I am currently on my annual leave and will return to the office on *date*. If your request is urgent, please contact my colleague *name* at *email* or *phone*.
If you have any urgent query about Tyro Magazine before then, please don’t hesitate to contact *** in my absence.
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Our office will be closed from [date] to [date] for the coming National Day holiday. We will resume our operations on [date]. Any inconvenience caused is much regretted.
If you’re using Gmail, you’ll find settings for out of office messages by clicking the cog icon on the main screen:
Thanks for your message! I am brushing up on my social networking savvy and analytics knowledge at a digital media conference in Vancouver from May 1-6. I will have limited email access, so if you need immediate assistance, please reach out to our marketing assistant, Kennedy Tran, at [email protected] or 555-432-6100. In the meantime, if you need access to our media kit, you can find it here.
I know a lot of people who never vacation for more than a few days because the email backlog becomes incredibly stressful upon their return; this is one way to meaningfully combat that which is somewhat in the employee’s control.
I had a boss that required OOO messages anytime you left the office. A single sick day, leaving four hours early, coming in two hours late, etc. This at an org that didn’t require quick email responses, and at which people typically only put up OOOs for multiple days out.
We’re not saying you’re boring but you do work in a fairly serious corporate environment. As a result, your out of office needs to be quite to the point but you also like to throw in a little pitch too, you cheeky sod.
Agreed! A bit of warmth is fine, sure, but it’s not the place for chattiness — that’s for talking to an actual person. I want an OOO message to tell me that the person is out, when they’ll be back, and who I should contact in the meantime if need be. No objections to multiple options there, whether it’s “X for llama grooming issues and Y for llama tea parties” or “X for routine questions, Y if it’s urgent, Z if it’s an emergency,” but I want to be able to absorb the useful info quickly and move on.
Have you ever called a company’s support line just to be confronted with an unsympathetic and confusing attendant menu? Or tried to reach a representative, but pressing the “0” key does nothing?
Not quite an OOO, but a former boss had an email signature that said she was doing field work so her email responses would be delayed.
The boss’s thinking was that people who did drivebys looking for you would then email you, see your OOO, and then be able to call you to talk about whatever they were driving by for. No one liked putting their personal contact info so we never worked from home (pre-COVID and pre-VOIP implementation) or told people to IM us and we’d call them.
I’ve done this a couple times: on the 3rd sick day when it’s all I can do to just set an OOO, and I’m tired of updating the dates and feel like I’m never going to get better.
so i tested my out of office reply last night.. how is my job real life!! SEE YOU TOMORROW MIAMI
The problem is that some people will just keep the old message, with contact information for their coverage and whatnot. If you do this, it’s important to change the date.
What would be annoying would be receiving multiple emails from me to see if the pet changes each time the OoO is triggered, along with follow-up emails from me inquiring about Fluffiekins’s adoption status. :-) Otherwise, this is BRILLIANT. And on brand.
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