Made a mistake at work, meeting has been put in with my manager

[Anxioussss]

An error in a document was found during an external review where two number values were written the wrong way around. I have responsibility for doing the internal review before it goes out externally and I missed this error. I was comparing it to the source document and somehow missed that the writer had changed the order that the numbers were written, so that the labels were now the wrong way around.

The senior manager has put in a meeting with me and my manager for Monday to discuss it. I'm feeling really anxious and upset, and worried that I'm going to get fired or a written warning or something. I have a good eye for detail and do my best and I feel awful about this.

Does anyone have any advice? I've never had a meeting like this, and have only been in the job a few months. I had a similar job before but mistakes/errors weren't treated like this.

I'd suggest that numbers have to be written in words too. (Thirty two and twenty three are easier to spot than 23 and 32)

Well in that case your processes suck. There are sound reasons why businesses don’t do this. You put one person on the job, they make a human error, then you take them off the job or discipline them. It’s a rather incompetent way to manage a business.

Even the most safety critical software that has been scrutinised to the nth degree can have defects in it. If you’re in a job where you’re scared at getting fired for making one small mistake, I’d be looking for a new job!

Just apologise, but don’t beat yourself up about it. Booking in a meeting to discuss seems heavy handed and OTT.

Ignore them honey. I’ts this kind of person I deplore working with and for me.

I’ts a step by step process, you were the last man standing. A bit like the goalie in football. 9 men in front of him then he’s expected to perform like robot at the end.

companies that create a fuss like this, create a culture of blame and secrecy. People will hide mistakes, rather than ask for help.

go in, apologise stand your ground hold your head up,

I would immediately look for another job, rather than stay with a company that makes employees feel like this

Own it but also - is there no proof-reading process /sign off? It seems risky to just rely on one pair of eyes?! So maybe you could suggest that as a way to move forward.

The actual impact of your mistake was pretty low stakes, op. It's a really easy mistake to make, too.

To put things into perspective, in my early career I was responsible for uploading meeting papers onto a website (public sector). I inadvertently uploaded part 2 papers which contained the names of individuals subject to disciplinaries. A very keen eyed local journalist noticed and ran a story about it. I cannot tell you how I felt when I was called by the reporter and learned of my mistake. I immediately owned up and came up with a plan on fixing it, which included better processes for reducing the risk of someone else doing something similar in future. I personally apologised to the committee members, who largely replied to me in a very kind and understanding way, saying how refreshing it was for someone to take such personal responsibility for a human error (albeit a pretty bloody big one!) People judge you far more on your response to making a mistake (ownership, remedy) than they do for making the mistake in the first place. I wasn't sacked. I learned a lot from the experience.

Human errors happen, 2 inverted number on a page of text can be easy to miss so if that was the only mistake in the entire document comprised of many pages then it's hardly a warning level error, is it?

Just own it and apologise

lol at the typos in this comment 🤣

Then you'd be acting like a dick. I've been working as an editor for 30 years and accepted industry standard is one person catching 95% of errors.

If this is the first time this has happened, own it.
Say in x amount of years, this has happened once.
Since it can't be a case of adding up as it would have shown, be proactive, ask if someone higher up can also check the figures, but remind them this will mean thousands of man hours every year for a mistake that happened once.
Tell they you apologised and correct the date, and that while you missed it when you proof read , it is also the clients responsibility to proof read as well, which worked in this case.

This.
admit the error. No excuses
but then what you, or anyone else can do, to prevent mistakes form happening

you are human. Humans make mistakes and errors. It what we learn from those that makes us wiser. We’d take longer to get wiser if we never made mistakes frankly!

full accountability. Then take responsisibity for improving, and explain how.

if they go with the full blame and shame game. Don’t respond. But start looking for another job. Any company that bales and shames human error is not worth working for. Some managers can be pompous dicks that think their employees are robots. You are not a robot.

Are you looking to create an environment where mistakes are hidden form you, and no one owns up in time to rectify, no one whistle blows

jeez, don’t you read news about hospitals disasters where this was culture.

humans create errors. No matter who you put in the job. Even a computer system isn’t 100% reliable as it needs metadata and coding that can also have errors introduced by humans

the sooner you stop seeing random mistakes as a form of laziness or incompetence the better for you. They are mostly a sign of flaws in ways of working, training etc. yes, if you have an employee that, despite a review of systems and improvements, and despite training, makes mistake after mistake- then yep, PIP is right decisions. One off errors? We’ll just bloody make sure you turn on your robotic mode then, becuase one day you too will make a human error. In fact I’d lay a wager you often made human errors in your life. You might just have never been uncovered.

If the mistake comes at high cost to company or stuff like H&S then there needs to be 2nd person verification etc and a whole lot more…potentially including auto proof readers. We had those in industry I worked in, as some documents were in foreign language and were legal documents.

If a mistake comes at high cost to the company and you don’t put systems in place to counteract inevitable human error - that’s just poor procedure and bad management.

It's my job to run disciplinaries when things like this happen. In the right team culture, the point of this meeting is to figure out what went wrong and how you can prevent it in the future, it's not a bollocking or at least, shouldnt be. No one died or went bankrupt from your mistake, you'll be absolutely fine. How I would handle the meeting having sat on the other side many many times:

Own the mistake, admit it was human error.

Have a think about ways to prevent it happening again and bring some ideas to the meeting - more time allocated to QA, the implementation of a macro to error check maybe? Whatever will help in this specific set of circumstances, bring those ideas.

Don't try to over explain or blame external factors, YOU made a mistake and that is absolutely ok, especially if it cost no one anything!

Don't be silly, are you really comparing commenring on mumsnet to a place of work?

It actually reaffirms my point, sloppiness/ not caring leads to errors. The difference is I am mot paid to type replies on here and you are not one of my clients. Your point is not valid

Whenever I've produced documents in the past, we always have a couple of us who are involved at every step and running the creation. However, it's easy to become word/number blind when you see something so many times. To avoid missing errors, we have someone else who is completely separate from the project and we use them to do a final check over. We always pick some who is amazing at grammar or has good attention to detail and they always spot things we didn't.

If you only have a single person sign off process, then own the mistake and suggest this as a method for ensuring it doesn't happen. Hopefully they will be impressed that you've considered how to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Is there a reason why you are the one in a disciplinary instead of the people who made the mistake / the other checkers before you? I would expect items to be fact / error checked before going to the final checker (I build approval and audit systems).

Really OP please pay no heed to the naysayers. They are genuinely not representative of most employees, even safety critical ones

And how exactly does that approach work out for you?

Your upset is entirely irrelevant when determining what is actually possible to do.

The vast majority of people don't try to make mistakes. They try to do the right thing. But trying to do the right thing, doesn't mean they'll always succeed. They're human, and humans are inherently prone to making errors.

There's a fundamental concept in process development of 'respect humanity'. If you respect people's humanity, you build your processes accordingly, rather than your suggested approach of finding someone else to do the task thinking they're somehow less human, or thinking discipling someone makes them more capable of reducing their humanity.

The gold standard in processes is to have a 6sigma process - it's one where you have 3.4 defects per million opportunities to make a mistake. Take a look at how many of such processes are entirely human-based processes. Good luck to you with your suggested management of human error. I think you'll find neither of your approaches achieve anything other than make you look like an ass.

OP, As others have suggested, own your error. Suggest ways the process could be improved, but also go easy on yourself - a manual process will always be prone to mistakes.

Not caring to understand your employees, industry standards, or setting up a system that insulates your business from human error - what could be more sloppy than that?

Hope you read @SpringKitten post

Very comprehensive and sensible

Don't panic,

Jeez.

I'm glad I'm retired. I'd hate to work for someone like you.

I once made a very costly mistake for a major retailer. Entirely my fault in that I forgot to do something. However, I wasn't disciplined or moved or demoted. I was reprimanded justifiably and I never made that mistake again.

Own up, apologise and be clear about what processes you'll use to avoid a repeat. We're all only human.

It is understandable that you feel anxious but please try not to panic and don't be driven into a state by harsh or misleading commentary on here from people who prove the human element by making their own assumptions or being incompetent at typing, punctuation and sentence construction.

It's a normal human easy-to-understand one-off error in a long document. Nobody in their right mind would think any human can be perfect or immune from making the odd error, even though they might be embarrassed in front of a client or have a bit of a perfectionist tendency.

A meeting has been arranged to discuss it but from the information we have, it hasn't been notified as a disciplinary meeting. I would regard it as part of a normal management process to discuss such a thing. Don't rush into assuming the worst.

Acknowledge the natural human mistake as yours but place it in the context of your record of conscientious application to your work and high rate of accuracy which you wish to maintain and minimise the risk of such errors recurring.

Hope you are OK @Anxioussss I've made a mistake at work before and it's so horrible. Honestly you've not killed anyone. If your work are completely horrible about this it's a reflection on them not you. Life is too short for so much stress about a switch in numbers. They would get some AI to proof the document if the concern is that awful.