff from them that the sender can’t get elsewhere and you need to grovel to get it from them.
So, professionals are expected to use out-of-office email autoresponders whenever they will be out of reach for a fairly long time.
Just a friendly reminder that we are closed today for the [Type of Holiday]. Hope you are having a wonderful day off! The office will be opened on [date and time] and we’ll be answering all your questions.
I wonder if anyone ever calculated how much time was wasted producing those messages.
Optionally, click the Attach Invoice checkbox to automatically attach the customer’s invoice to the auto-response.
Labor Day 2013 – Brand Constructors. Out of office message examples. More general requests can be emailed to. If your message is time sensitive, use urgent in your subject line so i know to reply by the end of the business day. Festive out of office holiday messages provide you with a creative approach to tailor your automated email message to a specific holiday.