I recently e-mailed a supplier and waited a week before I got a response - only to find out they had been on holiday all week. As it’s our office policy to switch on the ‘out of office assistance tool’ in Microsoft Outlook when we are out of the office I was surprised that this was not the norm for all companies. To me, the tool is an obvious help when I’m not around - whether be it an afternoon workshop or four week trek in Patagonia (I wish!).

Of course, the idea is that things will continue to happen when I’m not around, so the assistant lets people know that I can’t help right now and usually directs the e-mailer towards someone who can. You don’t even have to spam your audience with Out of Office Assistant emails as you can set that people only receive the notification once.

This used to be enough to know you could come back to work without any major crisis looming but there is a growing problem with this assumption. I recently came back from a 4-week holiday and on my return had to take a few hours to run through the masses of emails, but because everyone knew I was returning on a certain date they all wanted responses ASAP with little acknowledgement that I needed to catch-up and hadn’t read the emails while I was away.

Perhaps this is just a sign of the times. With the advent of blackberry’s (AKA Crack-berry’s) and email via mobile it’s rare that anyone is ever considered truly un-contactable. So even being on holiday in a remote location doesn’t seem to matter anymore (in fact, the clearest mobile phone reception I’ve had in a long time was in Machu Pichu!), and everyone seems to know it. So whilst it wouldn’t have been thought-of just a few years ago, when holidays were a time to switch off from work, it’s now becoming increasingly difficult to be allowed to do so. So with the advent of mobile technology it seems the out-of-office tool is becoming redundant as being ‘out of the office’ no longer means you can’t work!