If you’re heading away for a much-needed holiday or simply taking a day off work, the top of your to-do list is setting your email’s out-of-office auto-response. We have some advice on how you can craft your message.
Holiday image from Shutterstock
Here are eight auto-response tips to keep the fires burning in the workplace — and to ensure your time away is interruption-free:
- Thank the person for their message.
- Provide specific start and end dates so people know when you’ll be back in the office.
- Include contact details for colleagues who can help with queries in your absence. Outline the specific projects or areas they cover.
- Mention whether or not you are checking emails, and how frequently.
- If you are checking emails from a different time zone, let them know. This way they’ll understand there may be a slight delay if you are sleeping while they are working.
- If you haven’t yet, specify when they can expect a response from you.
- Be generous with your response time estimation. Your first day back in the office is likely to be hectic – especially if you’d been away for an extended time.
- Once you’ve drafted your out-of-office message, ask a colleague to have a look to check if you missed anything.
Do you use an out-of-office message when you are going to be away? Or do you prefer to solider on and check your emails during your absence? Let us know in the comments.
This article originally appeared on The Naked CEO
Comments
3 responses to “How To Write A Great Out-Of-Office Message”
I’d either have to own the business or be earning a crap tonne of money to go near work emails on holiday.
And here I thought this would be an article about how to best gloat about being on holidays, without being smarmy about it.
Lifehacker you troll, ” Here are eight”… provides six 🙂
Hi there,
That has now been fixed! Thanks for flagging 🙂
I actually find these types of OoO messages to be terrible. Just do something simple telling people who to contact in your absence. I find the whole blow by blow account to be a bit self indulgent.