Thank you for your email. Your message is important to me and I will respond as soon as possible. Thank you!
Now that you know what you should and shouldn’t include, how do you go about crafting the perfect out-of-office vacation message?
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I dunno, this is one of those areas I feel like people overanalyze. Like, yes, there are definitely some away messages that make me raise an eyebrow and I really don’t want anyone’s medical history. I’m not a huge fan of the one from the LW cause it’s a bit cutesy and takes too long to get to the point — I prefer short and sweet. But some people also just…struggle with how to put together an away message and copy what their boss does. Or they’re like me — I need a message that works for clients as well, so mine needs to be a little more formal, even if my office isn’t.
Education Details: When you need to step away from the office and won’t be in touch with your email correspondents, or if you are going on vacation and don’t plan on checking your email messages very often, you’ll probably want to create an out-of-office/email autoresponder email message to let your colleagues, friends, clients, and family know that you are currently unavailable but will be back soon.
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Our office will be closed today for the [holiday name]. We will reopen tomorrow morning at [time].
That’s exactly how I set up mine, except that ordinarily I’d have several options, like: “If you need help with X, call A. For help with Y, call B. For help with Z, call C. For anything else, call my manager at extension 000.
5. Internal out of office reply template. An internal reply can use slightly more informal language but should not be too casual. Remember that any employee, including management, will be able to see this auto response if they email you.
I’ve seen similar things with OOO messages where people would update them practically daily. “I’ll be away from my desk from 9-2 with intermittent emails and then on a call from 3:-3:45” and ….dude. We don’t need that much detail every day.
There were a lot of bilingual staff at my last job, and they always did their out of office messages in both languages. But who knows, maybe the Welsh translator was in a rush and forgot. An agency that handles government translations like road signs might be expected have such rules. On the other hand, never underestimate the boneheadedness of the monolinguals. Especially English ones.
I appreciate your message. I am out of the office currently with no office email access. However, return on the following [date-of-return].
Listen, who doesn’t love a little furry animal friend? If you want to put a smile on your colleague’s face then why not include a cute little GIF or photograph of some adorable animals. Go on, brighten their day.
The reason for the OOOs for staff taking half-days? They didn’t want to check the shared office calendar where our time off was recorded. UGH
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My colleagues have this weird habit of not using out of office messages, but instead, sending all staff or all manager emails before they go on vacation letting everyone know they’re going to be gone for x amount of time. It’s really odd. I do not do this.
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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.