Very true, if the options came in reverse order (or maybe emergency first followed by not-urgent followed by urgent) that would be a little better.
There ought to be a word - and perhaps there is, in German - for the mix of feelings that accompanies composing and activating a holiday out-of-office message. There's smugness, of course, and a gratifying sense of laying down one's virtual tools after a horribly long shift. But for many of us, these nice feelings are tempered by the knowledge that in two weeks, refreshed but depressed, we will have to trawl through hundreds of emails, many of which will be conference room notifications for meetings about crises that have passed.
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After all, a professional voicemail recording boosts your credibility, makes you seem more competent, and encourages whoever's listening to it to continue the relationship.
Under “General,” scroll down to the “Vacation responder” section. Fill in your message and subject line and select the dates you’d like it to appear, then select “Vacation responder on” and then “Save Changes” to finish.
Some of my coworkers have started putting “Thank you for your email” at the beginning of their out of office replies. Management loves it, but I think it’s too ingratiating and I cringe when I read it. These are junior-level staffers, so maybe it makes sense in that context? Anyway, I refuse to put that in my out of office messages.
But what if you’re only taking off one day? Sometimes, it might seem silly to bother with an out-of-office for such a short amount of time–especially if it’s a day that a lot of other people are taking off (such as a national holiday). If people do need you to get back to them urgently, they’ll think they’re being ignored. (Even if you define “urgently” differently.) And if there’s a chance of an emergency landing in your inbox, it’ll be that much harder for you to unplug because you’ll just keep “checking in.”
I’ll be out of the office from 07.07. until 16.07.2020 with no access to my mailbox. Please contact (COLLEAGUE NAME), [email protected].
Oh, it’s part of a much larger set of problems. He will put in the subject line “don’t read until Monday,” also not understanding that when I say I do not look at my email on my off days, I really do not see them, because I don’t open my work email out of work. And that I have a personal email account, that is not my work account?
Out-of-office auto-replies that keep happening over and over on CC’ed email threads.
People often forget the power of an out of office message. One could even start their own language, as shown below:
I wish I’d copied it, but once a co-worker in sales had an out of office that was long and rambling and talked about how she and her family were “going to visit Mickey.” I didn’t know what to make of it, especially since it could go to prospective clients.
I worked for a federal contractor back during the Great Recession when government offices were shut down/working with a skeleton crew. I still remember getting OOOs from almost every email address in the agency we worked at explaining they were on furlough & to contact one specific person if the issue was urgent. We all assumed this poor person was hiding under her desk, rocking back & forth, with her head in her hands.
Be aware of your tone. Keep it clean and simple. Sullivan says: “Even if you work in a casual office environment, the people emailing you may not. It's fine to have a light tone in your communications, especially when you're in an email conversation with someone directly, but your OOO is more of a blast message—including a cat meme or silly quote could backfire if your OOO goes to, say, a new client prospect or the sales director at a company you've been trying to engage.”
I don’t think OP meant condescending to the person’s teammates so much as condescending to the reader. The person over-explains each option and I can see how it would read as ‘wow, you are really dumb and obviously need some handholding to figure out simple decision-making!’ That likely wasn’t the intent, I understand, but I get why people might take it that way.
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This is so timely for me as I begin a 2 week vacation in 15 days (no I’m not counting days or anything). I have been agonizing over how much detail to share in my Out of office message as I will be completely unreachable during this time.
One of the only reasons I get voicemails is because our system is set up to send new voicemail messages to your email as an attached file. Now if only it would send the voicemail as a transcript, I’d be set. I don’t mind returning calls, but listening to voicemails is obnoxious, especially because people are really bad at leaving voice messages.