To be worried mistakes at work will cost my job?

[Kendra43]

I'll start by asking I'm burned out and going on holiday for a week this weekend.

I started a new job 4 months ago. Everything was going well and I had a great end of probationary meeting where the boss said she was 'very happy' with my work. I moved jobs because I wanted a better salary and new challenges.

Last week I made a couple of small mistakes, a typo in one email and scheduled a meeting at the wrong time in another. My first errors. She brought these up in our 1 to 1 this week, asking if I'm ok and saying we need to work on improving it after my holiday.

Today I sent an email to an important client and forget to attach something. I caught it in time/sent the file quickly and when I looked at Teams she had already messaged telling me I hadn't attached the document. I told her I had already rectified it and she said 'I messaged you telling you before you rectified it'.

I get the feeling she is very annoyed with me and I'm upset about being pulled up over small mistakes and for making them. AIBU?

If you use Outlook, you can set a rule that there is a time delay on any sent messages being sent. I do that with all my messages to give myself time to realise I forgot an attachment or recipient or need to correct something.

They’re being trivial. However when I was in the midst of burnout/menopause/feeling under downwards pressure in my last job, putting a delay on my emails has 1. Been a bit irritating to get used to 2. Been an absolute godsend.

I reported myself after making a minor data breach late at night due to all the above issues. I cried a lot about it at the time and a sympathetic ear recommended sticking a delay on emails. I set it originally to 2 mins, but now at 1 min and I can catch and amend stuff in my outbox if needs x

It's in Rules - actions for items in outbox

It would take ages to warm up another pigeon 😂😂 I had a good belly laugh at that. Thanks yeaitsmeagain.

Totally agree with this.

I don't understand why you wouldn't stop before sending, take a deep breath and just spend 10 seconds checking you'd done everything/attached everything/not missed anything stupid. In a new role you should be making sure basic mistakes don't happen, and then you can drop your standards in line with what is acceptable in the company culture. Right now you just look like you're flailing around and can't cope, but it would have been such an easy fix to just check your work before hitting send, and then you wouldn't feel so stressed and unsure of yourself!

Good lord! I'm not surprised you're stressed given such micro-management. Doesn't sound a healthy work environment. We're all human. Human error is commonplace.

I do this. Because inevtiably after pressing send you realise. 100% recommend.

Your boss sounds nightmarish though. The thing is you kind of have to make these little mistakes to learn from them.

Someone doing it constantly is quite different to OP who has made only 3 mistakes.

The typo - hard to know if it's a big deal. Most are obvious and not worth mentioning. Doing it on say a certificate - much bigger problem, but even then. If a typo is going to be a big problem, there should be checks in place. I work in publishing. Someone else checks things before the final button is pressed.

Meeting time - again, it depends. Internally where hopefully someone would pick it up and query it, or something you spotted and fixed...not a big deal.

Attachments - most email clients will say "did you mean to send an attachment" it's in mentioned in the body of the text but not attached ie. it's something we all do. Haven't we all groaned 1 second after hitting send and then sent the attachment straight away with a little "ooops"?

OP if you're giving us the whole story, red flags that you've got a very poor manager with micromanagement tendencies. Keep on your guard.

This in spades.

How soon after you passed probation did this happen? It’s possible she’s concerned that you ‘gave it your all’ in order to pass probation but is now concerned that you’re now relaxing and not putting the same level of attention to detail in? She may be concerned that this is how you’ll operate going forward, not as you were in the first 3 months. Typo in an email would depend on what it was and who it was going to. In an internal email to a peer group I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it, but to a group of very senior stakeholders or external clients I would have as these things can matter. Similarly with the calendar meeting. 3 items in a week from someone who had been exemplary before I’d be checking in to see if there was something either inside or outside work which was having an impact (including whether there was an issue with the volume of work which was expected). I think it’s less the individual mistakes and more 3 in a week from someone who hadn’t been making mistakes previously.

take the week off, have a good break and come back refreshed. Hopefully you’ll find out it was genuine concern for your welfare and not micro management

Christ how incredibly anal - if the only thing that's gone wrong that day is that someone's made typo and forgotten an attachment I'd call that pretty ace day 😂

You need to document all of this. Start keeping a diary of every incident with screenshots and times and dates. It could end up saving your job down the line like it did me.

My manager started doing exactly the same thing to me, and i thought nothing of it at the time. She then started draft emails for meetings for me to send then change her mind about something after I sent them and make me send an amendment, making me look totally incompetent. She would then interrupt in said meetings within two minutes after asking me to lead, trying to make it look like I didn't know what I was doing. Then she started going into documents I was editing to watch what I was doing, then escalated it to editing over what I was writing in it before finally telling people she'd had to come in on her annual leave to "correct week and weeks worth of work".

She then went on leave, but logged in on the first day to interfere with my work and the relationship I was building with my new boss, who swiftly told her to bugger off once i'd brought it up. She had also tried to throw me under the bus with said boss, so when it came to discussing the terrible performance review my prev manager left me I was able to show new boss all the evidence i'd kept of the underhanded sabotaging she had pulled in the weeks prior - who swiftly struck off the shit performance review because it was all bullshit.

I would say though, escalate it sooner than I did. If it is happening every day then a couple of weeks worth of evidence should be enough for you to go above her head to discuss it.

Hold on..are YOU the manager?

I think it just sounds like you really need a holiday and a good rest, because you caught covid when you were supposed to be on your last break. Don’t take your mistakes to heart, relax and rest on holiday. Covid can stay in your system for up to 90 days. If you still don’t feel quite right when you get back from your holiday then speak to your GP 💐

If it’s intense… 😂😂

I once had a boss who always felt relieved once he found the typo in a finished document because he knew there would be one there - because there always is - and he'd rather know what it was than live in ignorance.

I'm very prone to making mistakes, especially at the moment with my perimenopausal brain fog. My manager has commented on it. What I do now is ensure I work slowly. Never rush your work, even if you're busy. Don't slowly and carefully. I then double and triple check everything!

Rather depends on the business your important client was in. If they used your company to provide a form of detailed, precise work, then a mistake such as not attaching something is not a good impression.
Indeed, any work for an external client should be as perfect as possible, to the extent you get a colleague to check as well as using spell-check.
Internal emails, perhaps not such a big thing...

Hopefully you'll feel better after a holiday.

A typo isn't serious, the wrong meeting time is potentially time-wasting, the email attachment you put right, so really it's just one (fairly significant) mistake.

Just tell her you'll be doubling down on re-checking and getting it right from now on (and try to keep a hopeful, optimistic look on your face).

Good luck!

Wow! We’ve all made those mistake at my company. Our old CEO made those mistakes all the time and no one cared. In fact we they were more funny than anything else. Some of the typos were hilarious! Sounds like she’s a nightmare manager.

Agree they are a possible micromanager which is stressful and bad for the self esteem

Try not to worry - stress makes it more likely you will make mistakes.

Did you make the error I often do of addressing the Acocunts dept? You can set spell check to check for common mistakes you make. I always spell the teh and mine corrects it for me. Also Gmail says I think you meant to attach something if you use the words pls see below or see attached, which I'd set up if you can.

😂😂

Pretty petty to bring up a typo in a 1 to 1 (unless you were supposed to write duck and misspelled it).
Fair to discuss the meeting mistake. But the missing attachment, I don't see anything wrong with her telling you you missed it, so that you can rectify it in case you hadn't realised - just a cross post.