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I’ll be at a work off-site and will have limited availability by phone and email until ___, please contact ___ for immediate needs about ____ otherwise I will respond as soon as possible”
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Then, all that’s left to do is turn it on before you abandon your desk, and get prepared for a relaxing holiday break—without feeling the need to be constantly tethered to your inbox.
Will this work if the phone is off or in airplane mode? I’m leaving the country and I can almost guarantee someone is going to text me and then get really mad even though I told them I was leaving.
Whether you’re off sick, away on training or somewhere blissfully sunny, you’ll need to set-up your ‘Out of Office’ auto-reply. Most people tend to go with the boring and basic formula of apologies and redirection to someone else who might be able to help. We’ve scoured the internet and gathered 10 of our favourite responses. After reading these, you might rethink your own!
hi i want to be able to hear calls and alerts while at the same time if my phone is in lock to auto reply. is that possible? to have both?
we had something similar at one phone-heavy place I used to work and it was actually extremely useful – everyone set their voicemail when they got in, and people would include if they were offsite (so worth ringing their mobile) or likely to be otherwise unreachable, and who to contact if your query was urgent. only took a minute to set, and was super useful to me as someone who had to talk to maybe 10-20 people on the phone in a day.
And if you suspect that you won’t look through all those emails that cluttered up your inbox while you were on a vacation at all? Be honest about it and tell your prospects to contact you again at a certain date.
It’s up to you whether you want to explicitly state that you’ve been furloughed. If you’re working at a company or industry where a sizable portion of the workforce has been furloughed, it might be confusing not to say so. You might write:
That’s how I feel about OOO for when I’m only gone one workday. Very rarely am I dealing with anything that can’t wait 2 business days. I only set up OOO replies if I’ll be gone longer.
Probably a lot of overlap with the same type of person who feels the need to justify every sick day to all their coworkers, like they’re afraid of being judged for being absent. (Yes thank you Jane I don’t care that you were up half the night with a plumbing issue, you don’t need to convince me that you’re tired enough to take the day off)
The Calls/SMS Auto Reply app for Android comes loaded with auto-responses for out-of-office messages. You can select any of the simple messages to send as a reply to incoming calls and text messages when you are not in the office or away for a holiday. You can edit these existing messages or add your own custom message to set up auto-response during your absence.
Thank you for your email. I’m currently out of the store on holidays. I will be returning on [return date].
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.
Our office will remain closed until the end of this week for Thanksgiving Holidays. We assure you that all your emails will be answered as soon as we return to the office. Happy Thanksgiving!
Hoo boy, have I got some PTSD from Old Job about out of office autoreplies. Exboss was such a stickler for them and actually enforced her expectations as official policy. Meaning if you didn’t do it to her exact specs, she’d call you back to the office to do it (which no one did) and read you the riot act afterwards while threatening to write you up for insubordination. She demanded them any time that we were away from our desk for longer than 30 minutes and for anything other than a meeting. So training in the conference room down the hall, a work lunch with teammates, leaving an hour early for an appointment, arriving late for an appointment, even working from home, all required OOO alerts.
Thank you for your message! I'm out of the office from X DATE to Y DATE and will not be checking email. I'll follow up with you as soon as possible upon my return. If you have an urgent request, please contact XX person at YY email address.