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I received one from a coworker in middle management that said something to the effect of “I’m working on a large-scale project and will be unable to answer email until X date. Please contact [direct report’s email] with any questions.” This went on for well over a month.
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Out-Of-Office templates (OOO) are a type of auto-responder that instruct eDesk to reply automatically to messages that arrive during one-off office closures, e.g., during a national holiday. For example, a customer sends your company a message on Christmas Day, but the office closed at 6pm on Christmas Eve and will not reopen until the 29th December. If you have set up an OOO template for this holiday period, eDesk will immediately respond to the customer with a message that reads : "Thanks for contacting Joe's Bikes! Just to confirm that we've received your message and that a member of our team will respond as soon as possible. Wishing you a very Happy Holiday from everybody at Joe's Bikes". This message is pre-written as an OOO template and is set up to be triggered for any customer messages that arrive between 6pm on 24th December and 8am on 29th December. You can use OOO templates to auto-respond to messages during any one-off time period when your team is unavailable to respond in person. Setting up OOO templates is easy - we'll show you how! Note: To access this tour you must be an Admin or have permission to access Templates. To find out more about this, click here.
Thankfully, with a simple out of office message taking a day off doesn’t mean that your communication with clients has to stop.
Get the time and date right for when the automatic emails start - you could choose the the moment that you actually leave the office, or some cheeky people choose an hour or two before they leave, saying that they are busy handing over or wrapping up to deal with customers or other colleagues. They are still able to check the emails they do get anyway, to reply properly to if they want to.
Using autoresponder emails when you are not available at the office is a part of the professional communication between business associates. That said, you should be careful about the information you are sharing in your OOO messages.
I’ll reply to your message promptly when I return. But, if you require immediate assistance, please send an email to [contact name] at [contact email] in my absence.
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.
As a part time person, I now put an OOO on my non-work days since I was getting snarky comments about slow response times. (People don’t realize I’m part time and my position is not suited at all to it.) Dude, I didn’t respond because I don’t get paid to work on Fridays.
I received one from a coworker in middle management that said something to the effect of “I’m working on a large-scale project and will be unable to answer email until X date. Please contact [direct report’s email] with any questions.” This went on for well over a month.
There’s no shame in using Christmas to indulge in your childhood movie tastes, but there is shame in not sharing that adorable side of yourself when people are trying to reach you during the holidays.
But for employees at Daimler things are a little different. Email these people while they are on holiday and you will get a message like this:
What’s the beef against part time staff? I am part time and I think it’s a courtesy to let correspondents know when I am at my desk. I also appreciate getting it from other people as I can either escalate or make s mental note of when I expect to hear back.
› Url: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/out-of-the-office-message Go Now
As a side note, I put a similar message on my work and cell phones, and once I didn’t change the cell message back for nearly a year. (It was my personal cell number, and only my parents ever left messages.)
Honestly, what drives me crazy is after someone has emailed me, gets the out of office, then *does* email someone else instead of waiting for me to get back. Yet said someone doesn’t email me back to say “see you’re out, person X got it taken care of, you can disregard my email”. So then I waste time seeing the initial request and following up. Has anyone found a good wording / other solution to know if the request was completed by someone else?
Thankfully, with a simple out of office message taking a day off doesn’t mean that your communication with clients has to stop.