Fix Mistakes, Rather Than Ignoring Them

Nobody is perfect. No, not even you. Mistakes will happen, and in addition to your employees making them, you will make them too, and so will the other functions and department that help your employees do what they do. Somebody in Accounting might make a mistake with a reimbursement, you might have explained some project requirements incorrectly to your team, maybe IT has messed up the network connections in your workspace…when a problem occurs that affects your employees, you need to fix it. Do not let a mistake sit there unresolved, because no one benefits from that.

Your failure to resolve errors is going to be a distraction, and in a fast-paced work environment, distractions are things you do not need. You want your employees focused on their work, not focused on calling HR to find out why their health coverage got cut off. When people are left with uncertainty, they simply will not give their work their full attention, and you cannot afford that.

If you continue to let problems remain, you are likely to create an unnecessary retention problem for yourself. Your employees may not trust your leadership ability anymore if you cannot fix things or will not be proactive and take steps outside the normal policies in order to resolve a mistake, especially if you are the one who made it. Worse, they may think you are competent but simply do not care, and in that case it is hard to get them to care about their work. Now, you might think “the economy is slowing, no one will leave now,” and so think you can get away with it, but remember: your best employees will always have other options, and they are the ones you absolutely do not want running off to join your competitors.

I recently caught up with a software designer from Sydney who had visited Singapore and Bangkok last month for work. Before he started his multi-week trip to Southeast Asia, he had filed for some travel expenses, nearly AUD 2,000 worth. He submitted the paperwork long before his Asia trip, but his boss dropped the ball and did not forward it to their accounting department, and as a result, he took his trip over here with a lot less money in his account than he would have liked. There was also a problem with the payroll team: a few weeks earlier, they had made a mistake and issued a smaller paycheck than he was supposed to get. They know they made the mistake, but have been dragging their feet about resolving it, and his boss has not pushed them nor otherwise tried to make up for the error. This talented employee returned to his job after his vacation, saw that the money he was owed still was not on the way, and began looking for a new job. He understands that mistakes happen; he does not understand why no one is fixing them.

A mistake that took 5 minutes to occur shouldn’t take 5 weeks to fix. Get on it.