Honest communication, even in the form of an email auto reply, is a roadmap. It helps people understand how best to help you and, in turn, allows them to better help themselves. Straightforward expectation setting is a way to be respectful of your coworkers’ time and pressures, but most importantly, it’s a way to be respectful of and guard your time. Even if you don’t feel an intense need to be more open in your workplace correspondence, consider modeling the behavior for others who work with you or, especially, those who work for you. It’s a small change in behavior but it’s a meaningful one. And this summer is the perfect time to start.
The first part of the process is to click on the Settings button in the top right-hand corner the Gmail dashboard, before clicking See All Settings.
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Every November without fail, when I take a week off for deer season, I start my OOO with “GONE HUNTIN’!”
I’ve heard “please respond at *your* earliest convenience,” but never the other way around.
Thank you for your email. I’ll be offline starting Friday, November 20 through the Thanksgiving holiday with limited access to email, and will respond to your email upon my return on Monday, November 30. If you need immediate assistance, please contact Maria Gonzalez, my fellow digital marketing manager here at MixCo Media, at [email protected]. Thanks for your patience!
Carnegie Mellon's U.S. campuses observe 11 official holidays. The university is closed on these days, and all non-essential personnel are not expected to report to work. Regular, full-time staff members may also take up to three floating holidays per calendar year.
Not every vacation you take is going to leave you completely unreachable. For those days when you’re out of the office but are still checking and responding to email or phone calls, make sure your message explicitly states that people will still be able to reach you, and how:
Over time, I began to suspect that those who might be telling the truth (of which I suspected there were very few), would mention their relationship to the person and possibly the cause, for example “My grandmother just passed away after surgery.” The ones who left it wide open (“someone close has recently died”) led me to imagine that it could be a random person in their city that they read about in the news, their goldfish, or perhaps a distant relative who had passed away in the previous few years.
Set a minimum delay for auto-responses. For example, if you set a minimum delay of 1, the eDesk will send the OOO template 1 minute after receiving the customer’s message. If you don’t set a minimum delay, eDesk will auto-respond immediately upon receipt of a message.
Yeah, announcing you were going to delete emails unread and expecting the sender to resend when you return would NEVER fly in my office. I’d get executive complaints about that, especially if it went to a client or outside party – if a client can’t reach you, they will reach out to someone else who may not work at your organization and you lose business. I feel like this delete-it-all philosophy would only work for an entirely internal role where timelines are more relaxed, and even then, I feel it’s a bit unprofessional to foist your own catch-up work onto others, especially if they’ve been backfilling for you while you were OOO.
I am out of the office from January 14 to 20, with only limited access to my emails and voicemail. Please be informed that this mail hasn’t been forwarded. I’ll come back to you as soon as possible.
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10) I am on vacation from mm/dd to mm/dd. I will allow each sender one email. If you send me multiple emails, I will randomly delete your emails until it is pared down to one. Choose wisely. Please note that you already sent me one email.
I’m four weeks away from going on maternity leave for six months, so I’m in the process of divvying up my clients between colleagues, or finishing off work and closing cases. I will need an OOO for anyone who pops up again having been closed in the past, so this thread has been useful to get me thinking about it!
See, in my head, “as soon as possible” reads simply as a more formal way of saying “I will respond at my earliest convenience.” Like, either way, this person is getting back to you as soon as they can, whatever that actually means.
Not quite an OOO, but a former boss had an email signature that said she was doing field work so her email responses would be delayed.
Depending on the type of holiday, you can create specific templates for various holidays such as Christmas Thanksgiving, New Year etc.: