Q. Who should notify contractors, vendors and other individuals who work with various University departments that their services may not be needed during winter break?
If you have critical projects that can’t wait until you return, offer a communication option like text messages, suggests Reeves. “I have found, to my delight, that people really are judicious about texting you while on vacation,” he says, with one caveat. “Don’t put your mobile number in the away message. That way, only people who have your mobile number can text you. And those are the ones you care most about.”
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Just because you are away, you still have the chance to keep the business going. Let your email work for you, by offering different things that will ultimately increase the chance to attract new customers. Your marketing team will be so grateful!
Running away from your inbox or your work responsibilities doesn’t solve problems, it merely delays them. What boyd suggests, though, is something different. Her strategy asks us plan ahead of time: to construct an off ramp from our jobs as well as an on-ramp for the eventual re-entry. Her asks aren’t Herculean but they require some foresight — and they demand that a person be very upfront about what they want from their time off, and that they commit to protecting their time.
The hours in your signature is a great idea! I’m about to have a non-standard work schedule to accommodate medical appointments. Totally stealing this idea!
Not an out of office reply but a voicemail greeting: at a previous job I called someone and her voicemail greeting said that she would be out of the office from Day – Day and that her voicemail wasn’t accepting messages during that time, click! The time in question was six months prior. Plenty of people she worked with and for could have called her on it and apparently had not, so she just … didn’t get voicemails. Like, that was not a way you could communicate with her.
Thank you for your message. I am currently out of the store on holidays, with no access to email. I will be returning on (insert date).
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.
Live support will be unavailable during our closure. Emergency support requests should be submitted via our contact form or via Basecamp if your project is currently active. We wish all of our clients a very happy and safe 4th of July holiday. We look forward to working with you when we get back from a well deserved long weekend. See you next week!
I am out of the office from January 14 to 20, with only limited access to my emails and voicemail. Please be informed that this mail hasn’t been forwarded. I’ll come back to you as soon as possible.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s had experiences in the past with people not getting an immediate answer then upping the urgency–we’ve had letters about such coworkers here. There’s an email, then a followup email, then a chat message, then a phone call, then they walk over, all within ten minutes of the initial email.
Once you set the iMessage Auto Reply, then let us see iPhone Auto Calls Reply setting. From the same Do Not Disturb Setup screen, you can allow the calls from a specific group like “Favorites.” If you want complete freedom from calls on your vacation, you can select “No One.”
I had a coworker whose former employer required them to update their voicemail message every day. “Hello, you’ve reached MaryMary. Today is Thursday, June 3rd. I am in the office all day but may be away from my desk for meetings. Please leave a message and I will return your call as soon as possible.” She got in the habit and still updated her VM everyday. Occasionally I run into someone elsewhere in our industry with a daily VM message and know they used to work at the same place.
Thank you for your email. I’m currently out of the store on holidays. I will be returning on [return date].
Every time I read it, it just gets funnier. On r/talesfromtechsupport, filter by top posts of all time, it’s on the first page. The punch line is … *chef kiss.
I have always been flabbergasted by people who include vacation details (especially if they’ll be out of the country) in their OOO messages. I’m not a burglar, nor do I know any. (I hope!) But the people with the message don’t know that!