If your phone system allows employees to receive external calls at their desks, instruct them to record a "closed for the holidays" message or "out of office" voicemail greeting that gives callers essential details about the closing.
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.
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The use of humans is weirdly condescending to me, like people who say ‘doggo’ sincerely. It seems incredibly off at work.
The worst one I ever received was from a coworker (senior to me, but not my manager) many years ago. I’ll paraphrase it as my memory isn’t great:
What Should Your Vacation Message Include?A subject, with the dates you leave and returnWho to contact in an emergency (name, email, and phone number)Point of contact for non-urgent inquiries (name, email, and phone number)Keep Your Message Professional
My project is entirely phone based and we don’t have voicemail, either for the project line or individual staff lines. We used to, but we found we spent so much time returning voicemails and getting people’s voicemails that it led to us missing calls and going in an infinite loop.
While I won’t be quite as far as the North Pole, I will still be completely disconnected from my inbox until my return. So, if you require immediate assistance, please send your email to [contact name] at [contact email].
I am on emergency leave for today with no access to emails and phone calls. Hence, kindly expect a delayed response. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
The OOO definitely has those two pieces. But it could be 1 of 4 people who handle things when I’m out (depending on what it is) and they may not know at all that the requestor had reached out to me first / forget to cc me. So, I’d see this as me adding to my OOO “if you contact person X, please keep me cc’ed on the message you send to person x”?
On the Inside My Organization tab, type the response that you want to send to teammates or colleagues while you are out of the office.
For comparison my current (not great) boss sent an out of office recently detailing how he would be out because he was on his personal sail boat all day, sailing from vacation destination X back to our port city. At length. In a pandemic. When we all had our wages frozen at the start of the crisis.
She’s not sure how long that author would’ve argued with her computer until she turned it off.
I’ve had several co-workers over the years use “at my earliest convenience” and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. It just sounds kind of dismissive like, “I don’t care when you need it, I’ll get to it when I get to it.”
“Thank you for your message. I am out of the office today with no access to phone. I will be back on April 5. In case you need any immediate help, you can reach [person] at [phone number].”
When we have people go on maternity leave we normally arrange with them for mail to be forwarded directly to the person covering their leave, (but I’m in the UK so normally they will be out for 6-12 months)
I’ll be at a work off-site and will have limited availability by phone and email until ___, please contact ___ for immediate needs about ____ otherwise I will respond as soon as possible”
Daimler's move follows Volkswagen's decision to turn email off after office hours and new guidelines in France ordering workers in some sectors to ignore work emails when they go home.