Setting up an effective out-of-office autoresponder may seem to be a simple task. However, there is nothing worse than receiving an automated response that is not clear or useful. You want your “out of office” message to provide useful information and clarify why you are not available now. You certainly want to avoid any confusion or frustration.
I love this! I don’t think its annoying at all– its literally sharing the mission of your work.
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1. Out of Office Template #1 For the Person Who Works at a Traditional Company. Hello, Thank you for your email, I’m currently offline until [date]. I’ll reply to your message promptly when I return.
It definitely sounds like something my boss would write and I laughed at it. In our work, everyone thinks that they’re a special emergency all the time. Stopping to think “if I don’t have this in the next two days what will the actual consequences be” is a thing that should happen more but doesn’t.
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”
One thing that really bothers me in out of office messages is “contact my supervisor” without listing the supervisor’s name. I work in a company with 4 large service departments, and each department is broken into multiple smaller teams. I don’t have a great grasp on who is on or who leads which smaller team, and we don’t have an org chart with that much detail readily available. If you’re saying to contact someone, I think you should always include the person’s name and contact information, not just “my supervisor”, “one of my team members”, etc. !
Of course, every message sends a message, even a barebones OOO that seems to say nothing more than that you’re away until next week, so why not try to inject a little personality? You could get quirky by giving your auto-responder robot a personality. You could dispense with words altogether and substitute a gif or emojis. Or how about a little retro concrete poetry – you know, where you arrange your words on the screen to form an image of a palm tree or a pina colada? It might be worth noting here that the amount of personality you inject depends on your trade. What earns you cachet in the creative industries might backfire in the financial sector, for instance.
Have you ever considered how your office design could be having a negative impact on the way your employees work?
I had this at my old job, but only for internal calls. It was a completely different person on an old job site. IT couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Only one person complained at least, no matter how many times I told her I couldn’t fix it.
Former coworker: “I am out of the country from X until Y. Please do not email me during this time as last time I came back to about 250, and reading them all takes up a lot of the time I have left before I retire.” Some people thought that was funny. The director who received that in response to an all staff communication? Not so much. Coworker got a talking to by his manager when he got back to the UK.
Total and utter cringe! Sounds like something a cheeky 11th grader would think is the epitome of word smithing. If someone sent this out at my work everyone would make fun of them and HR would make them change the message.
Yeah, that’s all I need to know when I’m trying to contact someone who’s out. 1) When you’re coming back so I know if my issue can wait, and 2) Where to go if I decide that it can’t.
Thank you for your msg. I am currently out of the office and will not return until November 10th.
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If you’re experiencing a higher text volume than normal, be sure to have a volume auto-text on hand to help buffer the traffic. Thanks for your message! We’re experiencing a higher volume of texts than usual. You can expect a reply within 12 hours.
It Rhymes! Rejection doesn’t have to hurt. Why not soften the blow with an adorable poem that informs and delights? Thanks for the email, but I’m afraid to say I cannot reply as I am away.
It’s my favorite time of year, which means I’m currently away from my inbox chugging mugs of cocoa, stuffing my face with cookies, and attempting to fulfill my life-long goal of memorizing every single line of [your favorite holiday movie].