Regardless of my general health and hygiene over the silly season, I’ll be back in the office on January 2. 15. “Thank you for your consideration during this festive or not-festive time.”
Dear Customer, Please note that all company offices will be closed from [date]. We will reopen on [date] We wish you the best holiday. Regards, [Company name]
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I did something similar the second time I took maternity leave, actually. I didn’t explicitly say, “I will delete all emails,” but instead I shared my backups’ contact info and invited people to contact me again when I was back from leave.
I say “I am out of the office without access to email” to avoid the expectation that I’ll check on vacation. With a contact for anything urgent given.
I could see the benefit if someone needed to ask something before they left. It seems courteous?
What we need in our work communication is not more professional politeness or less formal, chat-based messaging applications like Slack. We need honesty. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to see honesty as self-indulgent or disrespectful. I’d argue the opposite is true. Honesty, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient for all parties in the moment, pays dividends later. It builds trust. When my partner Anne Helen Petersen and I were interviewing people for our forthcoming book on remote work, a frequent lament from both middle managers and workers was that they didn’t feel like they knew how to succeed in their jobs; that they were guessing what their superiors and coworkers wanted and, even when they asked, they didn’t quite trust the responses they got back.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
The worst one I ever received was from a coworker (senior to me, but not my manager) many years ago. I’ll paraphrase it as my memory isn’t great:
Out of office emails should be short, succinct, and to the point – and should never include more information than is needed.
22. "Hi, you've reached [your name, the office of X company]. We're closed until [date]. Please leave your name and phone number and someone will return your call ASAP. Have a great [New Year's, Fourth of July, etc.]."
Not exactly a neutral audience, though. A number of people following the account, if not most, will be following because they share the same sense of humor. Likewise people @ed by friends.
Same. There are a few people that are regularly in charge of things I need from them, but are part time. The vast majority of our office is full time. I have no idea when they’ll get back to me, or if I should email someone else. If I saw an OOO message every time they were gonna be gone Th-Fri, I would learn their schedule faster, and hopefully have the most up to date info about “oh, they changed their schedule due to Memorial Day, I can email them and get a response quicker this week” or whatever the issue is.
Yes absolutely! I would be really annoyed if someone did that. I would probably have to set a reminder for myself to resend that email (or emails), which is more work for me. If I’m sending the email to several people, I’d also have to ask myself if I should resend it to everyone to follow up, or maybe just wait to send it. This would stress me out that something might slip through the cracks.
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Education Details: Joshua Kim. January 15, 2020. Hello. I am on vacation between now and Jan. 13 and will not be checking email. Please resend your email on or after Jan. 13. Thanks, Josh. That was the out-of-office (OOO) message that I set on my work email the last time I went on vacation.
Education Details: If there is a way for the recipient to discover your address, you simply use a general template, like the one you have presented, or the all-purpose out of office message from the article. Still, I cannot imagine using a home landline number in an OOF message …
This is very useful in situations where you are changing jobs (as an employee) or a former employee has left your company (as an employer or HR manager). Permanent out-of-office emails help to guide correspondents appropriately.