Once I come back on *date*, I will get back to you. Maybe I can even tell you about my adventures.
Hi, Thank you for your email! I am on vacation until [MM/DD]. Vacations are not for checking email, so I won’t be doing that. During my absence, please contact [name] at [email] or [phone] because she’s checking email. Not me. Really, I’m not checking email.
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Seeing and experiencing destinations is how I keep on top of the trends and make on-the-ground connections for my clients. While I'm away, take a peek at how these connections helped me surprise Tina with an upgrade to a beachfront villa for her honeymoon [link to testimonial/video/FB post with Tina's thank you email and picture of the view].
This is what I’ve seen most often in my career. Problem is, the contact is almost always the admin. I’m the admin. Everyone’s idea of assistance is different. Often, I didn’t have the knowledge about the issue in order to be of any assistance. I wound up spending more time running around looking for answers than actually working on what was on my own plate. It’s exhausting. Otherwise known as “please don’t call us for unicorn problems when we handle llamas. Literally, we can’t do anything for unicorn problems.”
I agree that the reasons are not relevant. But at my last company, a coworker had overly short out of office messages. Examples: “out of office today.” Or “out of office until Monday.” With no additional information about coverage, etc. Those always felt overly curt to me and made me wonder, is this person okay? Was this OOO planned or are they on the verge of a mental breakdown? (It was a very toxic culture so this wasn’t out of the question). I would be curious to hear others perspectives on this. Is too little information just as bad?
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I have a coworker that purposely leaves them on the first day that she’s back in the office (even though it said she would be back today) because she thinks it signals that she’s still unavailable (while she needs some time to catch up.) I think it’s a bit confusing. I personally would feel weird doing it because it seems like I just never came back from vacation.
Whether your schedule has changed because you’re temporarily down to part-time or because you’re trying to fit work in around taking care of your children, you can use your OOO message to communicate and set expectations. You might write:
On the Inside My Organization tab, type the response that you want to send to teammates or colleagues while you are out of the office.
It is regretted to announce to all of you that Mr. Neil Johnson who was the pioneer of our office due to cardiac arrest could not survive and met his creator. So, in condolence with his family, our office will remain closed for three days from 2-01-20XX to 04-01-20XX. During this time, all our office-related works will be postponed and you all will start working from 05-01-2020. If you have any problem and queries related to work you can contact Mr. Lewis Harris, he will answer all of your queries.
Hello, All our stores will be closed until the end of the week for [Christmas]. We will respond to all your inquiries once we are back on [date]. Merry Christmas! Regards [Name/signature]
Exactly. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting on the beach, on my couch, or in a hospital bed–I’m not reachable and you’re gonna have to wait until I get back or contact someone else.
So here's a breakdown for how to write the perfect, most concise out-of-office message.
I should add that I actually WISH I got more exciting OOO messages and/or that I felt like I could be more exciting with mine!
There was a lot of pushback on this, discussion about how big a risk was that really anyway, people saying that John could word his out of office in such a way that people didn’t have to know he was actually away, and if something really was an emergency people would like to know that they have the opportunity to “direct queries to Sam or Dean” so they could be actioned, or make the judgement call that something could wait for John to return.
When you left for the day?! I could maybe see that if you were dealing with different time zones (although I worked for a company with offices on both US coasts, in the UK, and in Asia and no one did this), but it still feels really excessive. I would guess the work/life balance situation would be bad at a place that required this.
And although my colleague had mixed feelings about her own parents joining that population in Florida, she couldn’t be too upset when her dad suggested flying down from Boston for a Red Sox spring training game.