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.”
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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?
The response on Twitter has also been overwhelmingly positive. "I love Daimler's approach to holiday email," says the entrepreneur Nuno Almeida, while the FT's Hanna Kuchler tweets: "Now this is email management."
Let’s be real, the majority of the thousands of emails you return to after being O.O.O. will be spam and salesy marketing drivel – any legitimately important emails will probably get lost! Unless you’re Barack Obama, just send it when they’re back.
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In an instant, you feel a weight lifted from your shoulders, and a choir of angels sing Paul Kelly’s How to Make Gravy around you as you skip out of the office. You gaze upon the masses of workers on the tram, smugly wondering if their out-of-office responses are on yet.
'The very fact you were content to type out your query long hand and settle back to wait for a reply suggests you can wait' (Credit: Getty Images)
If you need immediate assistance before then, you may reach me on my mobile – (Mobile Number).
Hahaha. This sounds like somebody thought the phrase “at X’s earliest convenience” sounded vaguely businessy and professional, but didn’t realize the pronoun is always supposed to be “your”. It’s never “my”, for the reason you mentioned.
The worst Out if Office I’ve seen wasn’t about the wording, it was how it looked. For some reason, some lawyer decided to write their OOO in lime green font against a deep blue background. SO GARISH. I could not read anything. Highlighting the text didn’t help either. Had to copy & paste it somewhere.
But for employees at Daimler things are a little different. Email these people while they are on holiday and you will get a message like this:
Save www.indeed.com https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/holiday-out-of-office-messages · Holiday out of office replies are automated email messages that professionals use to let others know they cannot respond due to being on vacation during a holiday. These messages typically include: An apology for the inconvenience A reason for not replying right away
The marketing tactics of businesses should be focused on customizing the client experience to make each interaction meaningful and valuable. Personalizing your automated replies makes your customers feel good (if you do it right) because it helps you say something that’s actually helpful and targeted.
Yeah, it’s very strange. I understood changing voicemails to explain that the line can’t actually be answered, but someone is checking the messages and will respond (though that was also only an issue for the first few months), but they had no reason to even mention it for email. I started my job 3 months into lockdown, and by that point, procedures were in place to pretty much allow us to operate normally, albeit with a lot more done electronically than before.
Here's a million-dollar question: how do you get people to do what you want them to? That's where Calls-to-Action (CTAs) come in.
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.