Don’t you worry: while I pretend to be Santa in front of my kids, my colleague, Hannah, will cover for me. Just email her at [email protected] if you need urgent assistance.
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.
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If your request is urgent, don’t sit around. Send your request to [contact’s name] at [contact’s email].
We have one key administrative assistant who works part time and I always forget — I appreciate that she sets an OOO every day because her department is very deadline driven and it helps me to remember that if I need something from them, I need to connect with her in the morning. We also have some staff who work the school year calendar and others who are year round; the OOO is so helpful in the summers!
I’m so glad not to have to work at [insert company] any more that I am literally high on life.
I have nothing against part-time staff. But, if they only work until 4 PM until 5 PM, then the OOTO replies aren’t as helpful. If we had staff that only worked on certain days, then knowing that it may be more than one business day before a reply would be useful.
Before I implemented this system, I got *way* too many calls asking if so-and-so was out of the office that day when an OOO tells them that Bob will be back in three hours and to call Sue in the interim. The OOOs have reduced status check calls to practically zero, and the OOO preview pops up in our system as soon someone’s email is entered.
Over Twitter DMs, one woman sent me her OOO messages from when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The messages — composed while she was undergoing chemotherapy treatments and recovering from surgery — were detailed and unique. They offered touches of humor, honesty, details about her treatment schedules and set expectations for others trying to reach her. She offered alternative contact options for potential emailers to make sure urgent requests didn’t fall through the cracks but offered a dose or reality as well. I particularly appreciated this line:
Unfortunately, literally every single thing in the world is an emergency in my office :(
› Url: https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-outofoffice-template-you-need-when-youre-only-taking-one-day-off Go Now
“The world is serious enough as it is - people need, and usually appreciate, an unexpected moment of levity in their day,” he says, when quizzed about how recipients might respond to such an OOO. He also confides that he himself has dispensed with auto responses altogether – though not for idealistic reasons. “The last time I tried to set one up, I botched it so badly that somehow it resent every single email in my outbox from the previous year - client emails, firing notices, literally thousands of emails.”
Some people keep theirs quite corporate and formal, adopting a to-the-point notification, i.e.:
In my office, most of the phone lines just didn’t even have voicemail, because we already got enough abuse in regular phone calls (university parking office). When we switched to VOIP, that went away, but at least now they get *badly* transcribed into our email boxes…
Not an out of office reply but a voicemail greeting: at a previous job I called someone and her voicemail greeting said that she would be out of the office from Day – Day and that her voicemail wasn’t accepting messages during that time, click! The time in question was six months prior. Plenty of people she worked with and for could have called her on it and apparently had not, so she just … didn’t get voicemails. Like, that was not a way you could communicate with her.
The exact dates you will be away.The reason for your absence. This is not obligatory, but bear it in mind. The thing is, people might still attempt to get in touch with you if you’re on a business trip or at a conference. They are less likely to try to contact you if they know you’re on vacation.The people who can assist a client while you’re away. Provide names, phone numbers, and email addresses so that colleagues and clients can keep in touch in case they need urgent help. It makes you look trustworthy in the eyes of the recipient and strengthens your working relationship with them.
These sorts of cyberattacks are more common than most might think and make up a large part of the cybercrime industry. According to the FBI, American companies have lost $12 billion to BEC attacks. The good news is there are ways to protect yourself and your company.