At this time of year, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, many companies are beginning to plan holiday breaks and cover. There are lots of tools available within Google’s Google Workspace which can help businesses to manage holiday breaks without interrupting workflow. One of these is straight forward: out-of-office replies for the email component of Google Workspace.
If you’re going on holidays (or vacation in North America!) then you can use this to let your email contacts know when you will be back, and who to contact while you are away. Its a great way to prevent frustration while out of the office. You could get super granular and use them when you literally leave the office (like overnight or for prolonged meetings and conferences) but for this, we tend to recommend inbox delegation to a Personal Assistant or colleague.
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How to Setup Out-of-Office Replies in Google Workspace
Login to your account here: https://myaccount.google.com/
Click on the cog icon in the top right of your email dashboard, then select “settings” from the drop-down menu.
In the “General” tab of settings, scroll down to the very bottom to find the heading “Vacation Responder”.
Click “Vacation responder on”, choose the dates for your response to apply, give the responder a subject, write the message as you would like to see it, and then decide whether you would like to restrict who gets the message, before pressing “save”.
Doing More
You might also like to setup a Google Group with its own email address. This can be used as a forwarding address for emails, enabling other employees to share work while a colleague is away. See our tutorial here.
Get Help
There’s loads more to learn over at the Google Workspace Learning Center.
If you’d like to do more with your company auto-responders, or would like Silicon Dales to help you set them up for the whole organisation, just get in touch.