Secret Notes on Employees

[DisgruntledGirl]

It has recently come to my attention that my managers have secret documents on all of the employees listing every mistake they have made at work.
The document has the date/time, description of the mistake, and the person who 'reported it'.

As far as I am aware none of the employees know about these documents (I only happened to see it briefly on my manager's pc). And 'reported it' is in italics because we do not have an official reporting procedure, if something is not done right we occasionally just work around it, if it was a larger mistake, we may just mention it to the manager casually (just in case the clients noticed, at least the manager is aware) and other times when we gather, we may also casually tell the person "oh, by the way, you forgot to do this".

But apparently, there is a secret log of all of these mistakes, and we aren't even aware that we are kind of 'officially' reporting one another.

These notes are definitely unethical however are they wrong or illegal?
Surely they cannot fire/promote certain people based on secret disciplinary notes?
And surely we should be able to view our own documents?
The fact that we cannot, means that these notes are seen as definitive, and we do not get to dispute the 'facts' or share our point of view.

I do this all the time
I have a file on each of my employees that I use when doing their appraisal. I jot down concrete examples of the good stuff and the bad stuff so I have something concrete to talk about during it.. ie love how customer focused you are especially when you did A B and C. More of that it's a strength or Alternatively you seem to be struggling with task x as you made lots of mistakes doing the task this year.
Honestly don't know what you issue is with it

@Crazycrazylady if they submit a subject access request, you would need to share those notes with them. So be careful what you write

But OP isn't saying this is a file on each employee for appraisal use, it doesn't include positives, or even negatives other than mistakes.
These are not just notes, they are records, and need to be legally compliant. The confidentiality aspect is also an issue.
OP, I would be telling all the rest of the staff that these records exist, and flag up that every time they mention a mistake made by someone else, it is being recorded.
It is a really horrible way to use staff to inform on each other without realising they are doing so. It means that mistakes are in fact taken very seriously, and that staff need to be very clear if they are making any allegations against anyone else that notes being taken for evidential purposes.

Our manager has decided that he will sit next to me he has sat next to my colleague too to watch us work all day even sat while I ate my lunch. Apparently it's not because we have done anything wrong its to see if we are all working the same if one person is doing something in a better way as the boss above him wants 10 - 5 percent more work out of us as they did think we needed another member of staff as we so busy but have decided against this. Anyway I didn't realise he was writing notes as I was busy inputting customer details I glanced over and noticed that he had wrote that I fidget. I felt quite angry about this and not sure how it will be used.
Any ideas or thoughts or anyone experienced this before x

This would make me uncomfortable if I found out they made records on mistakes I’ve made without confronting me first.
I usually leave workplaces that do this. I would like to be made aware first and spoken to rather then doing it behind my back. To me it shows a lack of trust…..
Also kind of weird that many on this post saying their just “notes” and nothing to worry about. Why don’t you just p*ss off, the OP has every right to know what has been written about her and actually a good manager would address the issue before hand.
& OP nothing is preventing you on keeping a record on your manager too 😉😉