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.
Right, Outlook has that auto-display of OOO messages, so at least I know so-and-so won’t be seeing it for days and I either adjust expectations accordingly or I just email someone else.
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The recipient may have filtering turned on that would reject the automatic reply;
We are having a temporary office move soon, and our head of facilities was delighted he didn’t need to find data ports for the phones as well as the PCs ;)
I pretty much never pay attention to out of office replies, just note if there is one. If I really need something urgently I’ll look to see if there’s another person’s contact info, but it’s rarely that urgent. I might also look for a return date, if that matters to me. It would annoy me if I had to wade through a wall of text to find either of those things.
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Give complete details of the person they can contact if there is an urgency. If you are in charge of multiple departments, you can add more people along with their expertise area so that customers know who they should reach.
To sweeten your wait, I am sending you this great article (hyperlink to your blog) that includes five books you should not miss this summer.
“For example, if a hacker knows that the chief financial officer of a company is OOO, thanks to the information in the auto-reply message, an attacker could impersonate the CFO on email and target another individual in the company’s finance team asking them to make a payment or update bank details for them while they are offline,” says Sadler.
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Given free rein, I’d absolutely love to tell people that needing me to show them how to do X in Excel is actually not a vacation-interrupting emergency and there are tons of free videos that would explain that, if they did not want to contact the actual departments who handle tech support and training. Or that this project they’ve known about for a month but decided to keep under their hat until it became an emergency is something they’ll need to resolve themselves. But that would not fly at all.
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I think simple is best, and also safest. I found the message in the post amusing as an AAM article, but if I had contacted this person on a serious and/or urgent work matter I would probably be annoyed by the comedy skit. And I was contacting them because they had messed up somehow, it would land very badly.
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.
COMPLETELY agree. Every time I see an OOO for a two-hour doctor’s appointment I have to fight the urge to reply with “How much are you paid?” because I know there is no scenario in which I would have to explain myself if I don’t answer an email for a few hours and if you are that important you better make a LOT more than I do.
I’m out of the office from 11/11 to 11/17 and I will not be checking my emails. It’s likely your note will be swallowed in a sea of inbox banality, never to be seen again. If you require a response, please resend your email after 11/18. For urgent editorial issues, please contact the channel or features editor responsible for that content. If you are Barack Obama, text me bro. We need to talk.