I’ve only seen it used for certain roles – usually admin-type ones – where people are fielding a significant amount of requests, so the potential vacation backlog could become prohibative and discourage people from taking time off.
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If you have plans to be out of the office for a period of time, then setting your out-of-office email message is a must. The last thing you want to do is upset clients, coworkers, or vendors by going dark with no explanation.
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This is one reason I rarely give a contact person. My company is terrible at communication, and not only could you easily be sent on a OOO chain, you could also be emailing someone who is out who didn’t even use OOO.
We do it every time we go on vacation or take a sick day. We put up an out-of-office (OOO) message with the date of our return, a colleague’s contact information for urgent needs, and maybe even some details about the destination of our long-awaited vacation.
Having a professional automated message when you are busy enough to answer customer queries right away can set the right tone for your business and inform customers when they can expect to receive the response.
I would very much like to meet him, and I don’t know if that proves or challenges his point…
I think the problem is that “at your earliest convenience” is a formulaic convention that uses explicit, almost exaggerated politeness to basically issue a stern direction, meaning “as soon as you possibly can”. When you turn it into “at my earliest convenience” it’s unclear if you mean “whenever it’s convenient for me to get to it” (what the words say) or “as soon as I possibly can” (what the meaning of the formulaic original is). Or else it sounds like you didn’t quite understand how “at your earliest convenience” works.
The boss’s thinking was that people who did drivebys looking for you would then email you, see your OOO, and then be able to call you to talk about whatever they were driving by for. No one liked putting their personal contact info so we never worked from home (pre-COVID and pre-VOIP implementation) or told people to IM us and we’d call them.
It’s your last day before the vacation starts, you are rushing through your to-do list and suddenly you realize- I need to write an OOO email!
But the best OOO (actually, an autoreply) came from Ryan Reynolds – you know, the actor and gin company owner. If you emailed him, you got this (I think there were others too – this is the one I got): Thank you for your interest in Aviation American Gin! You’ve reached my Out Of Office Mission Statement.
While injecting a little humor into your vacation email message can sometimes be a good idea – depending on your company and contacts – avoid oversharing and keep it professional at all times.
Have you ever had one of those most amazing kind of days; the kind of day that you will remember when you are old and gray and telling your grandchildren stories? Well, I seem to have those days quite often. In fact, if you’re seeing this message, it’s probably because I’m having one of those kinds of days today, and I’m not going to respond to your message.
Don’t be afraid to use a pop cultural reference that the audience would recognize. Instead of bemoaning your absence, they’ll have something fun and familiar to laugh at.
This holiday out-of-office email is definitely on theme, if not a little passive aggressive. If you’re getting emails during the holidays, why not treat everything you receive that season like the present it is, and send a thank you note?
Otherwise, all hands will be back on deck upon my return on Thursday 5th September and I will reply to your email at the earliest convenience. The single biggest day of the year for calling in sick tends to fall during the festive period; more people were too ill to work on Monday 10 December than any other day last year. (Whosoff.com, 2019) December is the most popular month of the year for authorised absences, as many employees are using up their remaining holiday entitlement. (Whosoff.com, 2019)