[BUSINESS] is in no way endorsing or not endorsing said holiday, nor encouraging or discouraging employees of all demographic clusters to engage in celebrity activities. Thank you for your consideration during this festive or not-festive time.
One-third of employees share information about business travel, including pictures, on social media, Tessian found. Many will also have advance leave notification in email signatures or add details about their time off in their OOO responses, such as when they plan to return to work or the details of the conference they are attending. This might appear safe because this isn’t personal travel. After all, it is a work trip, and an out of office message is no big deal.
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First, here’s the out-of-message for people who don’t like watching video (although the person in the video is funny and really brings the message to life):
Education Details: Select Turn off to disable automatic out-of-office replies. If you want to modify the dates for your automatic reply or the message sent, use the steps above to modify your settings. Note: For Outlook 2007, to turn off out-of-office replies, select Tools > Out of Office Assistant and uncheck the Send Out of Office auto-replies checkbox.
Unless you work in an industry well known for grownups being good at smart and bad at practical. Then, you do.
In this post, I’ll go over what an OOO message is and share some of the best examples I’ve found on Google, as well as a few from my coworkers).
My snarky colleague sure did in his out-of-office message below. We send thank-you letters in response to holiday gifts, so it’s only natural to expect the same gesture in our work inboxes …
The original concept for the celebration was for a day observed with parades and public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11:00 a.m.
Education Details: The Out of Office feature is only available for users with a Microsoft Exchange account; however, Home users with non-Exchange accounts can create an out-of-the-office template and create a rule to have Outlook send the reply automatically.
If you’re an events-based business, use your out of office auto-reply as a way to promote your upcoming conferences, sessions, and speakers! Jason here, thanks for reaching out to ThinkTank! I’m currently at a speaking event in Chicago. Find out if I’ll be coming to your city here https://txt.st/PQB
It usually isn’t enough to just say you’re out and won’t be responding to messages. You’ve got to give people options for how they can get their issue or request resolved. One of the easiest wins here is to provide alternative contact information. That could mean providing your mobile number while you’re out, or, more commonly, providing the phone number and email of the colleague (or department) that will be covering while you’re away.
I don’t usually read the messages anyway, I just take it as information that the recipient won’t see my message right away. If that will cause issues, I’ll contact someone else.
I might be your coworker. I don’t get a lot of calls so it slips my mind constantly. Email I just set up a timer and it’s so much easier that way.
Option 2: Get help sooner. If you answered yes to the above question, don’t wait. I have a team of competent humans who look out for me and one another. They can help you too. Work with (insert names here) accordingly. If you need help with scheduling, cut straight to my assistant.
I forgot I did that and it was pointed out by a recruiter who was trying to reach me to schedule a phone screen. Whoops, haha.
On the funnier side, my vacations tend to be trips to either see my favorite band in far flung places or going to conventions for my hobby, so for a while I added a checklist at the end of my OOO that said:
But this absence of basic travel cybersecurity is a problem. Email is the number one threat vector for socially engineered attacks. An automatic reply message not only sends the information to designated contacts, but it also bounces back to people who send phishing emails. Threat actors use any details found in OOO messages to craft targeted social engineering messages. Well-targeted messages build trust that threat actors take advantage of.