What a goof ball I am

GLC

I've had a bad day today. I'm in an HR group with some other HR directors in my city. We often will ask questions and share info. with each other. Today, someone asked if anyone had prepared Total Compensation Statements for their staff and if they would be willing to share the info. I did one for our staff 2 years ago so I sent the spreadsheet to the group. Well, I was on my way to an appt so was rushing to get this document to the group. I deleted the name from Employee 1 on the first sheet, but I forgot that when the spreadsheet was set up in Excel, it had all EE names listed in the different sheets at the bottom, so yes, you guessed it, I sent all the EE salaries to this group, including mine. I feel so embarassed. The lady that originally asked for it sent me a reply back and called it "Urgent" and told me of my mistake. I immediately tried to "Recall" on the email. Unfortunately, some people had opened it before I could get to everyone. I assumed since I tried to recall it that they realized I figured out my mistake. Has anyone else ever done that or something similar? I asked a friend if I should send an email out telling them that I know I goofed or just hope they didn't realize the additional sheets at the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet. I trust that since they are all HR folks, they know to keep the info. confidential. I just don't know if I can face them again at our monthly HR luncheons.

ray a

I participate in a wage/benefit survey every year conducted by a local manufacturer. It is helpful because one of the participants is our customer and a couple others are competition for employees. Well, we all get together to review the results and have a nice lunch and of course when we all get the packet we turn immediately to the section on HR to see how we compare with each other. Of course there are never personal or company names on the spread sheets. But, this year the compiler did make a mistake and left on the company names on the benefit spread sheet. But, no big deal.

Toto

I am sorry to hear of your faux pas. It may not be much consolation that EVERYONE has done something embarrassing and when they are work related it bothers us even more. Happens when we are rushed and trying to do too many things. Remember, no one got hurt and it isn’t public except in your HR group.

Besides names, did the info have SSN or other protected info? One possible way to address it: Send an email to the recipients saying you requested the attachment back because the excel program co-mingled data from another excel spreadsheet and a lot of the data became skewed. However you want to phrase it so those that got the sheets are no longer sure the salary data & names match up. You could then provide new sheet, maybe deleting a couple of the employee pages & rearrange the info so it is not obvious the only change you made was to eliminate names.

Hope that helps & that you got some sleep last night as I noticed your post was around midnight. And just keep repeating, “I would much rather have done my minor goof than be going through what _____ (fill in the blank with whomever is facing public humiliation in the news this week) is facing.

Paul in Cannon Beach

I think we all have had our emberassing moments. Its God's way of keeping us humble, don't you think?

His other method is marriage.

ray a

Spelling errors can be embarassing, too. Another way to maintain humility.

Paul in Cannon Beach

Smart alick.

GLC

Good advice. I will do that.

neveradull

I would send out a corrected copy and ask the recipients to delete the first email. Be honest, admit your mistake and move on.