While injecting a little humor into your vacation email message can sometimes be a good idea – depending on your company and contacts – avoid oversharing and keep it professional at all times.
Thank you for your email. I’m away from my desk until [return date] trying to corral my kids between family visits and holiday sugar highs.
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It is a shame it doesn’t work for people who are not saved as contacts. Hopefully Apple will realize this shortcoming at some point.
Okay. So, it’s not to my exact personal tastes — to me, it’s overly wordy — but it’s probably fine for their culture and I’d be mildly amused if I got it. I see where you’re seeing condescension, but I think you can read it without that too.
In spite of your best efforts to notify people ahead of time, not everyone will get the notification that you're going to be shut down. Make sure that you: Post signs about the shutdown and when you will be back Change your voicemail message and have a plan for what to do if your voicemail is full: will it notify you? Is there an alternate number to call? Put together an "out of office" email that lets people who attempt to contact you know when you will be back Make sure you have a call tree for emergencies, and that everyone knows who he or she will be responsible for calling in the event of an emergency
Q. Are there any departments or clinics on the Health Science Campus that will be closed during winter break?
This is the perfect way to reduce the sheer email volume that you’ll return to, with a little anarchy involved…
They only discovered this AFTER the Christmas rush. Thankfully there were no client meltdowns that year or it could have been a lot worse.
That’s the simple structure of a voicemail greeting. Overall, your greeting should be professional, but the wording can vary depending on the situation. Check out a sample below.
People also hate it when some people sign “Sincerely,” but also a bunch of people hate “Thanks” and “Best” and “Toodles” — almost any signature you pick someone will hate. This is one of those areas of language that feels really subjective and culturally dependent and also…isn’t that big of a deal?
. If the out of office assistant will turn off on the day and time you selected, do not send automatic replies audio button, else the messages will continue to get delivered.
A couple work friends and I banded together years ago to fill each others’ voicemails so it would be impossible to leave us new voicemails.
If you set up a vacation reply but people say they are not getting the reply, it could be one of the following:
It’s your last day before the vacation starts, you are rushing through your to-do list and suddenly you realize- I need to write an OOO email!
I often see people put public holiday notices in their email signatures a week or two in advance, especially where there are multiple affected dates in a row. We are a very date-dependent field, though.
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.
Ha – I didn’t watch the video but still definitely get the condescension! It’s a LOT of extra explaining and direction when something like, “if you need immediate assistance, please contact Fergus at…” will do. In my opinion, cutesy stuff like this is mildly entertaining at the beginning but gets dumb/annoying shortly thereafter. Not just with OOO messages, but other instances where companies try to make being “cool/funny/laid back” parts of their brand in really obvious ways.