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Daimler's Solution For Annoying Out-of-office Email: Delete It
AmiMoJo writes Sure, you can set an out-of-office auto-reply to let others know they shouldn't email you, but that doesn't usually stop the messages; you may still have to handle those urgent-but-not-really requests while you're on vacation. That's not a problem if you work at Daimler, though. The German automaker recently installed software that not only auto-replies to email sent while staff is away, but deletes it outright.
Out Of Office = "I'm not going to get a timely reply"
Email's strength is that it is asynchronous. I send CC emails to people that I know are not available because I want them to read it when they get back, so they aren't totally clueless as to what happened while they were out scuba diving or whatever.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I let physical mail pile up and then deal with it when I get back. Ditto electronic mail. Just tell people when you'll be away and that you won't be checking during that time. The only people who get annoyed by this tend to be the sort of people who deserve to be irritated anyhow.
And unlike physical mail you don't have to worry about the accumulation tipping off burglars.
You don't have to check it while you are on vacation. You can actually ignore it.
So why delete what could be important communication? Just deal with it when you are back in the office.
1) Daimler-Benz doesn't exist any more.
2) "Model S" isn't a model that was ever produced by Daimler-Benz or Daimler AG.
3) 500 cars isn't very many and would merely be a drop in the bucket compared to how much money Daimler AG has.
4) Daimler AG has more than one person working for them.
5) Sane people make money to live their lives, not the other way around.
It won't work. You also need one more thing: a sender that pays attention to the out of office message. When I see an email which has a subject line that says "Out of office", I don't bother reading it. I just delete it. Obviously the recipient got the email; they just won't respond right away.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If a sender does not pay attention to my message, then why should I pay attention to the sender's message?
If I send something important and then soon afterwards get an out-of-office reply, I certainly read it.
The problem with implementing something like this in a US company is the staffing model. European companies tend to have more people doing similar jobs, so that one person actually can fill in for another. Most out of office messages say something like "I'm not here, please contact my manager XYZ for assistance." 9 times out of 10, there's no backup person who can actually provide an answer, simply because there's no backup staff that knows enough to solve a problem.
The other issue is that at least in IT, most places still allow individuals to knowledge-hoard. Often it's unintentional (see understaffing above) because there's simply no time to ensure someone else knows about what you do. But sometimes people do this in a misguided quest for job security. Also, a very small number of people do it to cover something up -- there stories out there about people who found loopholes in purchasing/accounting systems and used them to write checks to themselves or divert equipment...and only got caught when someone else started reviewing things they had been handling themselves.
In my opinion, a lot of the knowledge-hoarding would stop if people were able to trust their employers to keep them employed, or to at least treat them fairly if they had to be laid off. Sure, implementing worker-friendly policies would probably be expensive in the short run, but I can't tell you the number of times I've walked into a new job where the previous individual held all the tribal knowledge about a system or process. I think this policy is a very good one -- especially for employees who work a stressful job and have family commitments, etc. Being able to completely ignore everything during a vacation would be something many employees would stick around to keep. Personally, I have a very busy work schedule and 2 little kids at home. Between not sleeping normally and often having to use my downtime to finish extra work, I would _love_ to be able to say "here, this is your problem now" for 2 weeks. (I wouldn't even have to go anywhere...just put me somewhere to turn off my brain for a couple days.)
It'll never happen here though -- there are too many people who buy into the "job creators" meme and let their employers walk all over them...everyone who even suggests a worker-friendly policy is a lazy entitled socialist here.