Yes, with all the holiday planning of feasts and gifts and decorations, there is also the important task of drafting your holiday auto-responder text. You need to let your colleagues and clients know that you’ll be away from your desk celebrating the spirit of the season (and not reading their emails!).
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I will be out of the office this week. If you need immediate assistance while I’m away, please email (Contact Email Address).
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really tired of the ones that are basically “I’m in a meeting for an hour and I’ll check my messages when I return.”
Oh my gaaaaawwwwdddd my mother used to do this. Like, her work voicemail was “Hello, you have reached Lizy’s Mother, Job Title at Company Name. Today is Thursday, June 3. I am in the office today, but away from my desk at the moment. If you’ll leave a message with your name, phone number, and reason for your call, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
That would drive me mad. I’m okay with in meetings all day but if you’re just going home at a normal time that’s ridiculous!
I’m currently out of the office for the holidays. While you are reading this response, I am probably: Trying not to laugh at my [relative’s] corny jokes Trying not to get pissed at my [relative] asking me why I still don’t have a boy/girlfriend Attempting to explain my career to my [relative] for the 800th time Trying not to get hungry (I’m probably busy stuffing my face with cookies)
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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 …
I used to have this on my personal voice mail, back when voice mail was used often since internet was over phone lines. I stopped using it because it confused too many callers. Invariably the first message would be “Hello? Hello? Mark? Fu-” (click). Then there’d be another call with a proper message.
Try this out with your colleagues or share it with colleagues/clients headed off on a vacation to send them off in style:
I would be SUPER annoyed to get this! I agree it seems condescending and it’s just too long.
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Additionally, you can reference a person in charge of your business while you are way:
Set up a vacation response to let your contacts know why you’re away or out of the office and when to expect you back. You can configure separate responses to use for different domains, such as one for your Yahoo email and another for your Gmail account.
Yeah, it’s very strange. I understood changing voicemails to explain that the line can’t actually be answered, but someone is checking the messages and will respond (though that was also only an issue for the first few months), but they had no reason to even mention it for email. I started my job 3 months into lockdown, and by that point, procedures were in place to pretty much allow us to operate normally, albeit with a lot more done electronically than before.
I have a couple people that I work with though who set them for outside their normal work hours, like they automatically kick on at 4:30pm and off at 8am or whatever, and then there’s the one special snowflake who sets her out of office not only when she leaves for the day every day, but also when she takes her half hour lunch or her fifteen minute break, Jesus wept.