The message your out-of-office reply is really sending

It has only been 10 months since Nicky Haslam, the self-appointed annual arbiter of what is and isn’t couth in modern society, declared “out-of-office” email replies to be officially, indisputably common. And yet here we are in the first week of August, peak holiday season, under siege again from a tsunami of subject lines containing those three little Os. OOO? Aaargh.

In an era when the machine of HR is supposed to have stripped workers of the ability to think for themselves, the content, tone and format of automated out-of-office replies remains mystifyingly left up to the individual. Fancy oversharing wildly? You may. Feel like making it clear you despise your job? So be it. Wish to redirect all contacts to a fictional person? That is your right. It is the last truly lawless area of professional life. And while that sounds like a good thing, it’s absolutely not.

It strikes me that there are three dominant modes of OOO: indefatigably blunt, needlessly passive-aggressive and just plain irritating. For a more outlandish alternative you could try gibberish written by an Icelandic horse, if that’s your preference.

Anyway, this isn’t to say there’s never a crossover in tone. It’s entirely possible for an OOO to be both blunt and annoying (“Thanks for your email. I am currently dancing on a beach like nobody’s watching”), blunt and pass-agg (“I will be away until September 5. I am not accessible. Nor is anyone else”), or annoying and pass-agg (“Interrupt my holiday if you like, but know that I am unlikely to choose your dreary corporate pitch over paddle boarding across Lake Tahoe with my little munchkins”) – but people tend to gravitate one way or the other.

Indefatigably Blunt

The first group are, obviously, the most sane. They set their OOO only when they truly are away, and could say as little as “I’m off” or as much as “I’m off until Monday 12, please contact Tracey if anything’s urgent”, but that’s it. Occasionally they will link to a person who is themselves away, and sometimes they might say they are “currently uncontactable”, as if they were holidaying at Butlin’s Mariana Trench, but all this does is underline the basic message an OOO needs to relay: I’m not at work, let me live.

Needlessly Passive-Aggressive

The second group are in the most obvious need of a holiday, but the fact they make it so clear vanquishes all potential sympathy. They are busy, and want you to know it, so they might set an OOO even if they leave work 10 minutes early to go to a dentist appointment. When they eventually take two weeks off (“annual leave”, as they insist on calling it), their OOO will say something like: “I am on my first break in a year, because cuts to my department mean I have no deputy. Email me if you like, but you’ll just join a queue that might take me months to clear. If it’s urgent, well, so what? We’re all going to die. God, I hope that’s soon in my case. Anyway, I’m on my phone.”

Just Plain Irritating

The third are the “fun” crowd. The office characters. They’re on their holibobs, and it’s wine o’clock, baby! They’re currently jet-skiing in the Adriatic and you don’t want to be distracting them! They’ll speak to you in a few weeks, when they’re as tanned as David Dickinson and as chilled as the Dalai Lama! If you need anything, send a message in a bottle because they ain’t leaving the beach until the piña coladas have run dry. And for anything urgent, please contact their very handsome colleague Eamonn, who doesn’t actually know he’s been chosen as recipient of all their emails for a fortnight, but nor can he contact them to change it. Peace out.

You can see why we need company-wide OOO policies to become commonplace, if only to lower the nation’s blood pressure. A few years ago, one German firm introduced an auto-delete program for emails sent during workers’ holidays, rendering creative auto-replies unnecessary. If only. Haslam was right; an end to OOOs would be the dream, though a little less freedom would be a start. You may disagree – but I’m going away for a couple of weeks so I won’t be able to get back to you. In my absence, please scream into the Letters page.