Sample voicemail message for office or department: “Thank you for calling The University of Toledo’s (office/department). The University is closed for winter break. Please call back after New Year’s Day or visit our website at (website URL). Thank you and happy holidays.”
1) Communicate when a person will be back, or if they are out for an indeterminate period of time, tell me who I should be contacting instead 2) Communicate what I should expect. (For example, when I do my monthly reports, I have an out of office message that says that I’ll be slow to respond. I *will* actually check my email at least a couple of times, but I generally won’t respond to anything non-urgent.) 3) If the person is in a job that handles urgent requests, list who I need to contact instead if it can’t wait until they get back.
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I get why that would bug the hell out of you. But on the flip side, having worked with a lot of European colleagues who do this, it’s not that they’ll have to 8 hours of work on vacation, it’s that they won’t be working at all. So if your bit isn’t done by X date, then their bit won’t get done until they return. That’s just the culture there.
Sample Phone Scripts. After Hours Voicemail for a Small Business: Thanks for calling (our company). The office is currently closed. Office hours are 9am to 6pm, Eastern Time. Please leave a message at the tone and we'll call you back on the next business day. Thank you. Voicemail Script: You have reached (your business name).
I’m guessing that this comment was gratuitously cruel on purpose just for the lulz, but I’ll give it a serious response anyway:
Set your out of office messages and determine who monitors division and department messages.
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In this post, I’ll go over what an OOO message is and share some of the best examples I’ve found on Google, as well as a few from my coworkers).
Note: Not all email clients show animated gifs. Some may show only the first slide.
I dunno – I think it says more about the writer than the culture. I worked in tech where there were always a handful of people who would do stuff like this, but most people would keep it basic. I just think some people love putting funky or gimmicky twists on rote stuff.
Our office will be closed from [date] to [date] for the coming National Day holiday. We will resume our operations on [date]. Any inconvenience caused is much regretted.
Thank you for your email. I’ll be offline through mid-January without access to email. In the interim, please contact Maya Schwartz, a sales and marketing manager here, at [email protected].
Which to my mind lets people know when I’m back and that I will get back to them after that date, as well as who to contact for more urgent stuff. But every time, Wakeen gets teapot questions because people apparently can’t be bothered to finish reading and they both get questions on stuff that is not due for weeks after I return.
2. Here’s your [holiday name] to do list. Holidays are a busy period, both for marketers and consumers alike. Most of us are turn back to the good ol’ pen and paper to put together all kinds of to-do lists.
“I am spending time with family today – some things are MORE important than work.”
Thank you for your e-mail. I will be on leave on 26th Jan with no access to email. I will revert to you on my return on 27th Jan.
Automatic email replies. The IS&T Knowledge Base (KB) details how to set up automatic replies for your MIT email through the Exchange service or on Outlook. Both allow you to set the start and end date of the auto-response and to choose if everyone will receive this auto-reply or only those within MIT.