TL;DR: what is the best way to smooth things over after you make an unintentional mistake at work and how do you prevent dropping balls in the future?
On Monday my manager asked me via email to submit a letter to compliance. I received it, I said I would but it slipped my mind. Work has been absolutely bonkers lately (we are all spread too thin). Plus I have been doing a lot of traveling this month which means more work on my non-vacay days.
This is the 2nd or 3rd time this has happened. A few weeks ago I missed an email that came in on a Sunday to pay a sponsorship, I don’t even remember seeing the email, when the requestor reached out I took care of it right away.
At that point I instituted a daily checklist that includes reviewing all my emails. Since dropping this most recent ball on Monday I added another checkbox on my to-do list. I have no explanation for how I missed it other than I had 16 hours worth of work (according to our project management system) on my plate for that day. (We are currently hiring for another position in our department.)
I think there was one other email I missed at some point prior to the two I mentioned as well.
I work really well in our project management system that is like a fancy to-do list and allows you to mark tasks as completed. When things come in through email I need to add them to my to-do list and it seems that is an easy place for me to drop a ball.
That being said, I already apologized for dropping the ball and owned 100% responsibility for it being my fault. I have a feeling I will get a talking-to tomorrow. I *hope* that’s all it is. I plan to tell her I added the additional email review to my checklist. What else can I say to smooth it over? Also, what else can I do to ensure I don’t drop any more balls at work?
What is the best way to recover from dropping a ball at work?
Do you have your email set up to put things in folders when they arrive? If not try setting up rules that emails from your boss, or any management go to a specific folder. Treat that one more carefully than the main inbox.
I have close to 2 dozen boxes that my email is sorted into, many of them are just short of spam. I don't need to know when every build is made but I may need to sort through them to figure out when a specific change went into affect.
If there is a group that you work with most closely they get a box as well. Engineers updates go to their own box since I work more closely with them than any other part of development.
Foes your project management tool send emails when changes are made to tasks etc? Yep, I have a Jira inbox. Less scrutiny than management or engineers and I can usually tell if it's important by the header or reporter.
Important boxes are favorited so they are right at the top.
Flag emails that are important but you aren't doing right now.
You can drag an email to the calendar, in outlook . It will open a new meeting with the info for that email. Sometimes it's smart enough to grab dates and times, but those are easy to change if necessary. Now you have a reminder for a task you were going to put off. You can even color code them so that when you open your calendar you know, at a glance, what type of reminder you have set up.
Finally, when you talk to your boss, point out that you are currently backlogged and will likely remain so until they add someone and that you are trying different techniques to keep organized and that you are trying to plug up any holes where information slips through the cracks.
Ask her if she has opinions on what kinds of things should take priority over others. And remember, if everything is top priority, nothing is. There has to be a hierarchy.
Let her know what you have done, what you plan to add to that, and if she has any other recommendations.
First of all, don't beat yourself down and certainly never let a company beat you down. Nobody is one hundred percent perfect all the time, even under the best of circumstances. Your team/company is extremely busy, you work massively overtime, communication coming in on a Sunday? Things will be overlooked or delayed, mistakes be made, that's totally a given. Where mistakes are obvious and asked about, just acknowledge them, curtly and in a neutral tone. Where mistakes are unnoticed, just correct them quietly, no need to create attention. Your to-do checklist is a good idea, although I assume there will always be the odd task/question outside of that. :-)
(In my opinion, your mistakes are completely harmless, non-publicly I could tell you stories where mistakes led to huge expenses or additional work. And the responsible persons are still there.)
I stopped caring honestly. I worked my ass off 3 years at this job to continue being mistreated in terms of shitty work schedules with breaks and vacation that we can't even choose as well as forced mandatory overtime almost daily. Yea we got a $2 raise but thats still crap. Its the highest pay in my state but thats because im working an out of state federal job. My cousin is moving to a diff state and she's gonna be working at a bank only 30 hours a week compared to my 50-60 hours a week and she's already gonna make $4 more an hour than me. So yea im ready to move states, i just want this covid shit over and done with. Also at my job, If you accept their benefits or insurance, you loose like $5 an hour so instead i pay for insurance outside of work. Its just a bunch of crap. So i dont care my about this job anymore. I've been pretty careless this last week or two. I dont wanna get fired but only because i rather quit come next year.
I truly do love my job and my manager and they pay me well. The extra work is just temporary till we hire someone else. I don’t like screwing up and I don’t like getting slapped on the wrist.
I get paid well too for my state. But i dont get paid well enough for mandatory overtime daily and not being able to schedule our own breaks/vacations. Plus they can take away your offday whenever they feel like it because theyre the government. Fck that. And our supervisors and managers are nice but theyre not helpful in terms of fixing this screwed up system that they really dont control anyways. Our extra work was mandatory even before covid hit. Our job makes us train new people and then they fire those people after 3 months. They clearly dont want to pay more people than they have to. And if we screw up something, we get 3 chances before a writeup. You can get 2 writeups before termination. Its dumb because if you’re 1 minute late from all your breaks, thats 3 incidents which equal 1 writeup. So you can easily get terminated here quickly. Im usually a good one but after the stress rhis month, i said fck it and skipped work yesterday
Yea i truly do. And i dont think i’ll ever love a job even if i can tolerate it. But i hope your boss gives you another chance and understands that you accept responsibility and will improve
we are all human and make mistakes, you did the right thing. and i started making myself post it notes i work as a caregiver with 15 patients 4am i start sometimes till pm then go back a few ore hours after that, its just is exhausting espc with covid and other things going on and i have forgotten a thing or 2 before , you took responsibility not much more you can do. post it notes might help.
Sounds like you've already improved your personal processes (CPI=continuous process improvement) to reduce the probability of this happening in the future. Don't worry though, we all make mistakes, and a good boss (and colleagues) will not overly criticize you for it; sure, they may kid you.
I've made some significant mistakes in my work as an engineer. One time, I completely shut down a rail transit system in a large European city (I won't name which one) for 30 minutes during morning rush hour because I incorrectly used a piece of test equipment that caused the centralized computer system to fail and restart. For safety reasons, all trains stop in that situation, and radio communications are required to get them going again. Our CPI was to a) not do any testing during rush hour (to minimize impact if we did screw up); b) require two qualified people for all tests (two sets of eyes are better than one).
Someone told me once... "If you're not making mistakes (sometimes), you're not doing anything worthwhile."
I have a triple check-list (because of my OCD tendencies) one is digital and I have it at my laptop, the second is hand-written on a notebook at my desk, and the third is a board on the wall because I like chalk... and I constantly check such lists, every 30 minutes or every hour... the bigger the workload the more I will check the lists
If you are missing tasks this often, is probably because of distraction... either check something by mistake, or mix the tasks and then you're not able to tell... if you use two different lists (digital and hand-written) it will be a lot less likely to make the same mistake twice, and it will also make you review your tasks more often and through the day
yes, in a similar way... sometimes our hands (manually) type passwords just by memory, we don't even think of it... our hands and fingers just remember it "automatically"
You could try showing up 5 minutes earlier than usual and leaving a little later and maybe buying donuts for the group and to remember things in the future, forgive yourself and don’t but yourself up over your past mistake but just resolve to do better next time because I think that sometimes the embarrassment of making a mistake makes you more prone to error because your too busy punishing yourself to notice current or future events. Look at yourself in the mirror at home and say “I forgive you.” Over and over and than tell yourself “I will do better because I’m capable of it.” If your nervous, try breathing techniques and if somebody tells you to do something and you don’t have time to write it down, draw a tally mark on a sheet of paper and when you look at the tally, you will remember you were told to do something.
Unless you can blame it on somebody else which it does not seem to be the case, you have done the right thing. You took responsibility and you have taken steps to correct the situation so t does not happen again. In the future you need some kind of feedback loop that will keep you from letting important e-mails slip through the cracks. If you make it too difficult to implement, you will not use it. Maybe make a "Priority" e-mail folder and put all these e-mails in that folder. You have to make sure that you do not quit for the day until that folder is empty.
Set your schedule better. Only read emails two or three times a day and don't multitask them. Email is also the time to set your to do list. What it sounds like to me is that you get an email, you look at it but your busy doing something else so it gets marked read but no action item is created.
Instead work on your to do list and SCHEDULE time for emails. The more busy you get the more organized you have to be. Think a half hour in the morning, another half hour after lunch and a last one an hour and a half before you go home. Use that last hour to handle things that have to be done today and simply do not look at your email any other time.
Of course I get it. Its natural you get the notification and you click but your busy. Just turn off email notifications instead. If its vital your boss will text or Skype you.
I will say, if your personality on GaG is like how you are in real life, they will cut you some slack for making an unintentional mistake. But, in this case, you did right by owning up to the mistakes. It may take a while to move past this but something I’ve noticed from time to time is that managers and sometimes their managers will start taking a closer look at your work and will notice all you do when they might not have noticed before. If you start improving while they’re watching, that will help improve your value.
It is. I am genuine me everywhere. She has already cut me slack. She is a really great manager. I just fear since this isn’t the first time she may not have as much slack to cut me.
Yeah, I was in a similar situation where I was getting incorrect information. I had no problem getting the reports on time but they were just sloppy. I had to build in checks for them and actually they only took several months to perfect but it took nearly two years to get them to stop checking over my work but it was worth it.
It's really difficult in my job to seriously drop the ball as we are a regulated industry, so we have a work flow system that were constantly updating, it's really hard to forget tasks. The only place we can really make mistakes is maybe in the lab with misidentified observations, but we normally have a colleague takke a look to back up what we've observed. There are some other situations where maybe it might be more serious but I can't really explain that. In previous jobs I always tended to keep a pad with me and keep a list of tasks and write new ones straight away. Sorry this hasn't been much help really lol
Own up to it of course. Look for a way to repair it fix things with the compliance department. I also keep reminders in my outlook, so I do not forget. It is what really helps me. I usually work 12 hour days or more and work with many other supervisors that should be my equals, but I am over them. The reminders are what saves me right now. I sometimes add them to my cell, so I have extra
I think you have already done what you can do… apologize, accept responsibility, institute a plan, share that plan with management, and make sure you follow through, but if it happens again… cover it up, and lie your ass off!
I'd apologize and explain you've implemented a new system to ensure it doesn't happen again. If you use Outlook, flag all emails that require attention, change them to unread, and add a reminder as soon as emails arrive. Categories in Outlook can also be helpful to track progress. You many also benefit from a free To Do program like "Microsoft To Do" that integrates with Outlook and can also be accessed from an app on a smartphone, or a desktop app on Windows or Mac. It can also be shared.
You’ve done everything you can. You said this was an unusual month with traveling. You owned the mistakes. Made steps to prevent it happening again. You always seem like a pleasant person to me, and sound like a hard worker. That’s a tough combination to replace. I’m betting you’ll be fine.
I always apologize for making miatakes, basically go tell my boss right away, if I need help fixing it I'll ask or. If I've already sorted it I will tell him. Things happen people make mistakes.
It's good that you owned up to your mistake with your manager. Keeping adding all the tasks you have to get done to your checklist. If you have an iPhone you could add the tasks you have to get done in the reminders app and set deadlines for when to get them done. That's what I do with some of my assignments. I put down what I have to get done and I set a reminder alarm about them before the due date
Implementing a checklist was a great idea. For me personally, printing the emails as I got them would help me keep them TOMA (Top Of Mind Awareness) and throw them out after addressing the email. I like the checklist best!
You’re only human, honestly I’d be calling her in for a meeting before she called me in, beat her to it, apologies but then also say we really need to address the i staffing issues as I hate making mistakes but it’s very difficult to do the job to the standard I expect from myself under these conditions… what do you plan to do to fix it?
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Anonymous
(18-24)
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I don’t know how you have so many f’s to give to be honest. Anyway. You tell your boss that ”yeah, I made that mistake, like all humans do, but maybe if you could hurry up and hire another person so I don’t have to work 200% (16 hours/day) I wouldn’t make mistakes as often anymore”.
Nope, not your fault. If your boss is having you work 200% she can expect the quality of the job you do to be affected. This is on her.
This is besides the point but you’re gonna waste your life and become depressed and burned out if you keep your mind set no matter how much you may think you like it. When it happens in x amount of years from now, remember you were told and warned. And all for nothing, your boss and company don’t give any f’s about you, all they care about is you making them as much profit as possible and if that stops being the case they won’t hesitate to kick you out and replace you the same day no matter how much of a good girl you’ve been. Good luck.
We all do mistakes and miss out things.. Human error is inevitable
The good part is your accepting your fault... I think you can just tell her how badly you were occupied and that's why you missed it, while accepting your fault and not sounding to be justifying it
Tell her you'll be more careful next time... I am sure things are already smoothened
I guess once you have read an email if you aren't going to deal with the contents immediately then you should mark it as unread so that when you next check your email you have to read it again.
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