Ways to Help Employees Who Have Made a Big Work-Related Mistake
Your instinct when you’ve realized that an employee has committed a mistake is to be angry. It’s easy to make quick judgments and react based on the situation. However, you need to be long-sighted. Your goal is to correct these mistakes and ensure that they don’t happen again. If the employee has expressed remorse and decided to work with you to correct the mistake, you should be there to help. Here’s how.
Control your emotions
When you get clouded by negative emotions, you can’t solve the problem. It’s even more challenging when the mistake has affected other things. However, if you decide based on how you feel at the moment, it will only worsen the situation. Make sure you learn to control what to say and even the expressions in your face. The employee is already worried as it stands. You don’t want to amplify the negativity of the situation because of your reactions. You should be there as a helping hand and not as someone who will provide further judgments.
Don’t let go of the employee because of this reason
You might also think about letting the person go because of the mistake. When you’ve conducted an investigation and realized that it was intentional, your decision is justified. However, if it was clearly an accident, the next step is to correct the problem. Firing the person isn’t going to reverse the problem.
Deal with every single issue
Ask the employee to tell you what happened and what actions were taken. What went wrong? When did the employee realize a mistake has been committed? What happened after such a realization? You must go through each problem and things will get better.
Seek help from other employees
You’re working with a team. You can’t figure out the solution yourself. Other members might have ideas in dealing with the problem and it helps if you tap them to join the effort. Again, the intention is to correct the issue and not to make things worse. It’s also not about humiliating the employee who has done something wrong.
Determine the steps to prevent these problems
You can no longer take things back to where they were, but you can always prevent the same mistakes from happening again. Therefore, it pays to determine the next steps. You want to prevent these issues from ever happening again. The result of your analysis must be shared with other employees since they might also commit the same mistake.
Move on
Once the problem has been corrected, move on. Don’t keep dwelling on the past. You also can’t take it against that employee. Never mention it again to insult that person, or even as a joke. It’s a painful situation that no one wants to revisit.
The important thing is that everyone learned from what happened. Be glad that you have given your employees another opportunity to learn and grow.
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2nd image from https://www.themuse.com/advice/how-to-recover-from-a-huge-huge-mistake-at-work
