Would this be acceptable in your workplace?

[olderbutwiser]

I’ve started to receive out of office emails saying “I am out of office until xxx. Please resend your email after that date”.

I may be a dinosaur, but to me it’s unacceptable to put the onus on the sender to resend their email on some random future date. Clearing piled-up emails when I get back to the office is just one of those things you have to factor into your working life.

Votes please:

Perfectly acceptable nowadays, you’re a dinosaur —> You Are Being Unreasonable
It’s completely unacceptable, time for a Meeting Without Coffee —> You Are Not Being Unreasonable

This was normal in our office but in my out of hours notification I always offered an alternative contact including their email and phone number.

If I received an out of hours that someone was away then I made a note on my calendar to resend my email a day after they were back.

I’d love it if it could be adopted where I work, as no one pays attention ton to out of office messages and emails you anyway.

Does it matter what day it lands in the inbox? The sender knows you won’t respond until X date at the earliest.

Id rather return to 500 emails I know I have to wade through than return to 0 and then 500 drop in as im sat there enjoying my return from AL!!

My view is if you are sending emails requiring actions to more than 20 people then you are part of the email problem! If the email is one of information, then it’s for the holidaying individuals manager, or whoever was covering the role if anyone was, to bring them up to speed on anything important that happened while they are away :)

Anyway, with Outlook nowadays for those inside your organisation it alerts you if the person you are sending an email to is out of the office before you’ve sent it (assuming they’ve turned on their out-of-office) which gives you time to think whether the email is really necessary.

Not all work places are the same though ...

For example, I've received two 'all department' emails today that will require a response from every member of staff. Those on leave will pick it up when they return.

It not fair to ask our colleagues, who need to collate this information, to make a note of when dozens of academics are back off leave.

I would just ignore it. I do sometimes schedule emails to arrive shortly after someone is back if it's absolutely vital it reaches them as soon as possible, but I certainly won't be doing this as a habit. During certain times of the year, almost half the office is on leave. If I had to schedule my emails for each and every one of them, I would never get around to doing my own tasks and I would go mad.

Email is designed to be asynchronous, like physical letters. It's good to receive an out-of-office notification, so you know when not to expect an answer from them, but apart from that, their inbox is not my problem.

Is email the best tool for collating that sort of information though, would be my question I guess. It seems rather too prone to the old ‘reply to all’ rather than ‘reply’ response, and subsequent risk of data ending up with those that shouldn’t have it.

This seems to utterly disregard situations where the email is more important to you and your company than it is to the sender.

"Hi, would you be interested in the 100 million pound contract we are looking to give someone - you are one of a number of companies we are approaching so we would appreciate a reply indicating your interest..."

No, just delete that, if it's important they'll follow up.

Is email the best tool for collating that sort of information though, would be my question I guess. It seems rather too prone to the old ‘reply to all’ rather than ‘reply’ response, and subsequent risk of data ending up with those that shouldn’t have it..

How would you collate this then?

Our professional services team need to know who is attending graduation ceremonies and if we need a gown ordering. There are 55 academics in our department. They sent an email which included a form for staff to complete.
No sensitive data, no risk of 'reply all' but the team get all the info in one place.

This exact same issue was raised here a month ago or so.

Was surprising how many people seemed incapable of grasping that different workplaces had different imperatives.

If I work in a commercial environment and my email traffic is likely to include customer enquiries or leads, then no, I'm not going to tell them their email will be deleted. But if I work in an environment where the bulk of my emails are internal emails across teams to e.g. coordinate or drive forward a particular project, then yes, directing emailers to either find someone else to speak to in your absence, or email when you're back is perfectly acceptable.

No, it doesn't mean I receive the same number of emails on Day 1 as I would have done over the course of my two weeks off - because most emails I get are not essential, the sender will either just not send it again because its low priority, or they will have found someone else to help. Those that actually get resent on my return will be a small fraction.

And no, it doesn't mean that I simply delete everything on return. But it does mean I can skim my inbox much more quickly just to scan for anything critical.

The reality is that I am being paid on my first day back, and my employer is not getting their money's worth if I spend my first day reading 3000 emails.

A shared spreadsheet would achieve that, and save anyone having to collate the answers.

I work in a very well known, large global firm.

As a PP has said, it’s be a little like signing your own redundancy notice.

Not appropriate at all.

We often have complex email trails with many senior stakeholders/Partners on them. It would simply not be feasible to do this, not for one moment.

The same thread almost word for word was posted not so long ago and I was really surprised by how many posters thought it was a good idea and they did the same as I've never come across it and I'm not sure my employer would be happy for us to reply like that

A shared spreadsheet would achieve that, and save anyone having to collate the answers.

That's what the form feeds into...
And we got an email asking us to complete it.

I don't really understand how that would work because in order for the sender to get your out of office reply, wouldn't they have to send an email first? So basically you risk doubling your emails. They send it once, get the reply, they send it again using schedule send - voila twice the emails.

My out of office reply gives my return date and also who to contact if it's urgent

The emails during the holiday can be deleted easily leaving just the things that arrive afterwards

I increasingly don't go through the email build up after a holiday. There are thousands. Many of them i didnt need to be copied on, or i find its already been dealt with. People tend to follow up if its actually important.

We send and copy on too many emails. Its a horrendous waste of time. Some of the least productive members of my team are the ones busily sending lots of long emails

Where I work you can see that someone has an out of office reply on and what it says before you send the email. I assume it's the same everywhere if using Outlook?

I do go through emails when I come back from leave - but I can easy get 50 emails a day, many of which are useless and unnecessary at the time never mind 2 weeks later. So I don't open them all, I look at who the sender/title is and make a decision about whether to look at it or not and ignore the rest. I guess there's a small danger of missing something I should have replied to but that's maybe happened once or twice in 10 years.

The reality is that I am being paid on my first day back, and my employer is not getting their money's worth if I spend my first day reading 3000 emails.

This - i have too much actual work to do to handle this much pile up. I often send a note round my team/other key stakeholders telling them when I'm due out of office and who to contact in my absence if its urgent, otherwise to please wait til I'm back. I am entitled to take a holiday from work.

Definitely unacceptable in my work place. To be honest if I got that I’d think f right off!

can you not just schedule the resend for an appropraite date?

At my old place of work - fast paced pressurised City environment - there was an unwritten expectation that you would periodically check their emails while away. To the extent that some OOO messages even gave contact details.

However a senior director of one key division bucked the trend with a heroic OOO message: 'I am out of the office until xxx - emails sent during this period will be deleted on my return, unread'. I do think though that you have to be pretty senior to take this radical approach. He was a legend in my view

Yes acceptable. Just schedule the email to go on that date