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I’ll be back in the office on August 7th and if all of the stars are in alignment, I’ll respond to this email before Labor Day.
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Whatever you decide before heading out for that much-needed time off, it’s imperative that you set up an out of office reply. Your customers and co-workers don’t get that same pause button as you do. That’s why you should inform everyone that needs to know about your time off.
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This is the perfect way to reduce the sheer email volume that you’ll return to, with a little anarchy involved…
Daimler's move follows Volkswagen's decision to turn email off after office hours and new guidelines in France ordering workers in some sectors to ignore work emails when they go home.
We do OOO messages, but also send an email to the department and other relevant people, so that part doesn’t sound odd to me. I want to know if someone is going to be away next week, because then I can plan accordingly instead of sending them an email about something important Monday morning and find out I’m SOL until the following week.
Thank you for calling [Company Name]. If you know your party’s extension, please dial it at any time. To reach our company directory, press 1. For more information about [Company Name], press 2. If you are an existing customer, please press 3. For billing questions, press 4. To repeat menu options, press 9. For all other inquiries, press 0. 3. Language Options
Of course, every message sends a message, even a barebones OOO that seems to say nothing more than that you’re away until next week, so why not try to inject a little personality? You could get quirky by giving your auto-responder robot a personality. You could dispense with words altogether and substitute a gif or emojis. Or how about a little retro concrete poetry – you know, where you arrange your words on the screen to form an image of a palm tree or a pina colada? It might be worth noting here that the amount of personality you inject depends on your trade. What earns you cachet in the creative industries might backfire in the financial sector, for instance.
haha no offense taken. No one wanted to read (or even listen!) to all that. We only did it so she’d stop ruining our Mondays with epic 1-hour rants about what terrible people we are. And no, none of the projects we worked on were ever so critical or time-sensitive!
It’s also expected that if you’re in Wales you put the effort in to at least try and read Welsh, but tbh I can barely read English before 10am.
5. Provide Your Mobile Number. This template comes handy if you don’t prefer checking your inbox during the holiday but want to provide your mobile number for urgent inquiry.
As your email will not be forwarded, please contact in the meantime my colleague, Mary, 0912345678, [email protected].
I do find the above quite amusing, but it would never fly at my place of work! lol!
I will be out of the office from Nov 3rd to Nov 10th with no access to my emails.
I find it rude because if I emailed them, it might be an FYI but requiring no action. If they just delete it, they might then be confused about project status later. I would be annoyed to have to re-send a message after the fact because they don’t think ANY email during their time off has value.
I accidentally left my slightly-more-than-professionally-testy “I am out of the office due to a lapse in government funding” voicemail greeting up for a couple months after funding was restored, oops.