So, for whatever reason you’re out of the office, your email inbox should be informative with any information about office closures or unexpected absences: Include an expected return date and time. Offer alternative point of contact and their details. Add the general office contact number and email address if you don’t have a specific point of contact. Be friendly and warm in your tone, even if you choose to keep it simple.
First, here’s the out-of-message for people who don’t like watching video (although the person in the video is funny and really brings the message to life):
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If their message is urgent or they’d like to contact someone else instead, you can let them know what to do.
Thankfully, setting this up in Gmail is easy to do and only takes a few minutes. Here are step-by-step instructions for setting your out-of-office message, plus some helpful examples you can steal for your own use:
I’ll add my shout out to MS and Outlook for not only being able to schedule OoO auto replies, but for having internal and external facing options.
8. "Hi, you've reached [your name]. I'm unable to come to the phone right now. But if you leave your name, number, and a short message, I'll be sure to call back."
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Thanks so much for your email. I took today off to [rest/relax/travel/spend time with family]. In an effort to come back fully recharged, I won’t be spending today with my phone attached to my hand. (Scary, I know.) Don’t worry, though, because I will be checking in every so often and responding to anything urgent.
“For the Symantec office, I send holiday wishes for the employees’ holiday out of office. I wish all the employees have lots of fun and adventure during the recreational holiday period. Have a happy holiday.”
That said, be careful with messages that are this curt. Make sure you’re familiar enough with your audience — and your boss, for that matter — to know that this sort of out-of-office message will be met with a snicker, and not with annoyance.
Hello, I’m out of the office until [DATE]. However, I will be taking periodic breaks from binge-watching everything I’ve missed to check my email [once per day/every evening/occasionally] while I’m away. If this matter isn’t time-sensitive, rest assured that I’ll respond when I’m back in the office. But, if this is an urgent request, please resend any messages that require my immediate attention with a subject line of “URGENT: [Original Subject]”. All the best.
I want to know how everyone who works from home is wording their OOOs. Are you saying you’re out of the office? Away from your computer? Have closed the door to your home office?
In most cases, the voice of your out of office message should be similar to the voice you’re using while communicating with clients. If you’re usually formal, replying with a joke could be jarring — and vice versa. Your mileage may vary, but keep that in mind before setting up an automatic reply.
One of the only reasons I get voicemails is because our system is set up to send new voicemail messages to your email as an attached file. Now if only it would send the voicemail as a transcript, I’d be set. I don’t mind returning calls, but listening to voicemails is obnoxious, especially because people are really bad at leaving voice messages.
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I’ve honestly considered changing my OOO message/voicemail to “You’ve reached Lisa. I’m overwhelmed right now, so I’ll get back to you eventually.”
She’s been with our org for 32 years, haha. And our departmental email policy for the last at least eight of them has been “check your email at least twice a day.” Definitely no expectations of a 15 minute turnaround.