Humanize Your Out-of-Office Messaging

Speaker 1: I'm not coming down. I never left it on the ground. I'm not coming down. I want go hire mess.

This is Write Your Own Story: three keys to Rise and Thrive in Life and Business. I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession. Y'all, I have a topic today that I've had written on my idea board for a bit, and I'm finally just going to talk it out with you today and that is the out of office email responses. I mean, if there is a better measure of culture or values or style, I don't know what it is, I think I am going to start keeping a file of the most interesting out of office emails that I have seen, both amazing and also cringe worthy. And maybe we'll just do a regular series here about out of office. You may be a part of my drink and a snack monthly not so newsletter, newsletter that I send out. If you want to get on to that, go to wethrive. live and give me your email address. So one went out today, which is a really good one by the way. If you're not on the list, get on the list. I actually just published it on my blog because it was such a good one and so many people responded and said, Ooh, this is really good. So I know it was a good one, but these are the days that I get a lot of out of office responses. So this really was on my heart today. So I was like, today's the day we go and talk about it. Number one, let it be known that I hate email. So everything that you're going to hear from me today, you need to know from the place of which it comes. Why do I hate email you, you might ask? Well, let me tell you, I hate email because I was a slave to it for so long that email feels like dating a bad boyfriend again, like going back to an ex that you know should just be done with but because business requires me, maybe requires is a heavy word, I could probably have a business without an... no, no. It does require me because I couldn't sign up for anything. I couldn't do anything without an email. So it is required. Business requires me to have an email address, which is the only reason I have an email address. There's so many better ways to communicate. But what's really interesting is when I started my business, my out of office message got a lot of interesting responses because my out of office, unless I'm actually on a vacation or something specific, says I only check email twice a week. So if you need to get in touch with me, here are the other ways to do it. And there's my clients know how to get in touch with me. We use an app called Boxer and so that way I know that's first place that I go to respond. So my out of office email basically says, I don't like email. I don't hang out here because I found that I was such a prisoner to my email that I wasn't doing any deep thinking or problem solving or enough time serving my client or creating new content if my measure of success was an empty inbox. It wasn't attached enough to my money making model. There was no correlation between having an empty inbox and higher revenue. And I just said, if I was going to start my own business, I should want to work in my own business. So I just said no to being an overly responsive email person. Trying to cut the cords of proving myself and over accommodating for things that don't really matter much. So that's the space in which I come to you today is, I know email is a part of our lives, but can we just take a minute to acknowledge that we don't email the fire department. So if your house is on fire, that's a shitty way to get your fire put out. And if we could just maybe acknowledge that from a human perspective about the rest of our businesses, that'd be great. Number two, I don't know how many numbers are going to show up in this. I'm literally just kind of on a rant here. Okay, so if that's number one, here's number two. We'll see what other ones pop in my head. It's late on a Friday and instead of sitting somewhere in a patio having a cocktail, I'm here with you. So you're welcome. I guess this is my podcast version of a drink and a snack, as I said the name of my newsletter, because I love when my friends say, " Hey, drink and a snack, and we get together and have a great conversation." So this is my drink and a snack version of the podcast. Now I already forgotten what my number two was, which also happens when I'm out having drinks with friends. Okay, number two. Most of us in the world of work, business career don't have life saving, altering jobs. Like I don't put out fires. I don't cure cancer. I do believe that my work is important and transformational. I do know that I have changed some lives, 100% without question. I have changed some lives with my work and I will change more lives with my work, but not in a way that is urgent life and death situation. And I got to believe that's the case for most of us here today. So if we could just maybe in our out of office responses, acknowledge that it ain't that deep, y'all. It just ain't that deep. The sense of urgency that is displayed in out of office messages, y'all, that's effed up. We got to stop because it's perpetuating this prove yourself work harder. The first two stages of burnout. It's not that deep. Yes, go to work and do a great job, but when you gone, the world still keeps spinning and turning. NPS if you leave that job, somebody going to come in and do that job. I love you, but I love you enough to tell you the truth. The sense of urgency in an out of office message is concerning to me. Number three. You know I love my business' human framework. Any chance I get to talk about it I'm going to. If it was cute enough, I'd probably get the tattoo. Business is human framework. Here we go. Business needs to control, measure and optimize. Those are good business practices. Humans we're personal, emotional, and social. An out of office message comes from a human and goes to another human so it is personal, emotional, and social. If we could maybe just also use words that are a little more personal, emotional, and social, and don't make us sound like machines here to produce. I even did a little research, and by research, I mean I did a Google search and I read five responses. I mean in most people's book that quantifies as research. In the templates for out of office messages, okay that maybe that's helpful to you but they were very canned and very not personal, not emotional. They were boring. They were terrible. Informative, which maybe that's good enough, fine. But when the out of offices that I read say things like, I'm going to use hyperbole now, but it's meant to summarize the collective of some of these that I read. I'm off taking care of my mother who's in the hospital, but I'll be checking messages every hour and I'm sorry if my response is delayed. What? Okay, even if it is your own business and there's nobody to respond to your emails but you like, just take some time and take care of your mom okay? Or I'm on vacation from this date to this date, but I no not, but I will. I apologize. Okay, so you've gone on vacation. Hey, now you're apologizing for being on vacation, boo. And then you're saying, my responses may be delayed. Why the hell you responding on vacation? Waiting for a response. I know I'm going to aggravate some people today. I don't care. I'm okay with that. I want to frustrate you into change. And I do. When I get these big out of office responses when I put out my newsletter, now it has become one of my favorite things where I'm like, Ooh, what's in here today? What's in here today, y'all? It is indicative of a real problem that I have been talking about now for years, but now I'm getting louder and snarkier about it. And that is burnout. The two fundamental stages of burnout. The first two stages are prove yourself and work harder. And if the out of office email is indicative of how we're doing with burnout, we losing the game. Like we losing the band burnout game, we losing it hard. So I'm here today to say I love you. I want your life to represent joy and happiness, which also can be achieved if we need to use the word achieved for something that is our God-given gift but if you feel like you need to achieve it, oh my gosh, see, that's even a problem. My even just common language is rooted in this whole thing. So because I care about you and I want you to experience not achieve, I want you to experience joy and happiness and thriving and wellbeing and value relevance and impact of your work. I want you to feel the joy of being valuable at work. I want you to feel the joy of being at home and loving on your kids or your man or woman or whoever it is that you're loving on. I want you to be out in your garden. I want you to be where you are when you're there. That's it. So when you're at work, you're feeling like you're valuable and relevant. You're like, I'm here because I'm here to serve and I know who I am. I'm here to be not to prove yourself, just to be you. Be yourself. And when you at home or when you are on vacation or when you're at a conference, I want you to be there, be yourself, and be there and not be worried about you're not on email or you're not somewhere else. If there's anything that I appreciate most about the changes that I've made in the way I respond to email is I no longer twitch wondering if my inbox is filling up because I promise you, my inbox is full right now. I promise you that there's a message that you sent to me two months ago that you wished you would've responded to, and I probably buried it. Does that make me a bad human? Maybe in your eyes it does, but I also can promise you that my clients can message me and I'm pretty responsive, but not overly responsive. The depth of care and concern that I have with my clients is, dare I say unmatched. I care deeply. So me not getting to all my emails is not representative of my level of care for my work or my clients. It's a choice. I give the people that I'm working with other ways to communicate with me then I just don't choose email to be at the top of that list because I think it's inefficient. And like I said, it gives me PTSD. I want you to be. I just want you to be. Be where you are, be who you are, all those things. Let's do a little practice round. What if the next time you put an out of office on you stop and you say, " Okay, I don't rule or solve the world's problems. I'm valuable but I'm not delusional about my level of contribution to the world. Therefore I am going to leave a conversational out of office message. Something that sounds like something I would say to someone in person, personal, emotional, social." It might sound something like, I'm away at the ABC conference until Thursday, enjoying time with my clients and colleagues, learning about, don't make it too long. I don't need a soliloquy of where you're at, but just something that says, I'm a human. Here's where I am. Here's who I am. Here's why I'm excited about it. I'll be back on Friday. Don't promise me you're going... I know I said this is what to do, but I'm still in what not to do. Don't promise me you're going to get back to somebody by 9: 00 AM because you just got back to work. Nothing says prove yourself like I've been away for three days, but I'm going to get to all these emails in 57 minutes when I return. Just don't do it. Don't promise a response time. Why do you need to do that? I know everybody's job's different and I'll probably get some hate mail. I guess you're not doing it right unless somebody doesn't like you. So okay, I'm a fan of, here's who you can contact in my absence, but I'm not a fan of if this is an emergency, what the Sam Hale kind of corporate emergency you got? Emergency, maybe your idea of emergency and my idea of emergency is two different things. My idea of emergency is my kid has a bleeding head wound, like the CRM, I can't log in. That's not an emergency. The client's mad, sort of an emergency. I just think that we have taken the prove yourself, we are machines here to produce too far. Too far. That's my crazy voice. So just say something human. Let's not apologize for going away. Let's not overpromise and when you're getting back with somebody, give them somebody they can talk to if they do. I mean, I know there's those situations where if you need information to keep going with your next project, it's inconvenient when somebody's away. If I can talk to somebody else and keep my stuff clipping along, that's cool. That's good, I'm inaudible about that. But the reason we feel so burned out is because of the unrealistic expectations of response time that we have given to each other. We did this to each other, y'all. This is a symptom of proving ourselves. Whoever responds fastest to the email is the best. No, you're not. No you're not. If your company is giving away awards for the fastest email response time, I think we all need to sit down and have a talk because I think I can give you other things that are more valuable. Okay. I'm going to try to reel this in for a minute. So what I thought I would too was read you my favorite out of office email from today's Drink and a Snack not so newsletter, newsletter. You ready? It doesn't do any of the things that we said about who you can contact and all the things, but I don't think it needs to because it already tells a story. Here we go. It tells a story is a hint. Automatic reply from the May, 2023 Drink inaudible. Karma is a long weekend. I'm enchanted to have gotten your message, but my office is blank space until I return Monday morning. Oh, y'all, that's fun. Okay? If you're not a Taylor Swift fan, those are all Taylor Swift references. Karma, enchanted, blank space. So what I am getting out of this, that Julie Eckert is at a Taylor Swift concert, taking a long weekend, having a blast, and on Monday she might be tired from her antics, but wouldn't that be a much better conversation to say, oh my gosh, I got your out of office. How was it? Or okay, let's say you have no idea what that means. You don't speak Swifty. Then that would be enough to say to somebody, you're out of office was funny. What is that? Then you spark an amazing conversation with somebody because we're humans. We're not machines here to produce. That ladies and gentlemen of the business community is connection. Connection over control. Control is, I'm sorry, I'm away and I'm sorry my mom's dying, but I'll be back in 45 minutes to answer your email. That's control. And you know what? Here's the other thing I know to be true because I'm a coach that talks to enough people to summarize the patterns. The feeling that you need to do that, that control feeling. The majority of the time isn't about your boss or your company, it's your own twitchy uncertainty of proving yourself. So this isn't about getting a new boss or the expectations of your company. For some of you it might be, fine. Your boss might be a jerk, fine, but most of the time we do it to ourselves, which means, good news, you can stop doing it just like I did. Maybe not just like I did because everybody's circumstances are different, but let's just take a breath, take a space, a blank space baby, Taylor's Swift's and acknowledge that you're out of office is indicative of the level of control, aka a path to burnout that you might be on. Fair? Is that fair? Correlation? Consultant speak? But I also know that if you want to work on some of these control issues that you have, I would love to help you. I promise not to even be snarky and inaudible. Can't promise that. But what I would love for you to consider if you're a woman, is come into a 1000 Thriving Women. Gentlemen, message me. We'll do some one- on- one coaching. I got you. Spent the whole morning with some fine gentlemen that are running an amazing company. Don't just work with women, but 1000 Thriving Women, that's just for the ladies. And there you will find a safe, loving, wonderful community and we can help you with you creating the conditions for a life that you want, which means we're going to have to put down some of our control issues, but I'm going to help you replace them with connection and value and relevance and impact. It's not a place where we all just become slackers. That's not going to help the world, right? I want you to add value. I want you to feel good about your work, but I also don't want you checking your email from the beach or the hospital or the conference even. There's better ways. There's better ways. So come on in. This month we have the topic is fear, uncertainty, and imposter syndrome. So if you are fearful of changing your out of office message to something less controlling, that should be where we maybe start. If you're uncertain of how your boss or your company is going to respond to those changes, I can help with that. And imposter syndrome just means I feel like I need to prove myself, not just be myself because we're all a little disjointed from the way that work has played out over the last 123 years. So there's some patterns that can change. I wrote about that in the Drink and a Snack, which triggered this rant for today. That's it. All a rant because I care. Because I love you. Okay, love you inaudible. Bye.

Speaker 1: I'm not coming down. I never liked on the ground. I'm not coming down. I inaudible.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Thanks for listening to this episode. I would love it if you would go to Apple Podcast and leave a rating and a review, and then you can go to rebeccafleetwoodhession.com and join the Badass Women's Council. And if you really want to take a deeper dive, join the movement of 1000 Thriving Women. There's amazing thrive tools there for you today. Love you mean it.

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Hey

Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: y'all, fun fact. If you like the music for the podcast, that is actually my son, Cameron Hession, and I would love it if you would go to Spotify and iTunes and follow him and download some of his other music. My personal favorite is TV Land.