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I’m extremely busy watching Home Alone, Die Hard, and the 1994 Ninja Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Christmas Special on repeat until the new year.
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I try to substitute “parental leave” for “maternity leave” whenever possible. Trying to normalize it as a benefit to all employees (at my company) rather than a special lady-vacation.
The root of that question, as pointed out in this New York Times article, is that taking vacation can be a bit emotionally conflicting.
I have always been flabbergasted by people who include vacation details (especially if they’ll be out of the country) in their OOO messages. I’m not a burglar, nor do I know any. (I hope!) But the people with the message don’t know that!
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Too little info is frankly worse, IMO. All you need for an OOO is date you are coming back, and who to contact in your absence if it can’t wait for your return. If it doesn’t have that, why bother having one at all?
You’ll have options to set a “first day” and “last day,” or just “first day.” If you want things truly automated, picking a “last day” will trigger the autoresponder to automatically turn itself off the day after the selected date. Of course, in those instances when you’re unsure of your exact return date, it’s best to leave this open-ended. The “out of office” subject line is much less creative and scientific than say, a cold email subject line or a marketing email subject line. More often than not, they’re very plain and simple, like the following:
If it’s anything less than a business day, it just becomes this extra beacon of our completely toxic and out of whack work culture that insists we be reachable every second.
Save time and direct folks to a page with answers to frequently asked questions in an autoresponse to help sort and prioritize customer service inquiries. Thanks for reaching SimpleTexting, my name is Jenny. While you wait for a customer support rep, see if we can answer your question here https://txt.st/PQBLPE.
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. !
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Bon voyage! You’re going on your holidays and you’re completely leaving the office behind. This is the perfect auto-response if you won’t be checking your emails the entire trip.
I am not able to set OOO messages at all. Most of the people who are contacting me do so through custom aliases that then come to our team, who each handles specifics. Even if I’m out someone else is available, but I can’t know who is supposed to handle that specific email to be able to redirect without naming everyone, and then confusing things more when Client A gets the same reply as Client B but one needs to go to teammate C and the other to teammates D & E. Then to make just that bit more complicated, there are the clients who think that going around the system to email the teammates directly at our personal email addresses is better but pitch a hissy when we’re OOO but they didn’t get a notice? I just set rules to forward those.
The OOO definitely has those two pieces. But it could be 1 of 4 people who handle things when I’m out (depending on what it is) and they may not know at all that the requestor had reached out to me first / forget to cc me. So, I’d see this as me adding to my OOO “if you contact person X, please keep me cc’ed on the message you send to person x”?
Thank you for your e-mail. Unfortunately, I will not be able to answer your e-mail before 01.02.2021.
I used to know someone who had a snarky message about how “if this is an emergency, there are no actual emergencies in my field,” and then encouraged someone to Google for “goats in trees” and calm down. Yes, she was allowed do that in her office.