What we need in our work communication is not more professional politeness or less formal, chat-based messaging applications like Slack. We need honesty. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to see honesty as self-indulgent or disrespectful. I’d argue the opposite is true. Honesty, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient for all parties in the moment, pays dividends later. It builds trust. When my partner Anne Helen Petersen and I were interviewing people for our forthcoming book on remote work, a frequent lament from both middle managers and workers was that they didn’t feel like they knew how to succeed in their jobs; that they were guessing what their superiors and coworkers wanted and, even when they asked, they didn’t quite trust the responses they got back.
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I guess it’s relatively minor, but I once emailed a local government official with a question about building permits (just as a citizen, not work-related) at about 10am on a Monday and got an out-of-office reply stating she’d be back “Monday” with no date. So I had no idea whether she was already back and hadn’t turned off the message yet, in which case, not urgent, I’ll wait, or was out for a week, in which case, I’d like to ask someone else. Not a big inconvenience, but it was so illogical not to give a date that it really drove me crazy
This OoO has to be in the tech sector. I can see something like this as an (internal only) OoO at my workplace. I actually kinda love it. Yes it’s wordy but it also makes the recipient take a beat and consider the importance of their issue and where to go if needed. It will also cut down on interruptions to the “catch-all” person in the standard OoO, which is generally the Admin. I have always hated being the go-to on people’s OoOs. I spent more time trying to find info on what Urgent Emailer insisted was URGENT than I did doing any actual work. And the urgency was never really necessary.