There were a lot of bilingual staff at my last job, and they always did their out of office messages in both languages. But who knows, maybe the Welsh translator was in a rush and forgot. An agency that handles government translations like road signs might be expected have such rules. On the other hand, never underestimate the boneheadedness of the monolinguals. Especially English ones.
I’m a huge fan of the scheduling. I give myself up until 8am the day I return, since that way I’m covered if someone is emailing me early in the morning and will know why it might take me a bit to get back to them as I sort through the backlog for triage even though I’m back in the office that day.
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Since holidays occur throughout the year, there is no one ideal time to send a message. For the winter holidays, we recommending sending your well wishes early in December. In general, if you can send your message before people get busy with the holiday, then it will have a larger impact.
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Hi, and thanks for writing! I’m out of the office with no access to email until [DATE]. If your request is urgent, you can contact [EMAIL] for assistance. Otherwise, I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible when I return. While you wait, why not subscribe to our fantastic newsletter? You’ll get actionable tips once per week geared toward helping you grow your online business. Join us here [link].
I am not able to set OOO messages at all. Most of the people who are contacting me do so through custom aliases that then come to our team, who each handles specifics. Even if I’m out someone else is available, but I can’t know who is supposed to handle that specific email to be able to redirect without naming everyone, and then confusing things more when Client A gets the same reply as Client B but one needs to go to teammate C and the other to teammates D & E. Then to make just that bit more complicated, there are the clients who think that going around the system to email the teammates directly at our personal email addresses is better but pitch a hissy when we’re OOO but they didn’t get a notice? I just set rules to forward those.
For non-urgent inquiries during my absence, you can contact [Name] at [email] or [phone number], and they will be happy to assist.
She, if I recall, had a few comments from people when she got back regarding her words (she was on annual leave on holiday, it wasn’t a family emergency or anything that might excuse the tone). It rubbed quite a few people up the wrong way (most of them parents themselves!). Don’t recall more of an outcome though, I wasn’t at that firm long.
This. I’m surprised more people dont havent mentioned this, but this has always been my back to work routine – and sometimes if vacations overlapped, I’d find a summary email of “While you were away, X,Y,Z happened, I covered A, but you might want to check on B and C” which was always very helpful.
I worked with a guy years ago who would update his voicemail greeting literally every time he left the office.
I will be out of the office for an extended period starting on (Starting date) until (End date).
Hello! Please note: [date] through [date] are holiday days for our employees. Our office will be closed and because of this there will likely be a delay in responding to your email until [date] when most of our team returns.
Also, IMO, it’s putting the burden of knowing and managing your schedule on the other person. You expect them to be paying enough attention to you to remember when you come back and to resend their request. That’s not reasonable.
But traveling for work, then I say “intermittent access” so that I only need to respond to the urgent emails and can ignore everything else for a few days.
Braden also recommends using HubSpot's out-of-office email generator to create your OOO message.
Before we further discuss some of the examples of a good out of office message, decide for yourself what you want to get from it and what tone are you going to use.