10. Office Closed for Annual Vacation. Use this template for your annual year-end vacation. Hi (specify the Name field id), I am out of the office for my annual year-end vacation and will not be able to check my mail until after the New Year.
There are some places where the culture absolutely embraces this type of…expression so it may be that it works just fine.
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Dear Customer, Our office is closed and you can expect to hear back from me by [date]. Have a great holiday! Regards [Name/signature]
I’ll return on [date] or after I watch [favorite holiday movie] one too many times (whichever comes first)—and will respond to your message at that time.
I agree. I think this one is way too long and comes off as trying to be too cute.
Humorous Vacation Message. While you shouldn’t use a vacation message like the first example in this article, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a little bit of fun with your emails.
Hi, Our store will be closed until the end of the week for Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year]. We are happy to inform you that all of your emails will be answered once we are back on [date]. Kind regards.
Head over to your vacation message template, and Hit Control + C to paste your signature into your out of office notification. This way, when someone contacts you while you’re on vacay, they can still:
Yes, me too. It’s a lifesaver. Although to be fair, Outlook announces the fact that you’ve got an OOO message going out with a big yellow banner, so it’s quite hard to miss.
I worked for a federal contractor back during the Great Recession when government offices were shut down/working with a skeleton crew. I still remember getting OOOs from almost every email address in the agency we worked at explaining they were on furlough & to contact one specific person if the issue was urgent. We all assumed this poor person was hiding under her desk, rocking back & forth, with her head in her hands.
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.
Thanks for your email. I’m currently offline, returning on [date]. I’ll respond to your message then.
In response to employee feedback, a University of Toledo winter break schedule became effective in December 2017 to provide eligible UToledo employees extra days off to rest when most departments are operationally slow - from Dec. 25, Christmas Day, through Jan. 1, New Year’s Day. Winter Break Policy
Remember that it’s important to choose the tone of your message based on the final recipient.
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Crafting an out of office message can be plenty of fun and we're about to show you how with our Mad Libs version!
I wish I could block my voicemail. I would so get fired if I had a message like this and was caught, though.