I will be out of the office until *date*. My colleague *Name* will be happy to assist you.
She retired shortly thereafter, and I was left with so many questions. Brain hiccup? Or did she actually think our email and phone systems were integrated somehow?
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Voicemail is also horrible for non-native speakers. I’m reasonably fluent in German but have to listen to voicemails at least 3 times to get everything. Why people can’t just type a text message is beyond me.
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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?
I give my folks scripts because, otherwise, I end up with long winding OOOs that talk about why they’re out but not what the writer/caller should do to get help (staff is 1/3 entry-level with varying degrees of professional office familiarity). I do not have the time to micromanage to this level, though – if I see an off-spec OOO, I send the how-to guide and remind them that they need to tell people who to call while they’re out or to mention the specific dates, but most of them have good judgment enough not to be totally inappropriate to the point I need IT to intervene.
Thankfully, setting this up in Gmail is easy to do and only takes a few minutes. Here are step-by-step instructions for setting your out-of-office message, plus some helpful examples you can steal for your own use:
Hello, Thanks for reaching out to me. Unfortunately, I’m out of the office from [DATE] to [DATE] with limited / no access to email. If your query can wait, I’ll be responding to the emails I missed when I return on [DATE]. If not, contact [NAME] at [EMAIL] or [PHONE] and he/she will take care of you.
Thank you for your email. I’m out of the office and will be back at (Return Date). During this period I will have limited access to my email.
The one from “Central Intelligence” with the Rock that I love is is (paraphrasing) :
Here, we’ll go over what’s required in an out-of-office email responder or email greeting, as well as a few ways you can jazz up your out-of-office message (and potentially making your colleagues wish they thought this up first!)
This workaround will take care of auto-reply messages for phone calls and messages to the iPhone. There are a lot of users using iCloud emails on iPhone and Mac. You can set a vacation auto-reply on the iCloud email account. Let’s see how to set automatic vacation messages on iCloud email.
My OOO replies are relatively boring…usually state if I’m using PTO or at a conference, dates, who to bother in my place, etc.
I usually put my boss in my OOO, because if something is so urgent that it needs to be delegated RIGHT NOW then it’s urgent enough that my boss should know about it, and he’s also in the best position to know who on the team to delegate it to based on everyone’s workloads and what can be dropped. But the most likely result is that whoever is emailing me either waits for me to get back because it’s not that urgent or goes to the next/backup person based on our central documentation about who to contact for particular issues.
One of my co-workers, who was involved in a lot of committees and consequently got even more than the usual share of email around my place, put up an OOO message that said she was going to be “on pot for the week of the 15th.”
There are a lot of ways to improve your out of office message, but you should first make sure that you covered the most important stuff.
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