Ask A Manager: Out-of-Office message etiquette

I love the Ask A Manager blog; as I've stated before, it's a great resource for finding examples of people pushing boundaries in the workplace and suggestions for how to enforce those boundaries. Watching other people hold their boundaries is a great way to learn about how to maintain your own ones.

But this morning's letter prompted me to give my own advice:

should you turn on an out-of-office message when you’re away for a few hours?:

I work for a medium-sized office, managing a small team; this team interacts with other internal staffers, primarily on non-urgent matters. Right now, leadership is brainstorming how and when it is most appropriate to use an out-of-office message.

[four more paragraphs deleted, and a whole bunch of Alison's opinions on out of office messages]

Your problem here is not "what's the right way to use out-of-office messages?" 

Your problem is "leadership is brainstorming how and when it is most appropriate to use an out-of-office message"

Every organisation has problems that management need to be working on, whether a successful organisation or not.

I promise you, the problems with your office are not caused by out-of-office emails.

The problems are caused by your leadership focussing on the wrong problems.

There are problems in your business, and the flagship issue for management to "brainstorm" is out-of-office emails? This is the most blatant example of "bikeshedding" I have seen in recent years, and I've worked at some pretty fucked-up places.

The fact that you are worried about the out-of-office messages, and not the fact that management are having long-winded opinions about out-of-office messages, tells me you are a frog, being slowly boiled.

As always, my standard advice for people slowly being boiled alive in a dysfunctional office remains: "tidy up your CV and start applying for new jobs, you can't fix that shit from underneath"

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