Hello, [NAME] is away from the office. E-mail contact during this time may be irregular or nonexistent. When she gets back she will be swamped by the backlog. Try to forgive her; she is a mere human and thus, weak. This message was NOT sent by a human, but by a robot. We robots are neither weak nor fallible. We are tireless and will one day rule the Universe.
The eternally mind-blowing story of the company-wide email, OoO messages, and reply-all autoresponders that took out a 30,000 employee university email server one summer, comes to mind here…
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Hey — you’ve reached my inbox, but hold on, the doorbell just rang. It’s the UPS driver. He’s loading me onto the truck. Dang, it’s stuffy in this truck with all these boxes. He’s taking me down to… Oh! Florida! And now I’m on the beach. Thanks, UPS driver!
What we need in our work communication is not more professional politeness or less formal, chat-based messaging applications like Slack. We need honesty. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to see honesty as self-indulgent or disrespectful. I’d argue the opposite is true. Honesty, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient for all parties in the moment, pays dividends later. It builds trust. When my partner Anne Helen Petersen and I were interviewing people for our forthcoming book on remote work, a frequent lament from both middle managers and workers was that they didn’t feel like they knew how to succeed in their jobs; that they were guessing what their superiors and coworkers wanted and, even when they asked, they didn’t quite trust the responses they got back.
You must pay close attention to signs of negative language or tendencies to sound monotonous. Instead, you can use simple, everyday vocabulary to convey your message.
They only discovered this AFTER the Christmas rush. Thankfully there were no client meltdowns that year or it could have been a lot worse.
Something that actually was an issue with my employer ages ago: at one time there was a policy that out of office would only go to internal people, and nothing would be sent at all to anyone external. Apparently this was felt necessary in order to mitigate risk of burglary, so people wouldn’t know that “John Winchester has gone on a hunting trip” and that his house was empty.
Exactly! This may be the type of person who hears a phrase that sounds polite when referring to another, but mangles it and uses it to refer to themself so it becomes the opposite of polite.
Hi, Our store will be closed until the end of the week for Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year]. We are happy to inform you that all of your emails will be answered once we are back on [date]. Kind regards.
70% of local searches online result in a phone call; In 2014, 80% of callers sent to voicemail said they do not leave messages because they don’t think they’ll even be heard. If you want your voicemail greeting to work for you and not against you, it’s …
You don’t have to disclose the specific reason for your absence in your out-of-office message. You can simply say “I’m on leave” or “I’m currently out of the office.” This goes for any reason you’re OOO.
If you are a contingent worker or un- or under-employed, just email and I’ll give you a free subscription, no questions asked. If you’d like to underwrite one of those subscriptions, you can donate one here.
An old boss had a pet peeve about this so I became very conscious of making sure that I listed out who to contact on what day… before the group email. So it looked something like this:
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?
One common challenge faced by customers is auto reply email or text messages lack a specification about the estimated wait time to get answers for their queries.
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The UPS driver is scheduled to pick me back up on the eighth. He should deliver me back to the office by the ninth (assuming he’s not late like he was this time).