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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.
Dear Daimler-Benz
I know it's after hours, but I would like to order 500 cars of the Model S as quickly as possible, color unimportant.
I'll pay double for speedy delivery.
Out Of Office = "I'm not going to get a timely reply"
...aren't already capable of doing this ?
Whose nephew just got money for college ?
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.
I've never interpreted these auto-replies to mean that I shouldn't send mail to that address. I thought they're just courtesy replies from a robot explaining that it'll be a long time before anyone reads it.
Deleting the email seems like a bad idea. That'll keep the recipient from being able to read it when they return.
And WTF does this have to do with overtime?
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.
Then your customers assume that they have the wrong email address
There are people who are either NEVER out of office or ALWAYS out of office. But there's a hard and fast rule you never respond or reply either way.
about what Out-Of-Office responses are meant for. The primary reason you have them is :
You *want* to convey something to a bunch of people and you expect some response. The Out-Of-Office just says don't expect a response from that person. But that person is still expected to read the emails.
Also, there are numerous occasions where people have been assigned tasks that need to be handled later, but the assignment was done when they are out-of-office. My own manager comes in at 8:00 am, while the official work hours start at 9:00 am. So, I get mails just within an hour before the out-of-office period ends. I definitely don't want those emails deleted.
Balachandran "Arise Awake and Stop not till the goal is reached"
This is the German one, right? Not the different badge on a Jaguar,
From Lewis Hamilton
To Ross Brawn
Tell Nico to move over, I 'm doing faster lap times.
Nuke the server from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I did this once and it worked really well. However, in order for it to work, you need a couple of things:
1) The auto-reply needs to be very clear that the original message was discarded and will never be read.
2) The auto-reply must contain contact information of a person who can help out with urgent matters.
It was so relaxing to come back from vacation and not have to face an inbox with 1000 messages...
FTFA: issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.
and
the program — which is optional — has gone down well with the company’s German employees
Seriously, the idea is that you get to actually take a vacation and let someone else handle the load while you're away. That way, you're not coming back to work with twice the workload as when you left. For many companies, if you take a vacation, no one covers you. The work just piles up. It makes it hard to relax knowing that you've got a mountain of work to return to. No one is taking away "Out of Office" messages or breaking them for people who want to use them.
I've seen several comments here saying "Well, I'm just CC'ing people who need to be kept in the loop!" Ok, I get that. If it's that important, why don't you just wait until they get back and give them a short briefing? If it's not that important, why did you bother sending it in the first place?
I, for one, applaud the effort to push back against the anti-vacation, anti-personal time culture.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Physical mail costs money to send, so you are unlikely to come back from vacation to a pile of 2,000 letters. Email costs virtually nothing to send, so it piles up far more quickly than physical mail.
Also, people who send physical mail tend not to Cc: 25+ recipients just because they can, and there's no physical equivalent of the hellish "Reply to All" button.
Technology isn't the issue here - obviously you don't need special software to auto-delete emails.
The real issue is that Daimler is allowing its employees to do this without fear of reprisals from management.
Yeah. That'll last until the first upper manager misses an important email because he forgot to reset the out of office flag.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So people who go on vacation aren't allowed to catch up when they get back? How about this; if you really want people to not check emails while away, disable their remote access. Turn off ActiveSync for that user, and don't allow them to VPN in.
In France it is illegal to have staff answer mail out of office hours. How's that for mandatory free time?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
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.
Dear Slashdot,
I am currently in the office attempting to work, so I am unable to post a funny, informative or insightful comment on this story. I expect to be goofing off again in an hour or so at which time I will give your story my full attention.
Meanwhile...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
This is only a problem if you don't have a decent anti-spam filter in front of your back-end mail server. Any company that can operate like that has far bigger problems than worrying about what to do with valid inbound email.
Spammers use to use auto response e-mail systems to traffic spam. In the days of Internet providers trying to promote their services, people would email an Internet provider pretending they are going to sign up and the reply e-mail address would be to another Internet provider and they would automatically answer each other all day long. I assume this Deutschland company is not so basic? E-mail ping-pong.
Dear Daimler,
You don't really seem to 'get' the value of emails. The point is that they can be processed whenever. To delete them is stupid. Essentially, by negating the time-independent aspect of email, you're reducing it to little more than a phone call in terms of utility.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the rest of the world doesn't conform to your standards of vacation, and there are even alternate TIMEZONES in this world, so it's entirely reasonable that someone might send an email while you're not there.
I look forward to the first time a Daimler exec sends an email to someone out of the office for something important to be done when they get back from vacation.
Dumb fucks.
-Styopa
This has to be the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard of. If I tell the Post Office to hold my mail while I'm on vacation, I expect to get all of that mail delivered upon my return. Not thrown away.
An email is an electronic form of mail. It is asynchronous. You send it to somebody when you do not expect an immediate reply, but instead expect the recipient to read it as time permits, but within a reasonable time, and respond as appropriate. An OoO is an optional courtesy letting the sender know that a reply will be delayed more than a typical amount of time. (I pretty much never use them, instead just go through my outstanding email and respond when I am available.)
Something is seriously upside-down about the world when otherwise sane business people find it totally normal to never answer their phone (which is a synchronous form of communication) and communicate by trading voicemails, but at the same time expect instantaneous response to emails.
When my vacation time approached, I loaded a bunch of duplicated emails in the trash folder, and started to operate dangerously close to the mail storage quota.
When I left the office, I left the OutOfOffice reply with the alternate contact. a couple of days after I left, mails would start to bounce.
A couple of days before I was due to return to the office, I connected, just to delete the duplicated email, NOT to check anything.
When I returned, I got fresh email, and the status report from my replacement, go get my up to date/speed.
My two cents, YMMV
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
If I go on vacation and turn on my out-of-office replies, I don't actually check my e-mail while I am on vacation, and my co-workers are aware of this. My supervisor has my cell phone number, she can call me if there is truly an emergency.
I work as an administrator in a higher education setting, so your mileage may vary ...
And the best way tools such as this have to communicate updates to those who shoupd get the updates is .... by email. And the Daimler solution would mean I wouldn't easily be able to see the updates I missed.
Surely there are other mechanisms to keep people stress-free while on leave? I just turn off email synching until the morning I return to work (with a suitable OoO message set).
Not going to work for important jobs. I used to do international interconnect work between Telco's having a link fail because my opposite number was on holiday is not something I would want to put up with. Though I did learn never to mail anyone in France telecom during August :-)
"Long story short, if someone did that to me I'd take my business elsewhere, I don't appreciate having my time wasted . Fuck 'em."
We used to have customers like you until we fired them.
The correct protocol (and the one we follow at my company) is to use role addersses such as sales@, support@, info@, etc for things that absolutely must be read by a human being in a timely manner. Think requests for product information, price quotes, requests for technical support, etc.
We guarantee that those addresses will be routed to a person who can respond quickly. All bets are off for personal email addresses, however. I see no harm in asking a requestor to redirect his or her request if a person is away on vacation. Odds are the requestor will appreciate being able to resend it to someone who can respond quickly rather than waiting for the original person to return.
That is, any email that can be deleted like this should never have been sent.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I usually have to spend a couple of hours going through my email when I get back from vacation.
Many of them are useless:
Some are useful
Threaded email readers help. Look at the most recent couple emails for each subject, and see whether there is something I need to do or file away for future use.
What I'd really like is if all of the dated stuff would evaporate when it's no longer relevant.