As owner of Aviation Gin, my mission is to never speak to you like some out of touch Hollywood A-hole. My job is to remain accountable. Down to earth. Hard working.
Most of what I’m describing (as well as boyd) boils down to examples of clear, honest, communication. While it sounds simple, such openness is extremely rare in the workplace. It is rare because, especially with time off, this type of communication requires the sender to be vulnerable, to cede control, and/or to be assertive and frank about one’s needs.
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To sweeten your wait, I am sending you this great article (hyperlink to your blog) that includes five books you should not miss this summer.
I have a confession to make: I haven't recorded a new voicemail greeting in nearly a decade. Since then, I've (hopefully) become more articulate, poised, and self-assured. But hear my voicemail recording, and you'd think I was still new to the work world, a little unsure of myself — and probably not an authority.
The big issue I have with the example in the post is that not only is it unnecessarily long-winded, but you have to listen through all the chattiness to get to the “here’s who to contact in a real emergency” part. The tone does rub me wrong, but I’m willing to roll with that as a personality/company culture thing.
When you’re trying to contact someone on a matter of importance (or even urgency) on one side of the equation and you find out via an autoresponder that they are away for vacation, it can be incredibly frustrating unless they’ve done the front-end work beforehand. (I’m speaking from personal – and recent – experience here. And worse, there was no auto-responder set up. I had to use the – gasp! – telephone to find out what was going on.)
Until I’m back at the office, here are the links to my social media: [FACEBOOK LINK] [TWITTER LINK] [INSTAGRAM LINK]
I’d just stick with “I will be OOO without access to phone or email from XX/YY to XX/YY, returning on XX/YY.” And then whatever directions for directing to your support/backup while you are out. I find that specifically saying ‘without access to phone or email’ sets a good expectation of non-response.
Thank you for your email. I’m currently out of the store on holidays. I will be returning on [return date].
I am currently out of the office on my holiday – I’m probably drunk somewhere in a bar in Spain. See you when I get back.
These holidays will allow us all to enjoy the great season and have some amazing time with family and friends. This email is to inform you [all] that the office will be closed for [ X] days from [ DATE] to [ DATE] due to the coming festive season. Our premises will remain closed for normal business from [start date] up to and including [last date].
My boss had this problem (outdated message), but it wasn’t his fault. No matter how many times he changed it, it kept reverting to the original message and dates. Even IT couldn’t figure it out.
I’ve heard “please respond at *your* earliest convenience,” but never the other way around.
The auto reply only allows you to choose between ‘No-one, Recents, Favourite, All Contacts’. I need it to reply to everyone. Is there a way of doing this?
See, if it’s a long period of leave and there’s an alternate contact provided, this is just… the sensible thing that should happen?
I’m with you on this one. Management has access to a mansion and a townhouse in two different fabulous vacation destinations and it burns my butt every time I see an out of office from one of them (98% white men) going on about how they’ll be enjoying this perk. In the meantime, a few years back we had to eliminate free coffee at the offices because business was not good enough (it was eventually brought back after company president realized after a year that people were really pissed).
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