The reason I did it was that the first time I took maternity leave, I came back to thousands of irrelevant emails. It was a chore to sort through them, and finding the ones that were still relevant was like finding a needle in a haystack. And it wasn’t just a waste of *my* time – I often had to reach out to email senders only to hear that no further action was needed, so I was wasting their time too.
hi i want to be able to hear calls and alerts while at the same time if my phone is in lock to auto reply. is that possible? to have both?
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I get really annoyed at people that don’t have put up OOO messages and I am left wondering if they are out or just ignoring me. I collaborated with a woman who was out frequently but never put an OOO. She also got very prickly if she felt you were going around her. So anytime we didn’t get a response from her, we had to go through this guessing game of “do we wait, do we talk to someone else, how important is our request.” I was glad when she moved on.
In my world, “please contact $Manager” is recognition of a staffing level problem. $Manager will have to decide what project to defer if a crisis comes up while someone is OOO.
(Aside: at my job, when you open a new browser window, a random picture of employee pets pops up. It changes every time. I could just refresh all day long.)
That really does feel excessive. I think most people are savvy enough to think, ‘Huh, it’s late in the day for pretzelgirl, I might not get a response until tomorrow. Business as usual.’ Being out of communication for a day – travel, meetings, days off – doesn’t require an out of the office alert, either, just a response as soon as possible.
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“Happy Holidays” is typically used when you aren't really sure what holiday someone celebrates. In that instance you are replacing Christmas or Hanakkuh with the word Holiday making it a proper noun, which means it should be capitalized.
I personally always leave my employee as my contact because a) I trust her completely, b) I’d prefer people email her anyway, so this is nice practice, c) My boss is the CEO so please for the love of god don’t email him about your data entry issue, d) the people who are emailing me about sensitive things that my employee shouldn’t know about also know enough to have that discretion.
My coworker tends to set his OOO for people to contact me, but he never bothers to tell me he’s going to be out of town and people may be contacting me. I’ll find out when I happen to email him and get the response. Not a huge deal, but the heads up would be nice! What if I was also on vacation?
Yupp! At this particular place we had a client who could not get a hold of someone. They made a huge stink about it and this became company policy. We also had to change our VM every night. We also had to reply to any emails we received within 4 hours. Even if we didn’t have an answer.
My favorite OOO to set is something like this: “I’m at sea from X to Y with very limited bandwidth. I’ll reply to urgent emails as soon as possible (but there may be a delay); if you don’t hear back from me by Z, please resend you message.”
If it’s not that infinite loop of autoreply hell, you get the “I will not be reading or responding to any email sent during this time. Please resend your request after August 1st.” dismissal.
The main goal of an auto-respond email is to ensure clarity of communication expectations and offer appropriate alternatives.
It got bad enough that others began begging someone to cull the list. Reply all, of course (thankfully it didn’t turn into an explosion of replies all). Someone finally did remove the email from the list.
My husband’s voice mails says “…if you need immediate assistance call Mary at ####…”, only Mary retired something like eight years ago. I mention this to him every once in a while. It hasn’t changed.
In this article, we’re going to teach you tips and useful phrases in English you need to craft an excellent out-of-office message along with plenty of examples.