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.
Website: https://spencercork.co.uk/2020/03/09/corionavirus-office-closed-recorded-message/
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Huh. This is a rare column from you that I disagree with almost entirely. I guess to start with what I think you get right, there's no need to apologize for being out of office, and no one should feel obligated to deal with anything other than a legitimate emergency (which are, in most fields, truly rare) while on vacation or while taking time off.
When you update your voicemail or turn on your email client’s out-of-office greeting, there are three basic things you must share in your message: When you’re leaving, when you plan on responding to your messages upon returning, and who they can contact if they need to talk to someone right away.
I had coworkers (and people up my chain of command) that did/do this. The thing all those people had/have in common is that they came from the military. So I always took it as a military thing. Curious if that particular coworker had a military background.
I am not able to set OOO messages at all. Most of the people who are contacting me do so through custom aliases that then come to our team, who each handles specifics. Even if I’m out someone else is available, but I can’t know who is supposed to handle that specific email to be able to redirect without naming everyone, and then confusing things more when Client A gets the same reply as Client B but one needs to go to teammate C and the other to teammates D & E. Then to make just that bit more complicated, there are the clients who think that going around the system to email the teammates directly at our personal email addresses is better but pitch a hissy when we’re OOO but they didn’t get a notice? I just set rules to forward those.
The reason I did it was that the first time I took maternity leave, I came back to thousands of irrelevant emails. It was a chore to sort through them, and finding the ones that were still relevant was like finding a needle in a haystack. And it wasn’t just a waste of *my* time – I often had to reach out to email senders only to hear that no further action was needed, so I was wasting their time too.
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”?
A thing my employer does is when someone leaves, they just shutoff the email. So someone goes to the trouble of writing an out of office explaining that they have retired or accepted a job somewhere else and where someone can go for help and IT just nukes the email address 24 hours after the person leaves. Then whomever was contacting them has no idea where to turn next. It is a terrible policy.
U.S. regular, full-time staff members may take three floating holidays during the calendar year. These floating holidays may be taken on days of your choosing, with your supervisor's approval.
Notice: Office hour of [company Name] during [holiday name] holidays the offices will remain open from : am to : pm. [company name] will be closed on [date] and resume operations on [date].
REVE Chat offers the template to set up personalized queue messages and exact wait to manage their customer expectations. Under the customization option from the dashboard, you can manage customer conversations by providing estimated time and message.
Auto-reply email sample: Hi [first_name], Thanks so much for reaching out! This auto-reply is just to let you know… We received your email and will get back to you with a (human) response as soon as possible. During [business_hours] that’s usually within a couple of hours. Evenings and weekends may take us a little bit longer.
Except since we usually have a strict 2 GB inbox limit, that usually lasts about 2-3 months at best and then nobody can send you anything at all so it works out. (In-organization they’ll still see the OOO when they put you into the address bar, so it works out that it’s not TOO much to delete when you return.
We have people who do this whenever they are teleworking, regardless of the circumstances. Teleworking is working and by putting OOM’s on, you are signaling that perhaps you are NOT, in fact, working. Stop it!
Yes, mine (for external e-mails) typically says somethingalong the lines of “I’m out of the office until [date/time] and messages to this address are not monitored in my absence. I will respond as soon as possible on my return. If your message is urgent, please re-send to my assistant [email address] or telephone [assistant’s number]” Internal it will usually just say “I’m out until [date/time] pass any urgent enquiries to [co-workers] ” although my assistant and a couple of others have my home number and personal e-mail so can get hold of me in a genuine emergency, and I will sometimes speak to them in advance if I’m willing to lower the bar on what amounts to an emergency, but I would not expect any of my employees to do that !
There’s nothing awful or offensive about this message, but it’s also not very good. Yes, it provides the courtesy of letting the sender nominally know that you’re going to be slower than usual to respond. That’s nice. The problem is in this bit: “may be slow to respond to email.” Another popular variation: “might be slower than usual to respond.”