With technological advancements, you always have access to your work and contacts, making it difficult to be offline even when you are not physically present in the office. However, it sometimes becomes a necessity to step away and treat yourself to a vacation.
I had a boss who was mad if I put his full name on my OOO. I was his deputy. He said people should know how to contact him if I just use his first name. He thought the public would get his info (public-facing office but we didn’t correspond with the public at our level, of course). It made me feel very very silly to comply.
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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.
Thank you for your email. I’m currently offline until [date] to celebrate the holiday with my loved ones—without my phone in front of my face.
24. "Thank you for calling [company]. We're closed for [holiday] from [date] until [date]. Please leave your message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a happy holiday season!"
I don’t have access to email because I don’t have a work cell & I don’t open my work laptop on my days off.
Rather than sounding like a boring email robot, you could add a funny tone to your letter. Use a GIF or a meme to joke about what you’re doing on vacation, but remember not to go overboard.
‘Karen’ is his executive assistant. Who he really should have had craft that OOO message.
I am in London May 29th - June 4th, so email replies may be tardy due to the curvature of the earth and the sun… and you know… science and stuff.
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Thank you for your email. I am out of the office in observance of [holiday] with limited access to email and will return on [date]. Your message is very important to me, and I will respond as soon as possible. If you need immediate access, please contact [number].
While the above is almost certainly a dramatisation, getting your out-of-office message right over the holiday period is arguably as important as all other facets of business. Cashflow? Investments? Who needs ’em when you’ve got an auto-response that’ll make people chortle!
My fav is the one I got that was “I’ve retired and I won’t be checking this account EVER AGAIN!”
“I will be away on a vacation from June 3 to June 14. For urgent queries, you can call [person] at [phone number].”
What makes this a decent example of an OOO message is that it’s candid, (hopefully) honest, and blunt. There’s no guessing whether or not this dude is going to respond to your email this week. Also, it gives us a bit of an insight into his life right now, which helps communication in the moment and in the future. He’s burned out. Even if you did manage to reach him, it’s likely he’d be resentful, even if he didn’t say so. There’s a good chance the sender of the original email will identify with this and respect his time.
Because you can never predict when an emergency will come up, make sure you have someone who can resond to urgent requests. And that person would be your direct manager. But let them know ahead of time so they're not blindsided when they need to respond to something.
I’m with you on this one. Management has access to a mansion and a townhouse in two different fabulous vacation destinations and it burns my butt every time I see an out of office from one of them (98% white men) going on about how they’ll be enjoying this perk. In the meantime, a few years back we had to eliminate free coffee at the offices because business was not good enough (it was eventually brought back after company president realized after a year that people were really pissed).