RIP OOO, Hello PTO: Your email autoresponder is going silent, one message at a time

Now that Labor Day has passed, marking the unofficial end of summer, the tones of our inboxes are changing like leaves on a tree. Summer Fridays are behind us, and human responses to messages will once again trump automated responses when we’re out of the office.

While we blinked through our auto-reply hangovers, a common theme emerged from those messages: telling the world that you “OOO” left the building. Now you’re more likely to hear that someone is “on PTO.” And no, it wasn’t your HR rep emailing you—it was your coworker. What’s in the employee handbook here?

People are talking about emotions more at work from 2020 to 2022 or so. A widespread mental health crisis has crept in, riding on the coattails of the pandemic to create a disastrous marriage that some studies have found has fueled Humanitarian awareness, comradeship and cooperation are enhanced. It’s not uncommon to see auto-reply emails or Slack statuses warning of slow responses due to mental health days or childcare responsibilities.

Now, however, a strange new trend is emerging in internal messaging and on social media: The need to know when a coworker isn’t working, or, as you might see spelled out in that auto-reply, is “on leave.” More and more, employees aren’t specifying whether they’re sick, on vacation, getting married, or on parental leave; they’re just… not there. They’re not even out of the office—with so many employees working in hybrid or remote capacities, “the office” is less a place and more a state of being, so how can you really be “off” it? Simply saying someone is on paid leave and leaving it at that has become more common among those I polled.

Why has the pendulum swung from the terminology of therapy—radical transparency, discussion of personal feelings and circumstances, a window into a person’s personal life—to HR talk about telling a coworker you’re “on leave”? The pandemic may have helped highlight the humanity in the workplace, but the natural next step is for those people to become more aware of importance of that humanity and value their lives outside the workplace. Gallup Poll 2022 found that at least half of US workers do not feel actively engaged at work, with another 18% saying they are “not actively engaged.” In the first quarter of 2024, the rate of “actively engaged” Workers’ morale, also surveyed by Gallup, hit an 11-year low. 30% and barely gained traction in Q2.

Across social media, a whole host of death humor has emerged related to the term: One TikToker joked that before you can take PTOYou have to understand that it really means “preparing for others.” Another person cheerfully noted that a colleague had updated his PTO schedule with the sentence “I don’t want to work today, okay?” Another sentence blame yourself for quitting your job “for no particular reason other than having to burn some of the PTO time I had saved up.”

Alison Green, author of popular Consulting Blog Ask the Manager and one book of the same nametell Vanity Fair via email that there’s a fine line between highlighting life outside of work and letting email do its job by telling the sender to wait for a reply without fanfare.

“I have mixed feelings about people being more human in their absence messages in general,” she says. “On the one hand, yes, we’re human and it’s good to acknowledge that in the workplace, but I also don’t want people to feel like they have to justify their absence. You don’t have to tell people you’re at a wedding or closing on your house or have the flu to justify not showing up! Just explaining that you’re absent is enough… and to the extent that ‘on PTO’ is a more vague way to do it, then maybe that’s a good thing, at least in that light.”