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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"
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.
> And WTF does this have to do with overtime?
Many people foolishly think that as they can check their work email while on holiday, they should check their work email while on holiday. By doing so they are doing unpaid overtime (an evil evil thing).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Then your customers assume that they have the wrong email address
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.
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?"
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?
In theory you could just let the emails sit there until you are back at work, but in practice sadly it is often expected that you check your email inbox every now and then. Employees often feel that they can't say "no" to the expectation that they have to be available via email even while at home off work hours. To protect employees (because vacations and off work time are to be protected, for health reasons), there are discussions in Europe about introducing new regulations which would make any such "off work work" paid overtime, by law - effectively making it financially interesting for companies to prevent emails from reaching their employees when they are off work. This Daimler story is just one example of that.
Employees often feel that they can't say "no" to the expectation that they have to be available via email even while at home off work hours.
People just need to make it clearer that you will be unreachable. My managers stopped when they insisted that they needed a way to get a hold of me in case of emergency since I would be well out of cellphone range. My response was a trained tracker and a team of search dogs. I told him about where I was going to be leaving my car and said to start searching there as I would be somewhere up in the north woods of Minnesota.
Time to offend someone
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.
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.
"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.