Okay. Before you go into fancyland or funnyland about how you're in the woods protecting yourself against bears, remember Rule 1! Make sure you have all the pertinent details in your out of office message.
I’ll be at a work off-site and will have limited availability by phone and email until ___, please contact ___ for immediate needs about ____ otherwise I will respond as soon as possible”
.
Personally, I’d get a kick out of it, but I wouldn’t do something like that myself.
“Hi, Thank you for contacting me. I’m currently out of the office for a conference and will not be available until [date]. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
There’s no shame in using Christmas to indulge in your childhood movie tastes, but there is shame in not sharing that adorable side of yourself when people are trying to reach you during the holidays.
If you're unable to respond to emails because you are taking time off, attending a work event or away from your computer for any other reason, it's important to set up an out of office message. Setting up an out of office message helps keep people informed and prepares them for how to proceed in your absence. What do you write in a vacation responder?
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.
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.
The head of llama engagement called my boss and reamed her out for my “poor behaviour” and then called me and reamed me out, too. She said it didn’t matter if project X was the biggest thing our company did all year – her requests took precedence.
When I’m back in the office and going through emails, I’ll sometimes send a note of “I’m catching up on my emails and saw you had XX question – did you still need help with that?” before doing any in-depth research.
I’m new to tech but have watched my friends in tech with envy up until now. Worth the wait. I may be in the minority but my company actually assumes we’re all adults and treats us like human beings. So different than working in the myriad corporate dronehouses I’ve been in up until now. Finally, a place I can have my pink hair!
We used to do this at my old job in addition to OOO messages. I found it useful to know in advance how long people were going to be gone. There’s nothing more annoying than needing something urgently from the one person who can help and then getting an auto-response saying they’re out for the next 2 weeks.
That’s what always got me! There always seemed to be an air of preemptive defensiveness? I’m definitely reading a lot into it based on other ways this person showed up in the workplace and how they treated others. Also I completely agree that some things are more important than work (!), but there was something about the way these were phrased that made me feel like ……… okay?? I know??? It just felt … performative.
If the person keeps you on the message thread in which they then contact someone else (ideally, the person you stated in your out of office message as the one who’s handling urgent issues in your absence), you are literally kept in the loop and can see for yourself that all was handled when you get back. Of course, this works even better if you check the most recent items in your inbox first when you get back.
My old job was like that! It was so, so annoying. I understood requiring us to update our voicemails if we were out of the office that day, but it was just a waste of a few minutes every single morning.
My snarky colleague sure did in his out-of-office message below. We send thank-you letters in response to holiday gifts, so it's only natural to expect the same gesture in our work inboxes …
Thank you for your email. I’m out of the office and will be back at (Return Date). During this period I will have limited access to my email.