A few weeks ago I decided to run an experiment:
What if I could inspire creativity and connection through one of the most boring parts of working in the corporate world: Out of Office Messages?
After nearly 5 years in the technology industry (3 years at Microsoft and 2 at SAP.iO), I have seen hundreds of out of office messages. Most of them go like this…
A sample basic out of office message.
Sometimes you may even get a bit more complex one…
A sample out of office message that is a bit more complex.
Generally, when I think about an away message, most people have two main goals:
- Convey that they are away from work and that you should not expect a response from them for a certain amount of time
- Provide a list of contacts for who you should reach out to incase your request is urgent
While all of these OOF messages do a suitable job at these two goals, they share one thing: They are incredibly boring.
During quarantine, i’ve been searching for a way to inspire creativity in unique ways and thought I could reinvent the out-of-office message during my next time off.
I was inspired several years ago by a close friend’s out of office message and thought I would try my own. Check out mine:
Notice the “For fun:” part. This is where the experiment of bringing creativity with micro-interactions started.
When our team is in the office at 334 Brannan, we’re HUGE into community puzzles. We open a puzzle on a shared part of the kitchen counter and anyone who has a break can work to finished a few pieces. It is common to see 2–3 people hanging out in the kitchen working on one at almost any time during the day. Most of the time, we can finish a 1000-piece puzzle in a few days. Occasionally, they take long. And one time it took nearly a month, which completely stressed us out.
We LOVE puzzles.
Using this as inspiration, I added a link to a virtual puzzle that anyone could work on together from their home.
Before kicking this off, I set up a few things to ensure I could anonymously track progress along the way. First, I put the link to the puzzle behind a URL shortener allowing me track the number of clicks, the country clicks came from, and the time when people were clicking. Second, I setup a service to take a screenshot of the puzzle every hour throughout the day. This would help visualize how people were working on in over the two days. Finally, I pre-seeded the puzzle with a few pieces completed. My thought was that if a user opened the puzzle and nothing was completed, they would be less likely to start.
So what happened?
Over a Thursday and Friday, I received 43 true emails. I count true emails as emails where I was included in either To: or CC:, removing large blast emails like newsletters (i.e. all-hands announcement) and reminder emails (i.e. remember to approve a purchase order). Of those 43 true emails, 14 people clicked on the link — 12 from the US and 2 from India. Interestingly, this click through percentage is nearly 10x higher than the average clickthrough rate according to MailChimp’s benchmark.
Now the major question — did people actually work on the puzzle?
The first screenshot comes from Thursday April 16th at 2AM which is when I turned on my out of office message. Remember, the pieces already completed and moved around are the ones that I pre-seeded to encourage collaboration.
A screenshot of the puzzle on Thursday April 16th at 2AM.
After 24 hours, we can see a few changes from the screenshot at 2AM on April 17th…
A screenshot of the puzzle on Friday April 17th at 2AM.
After another 24 hours, surprisingly there were no further edits. This was surprising as I hypothesized people would be more likely to take a break during the day on Friday or as a wind-down for the week on Friday afternoon but this did not happen.
A screenshot of the puzzle on Saturday April 18th at 2AM.
Interestingly, in the early hours of Saturday (PST), someone came in and worked on the puzzle a bit. While not making much progress, it was clear they organized quite a bit of the pieces.
A screenshot of the puzzle on Saturday April 18th at 9AM.
Finally, the puzzle was completed between 3 and 4AM PST on Monday April 20th . It is very likely this was finished by someone on our team in Bangalore India, which is 12.5 hours ahead of San Francisco time.
A screenshot of the puzzle on Monday April 20th at 4AM.
So, after all of this, it ended up getting finished, woohoo!
This experiment highlighted a few important things during our COVID lives…
- Inspiring moments of connection is much harder while remote — While in the office, most of the people who swing by the kitchen to grab a drink, stop and work on the puzzle for a bit. At the least, they stop and say hi to those who are working on it. While remote, only about 1/3 of the people clicked on the link. Certainly working on a remote puzzle is a less personal moment than connecting with someone in the kitchen but it just means we need to work even harder to create those spontaneous moments of connection.
- _Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes _— In total, an out-of-office message is a tiny way to inspire creativity. I did not spend hours preparing for this. I just looked for a micro-interaction that I could use as a way to put a smile on someone’s face during the day. These small interactions have a multiplier effect throughout the day and can radically improve someone’s week.
- Building things matters — Even though this was a small experiment, trying new things is something I love. The excitement of getting it all set up, checking on the puzzle sporadically, and trying to dissect what happened throughout the few days was so exciting. Personally, it is a great reminder that I need to constantly be building and experimenting to stay energized with my work.
I have a few ideas for other ways I can inspire creativity and connection remotely and cannot wait to try them out! I hope you’ll experiment with creative out-of-office messages as well. There is no better time than now!