“I’m not in the office. I’m spending time with my children and that’s far more important than absolutely anything you could be after”
Regardless of my general health and hygiene over the silly season, I’ll be back in the office on January 2. 15. “Thank you for your consideration during this festive or not-festive time.”
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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.
Sometimes people will think it’s okay to ask a quick question while you’re out of the office. Avoid the interruption by including at least one person who can answer questions in your absence.
If you need assistance during this time, one of my team members will be able to help. They can be contacted at [phone number] Monday-Friday from 8-5.
There are a million reasons why people feel the need to sheepishly telegraph that they’ll be checking email while OOO: a toxic workplace culture; a set of bad managers who don’t model work/life balance or use manipulative tactics like saying, ‘feel free to take some time if you need it’; companies that are so focused on lean growth they don’t have anyone to pick up the slack when an employee opts to take time off. These days, merely having the confidence to step away from your job by taking the vacation time granted to you in the terms of your employment agreement is still a privilege in the American workforce.
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
In urgent issues, you can contact (YOUR COLLEAGUE’SNAME) by mail: [email protected].
If you scroll down, towards the bottom you'll find a section called Vacation Responder. There, tick Vacation Responder On and fill in the dates for when you want any received emails to be replied to with the automatic response.
1) Communicate when a person will be back, or if they are out for an indeterminate period of time, tell me who I should be contacting instead 2) Communicate what I should expect. (For example, when I do my monthly reports, I have an out of office message that says that I’ll be slow to respond. I *will* actually check my email at least a couple of times, but I generally won’t respond to anything non-urgent.) 3) If the person is in a job that handles urgent requests, list who I need to contact instead if it can’t wait until they get back.
However, I will be taking periodic breaks from binge-watching everything I’ve missed to check my email [once per day/every evening/occasionally] while I’m away.
10) I am on vacation from mm/dd to mm/dd. I will allow each sender one email. If you send me multiple emails, I will randomly delete your emails until it is pared down to one. Choose wisely. Please note that you already sent me one email.
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Half of the auto-replies I get are for very specific chunks of time. Like, if you are out of the office for three hours I don’t need to know, dude.
Personally, I’d get a kick out of it, but I wouldn’t do something like that myself.
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”?
Sample voicemail for individual’s work phone: “You have reached the voicemail for (name) at The University of Toledo. The University is closed for winter break. Please leave your name, number and a brief message after the tone, and I will return your call after New Year's Day. Thank you and happy holidays.”