While you’re writing and activating your out-of-office message, sidestep these pitfalls:
Agreed, the whole quirky-cute thibg annoys me, but human drives me up the wall. I cant articulate what about it grates me.
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(If you have certain projects you cover list project name and the person covering you).
Otherwise, a referral to your company’s general contact email or a simple ‘I’ll respond when I get back, stop bugging me’ should do the trick.
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Hi, You just missed me. I am out of the office until [MM/DD]. If your question can wait, great. I’ll reply when I get back. If not, contact [name] at [email] or [phone] and they’ll take good care of you. Meanwhile, feel free to peruse our FAQ section of [website] to see if your question can’t be answered there.
Hello, [NAME] is away from the office. E-mail contact during this time may be irregular or nonexistent. When she gets back she will be swamped by the backlog. Try to forgive her; she is a mere human and thus, weak. This message was NOT sent by a human, but by a robot. We robots are neither weak nor fallible. We are tireless and will one day rule the Universe.
Try this out with your colleagues or share it with colleagues/clients headed off on a vacation to send them off in style:
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I’ll be back at my desk on [date] and will respond to your message immediately. In case you need urgent assistance, please forward an email to [contact name] at [contact email] so that Santa’s little helpers at our shop may look into it.
In the time before your vacation, remind all of the co-workers on your team that you will be gone for the specific dates while also making sure to note your vacation on all internal company calendars. People are busy and can forget things, especially if those things are not happening regularly. You might have shared that you will be gone two months ago, but it’s something your colleagues may have forgotten. So, don’t neglect to remind everyone, because there might be some problems if that happens. Miscommunication is something that can be easily avoided, as in this specific case.
I think my personal VM still says, “Ahoy, ahoy!” In my best Mr. Burns voice. I’m a woman.
Something that actually was an issue with my employer ages ago: at one time there was a policy that out of office would only go to internal people, and nothing would be sent at all to anyone external. Apparently this was felt necessary in order to mitigate risk of burglary, so people wouldn’t know that “John Winchester has gone on a hunting trip” and that his house was empty.
Thanks for your email. I will be away from the office until September 13th and will respond as soon as I can.
Also, you need to know your audience if you are going to go eccentric. Alison mentions that this message is fine in their culture, but it wouldn’t npbe appropriate for my somewhat formal field. And even if your workplace in general is casual, you might be contacted by someone outside. (In a tiny provincial courthouse I served in the past, there is a story going around that in the 80s a junior but elderly clerk used to address phone callers as hun and sweetheart and generally speak very informally. Most people thought it was funny, and then the President of Supreme Court called and… he didn’t).
This person decided that setting their out-of-office message was a prime time to settle an ongoing office argument about which Die Hard film is the best, complete with an integrated poll to add a little festive cheer to the auto-reply.
Now that you know what you should and shouldn’t include, how do you go about crafting the perfect out-of-office vacation message?