Hey, there! I’m out of the office this week, but my Twitter signal is always on. Seriously, I’ve got robotic wonder thumbs! (No, not really.) I never fail to tweet fascinating stories about how people can win big with their marketing efforts. So, until I’m back at my desk, won’t you follow me [LINK]? Whether you follow me or not, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can upon returning to my desk on [DATE].
When you’re trying to contact someone on a matter of importance (or even urgency) on one side of the equation and you find out via an autoresponder that they are away for vacation, it can be incredibly frustrating unless they’ve done the front-end work beforehand. (I’m speaking from personal – and recent – experience here. And worse, there was no auto-responder set up. I had to use the – gasp! – telephone to find out what was going on.)
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If you’re taking a vacation and staying home, your clients or coworkers may still expect you to pop into the office and answer their email. Use this autoresponder to let them know you’re really not available — even if you’re bumming around on the couch.
As a matter of courtesy – and to give you the peace of mind needed to be present wherever you are going (either away from the office or on vacation) – you should send each of your clients a simple email to let them know you’ll be away. Below I’ve offered some sample text for to you use as a template. Feel free to make it a TextExpander snippet, Gmail canned response, or whatever. Just use it (or something like it). Please.
However, I will be taking periodic breaks from binge-watching everything I’ve missed to check my email [once per day/every evening/occasionally] while I’m away.
Here are some of the common questions and answers about holiday messages to employees.
This seems like information that would be better in an email signature than an OOO, really. That’s how my organisation does it.
Website: https://www.snaprecordings.com/blog/preparing-your-business-messaging-for-covid-19-impact
I am out of the office from [date range]. If you need immediate assistance, please contact [name, title and contact information].
Thank you for your message. I’m on sick leave and will get back to you as soon as I return to the office.
I am currently out of the office on my holiday – I’m probably drunk somewhere in a bar in Spain. See you when I get back.
Duh. We're in the travel industry. Of course, an out of office message involving dolphin-speak would be at the top of our list! Who doesn't love a dolphin?
If your phone system allows employees to receive external calls at their desks, instruct them to record a "closed for the holidays" message or "out of office" voicemail greeting that gives callers essential details about the closing.
Then there was the occasional one who would do what Alison mentioned with the sickness excuses, and create a tale that read like a police report: “I must miss my deadline because, on the night of August 12, my 45-year-old sister was alone in her house when an intruder entered. He was a 6’1″ caucasian male wearing a black balaclava and carrying a candlestick. As my sister approached him, with the dog barking around her heels, she heard a distant car crash which led her to have a fatal … etc.” (This is not an actual excuse I received, just similar in detail to some of those that were submitted.) These ones I was pretty sure were a writing exercise, requiring time and effort that could have been put to better use on the actual assignment they had been given.
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.
Yeah, that bugs me because a) now I don’t know when you actually will be back, and b) leaves me unsure what other information in the message may also out of date
Should the matter be important, please contact Jim Ross ([email protected]) in my absence. Kind regards.