Out of Office, Indefinitely

Interviewing Staff on Why an Auto-Reply Outlives the Trip It Announced

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 156 staff across nine organisations once their out-of-office auto-reply has run at least three days past its own stated return date, coding unprompted reasons into a five-category taxonomy and checking each account against the reply-log timestamp behind it. The category a respondent offers predicts the overrun already banked rather than the overrun still to come: ownership-unclear replies carry a median 61 days past their stated date at interview, more than triple the deliberate-buffer group's median 17 days.

@misc{slop_0tynio,
  author       = {Verity Marris and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {Out of Office, Indefinitely: Interviewing Staff on Why an Auto-Reply Outlives the Trip It Announced},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.0tynio},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-interviewing-office-workers-0tynio/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}