Thank you for your message. I’m on sick leave and will get back to you as soon as I return to the office.
It was just this colleague – it (thankfully) wasn’t the culture of the office, and I never saw anyone else abuse the OOO like this.
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If your request is urgent, there’s no use sitting idly in my inbox. So, please send your request to [contact name] at [contact email].
If your email truly is urgent and you need a response while I’m on vacation, please resend it to [email protected] and I’ll try to respond to it promptly.
An out-of-office auto-reply serves to inform people that you aren’t available to respond to their emails. These are mainly used during the holidays.
Hello, Please note: [date] through [date] are company holidays for many of our employees. Because of this, there will likely be a delay to request, possibly until [date] when most of our team returns. In the case where you do not receive an initial reply from one of our employees, their subsequent replies may be delayed. We have received your email request and will process it soon. While we process your request, please make sure to check out our extensive list of documentation by clicking on this link: [link]. Thank you for choosing [company name], and we look forward to providing a smooth and seamless support experience for you. Thanks!
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.
Your clients should know when they can expect a response and when you might be unavailable due to unforeseen circumstances.
My new job provided a template OOO as part of the onboarding brand templates package! I’m sure it might seem like overkill to some, but I’ve had tons of nervous first-job employees ask me what theirs should say, so I loved that they just gave a sample to go from. Also goes a long way in communicating that unique office culture stuff that is usually unspoken/not formalized.
Be aware of your tone. Keep it clean and simple. Sullivan says: “Even if you work in a casual office environment, the people emailing you may not. It's fine to have a light tone in your communications, especially when you're in an email conversation with someone directly, but your OOO is more of a blast message—including a cat meme or silly quote could backfire if your OOO goes to, say, a new client prospect or the sales director at a company you've been trying to engage.”
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.
My favorite thing is setting my OOO to only run for a specific amount of time. I will absolutely forget to turn it off if I have to do it manually, but we can just set a date/time range for it to start/stop. So I usually start it around 4 pm the day before and end it at 7 or 8pm the night before I return.
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I feel like this is the only reason to do this, otherwise its just a big piss off.
I’ve done this a couple times: on the 3rd sick day when it’s all I can do to just set an OOO, and I’m tired of updating the dates and feel like I’m never going to get better.
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