You can -and often should convey emotion in your official public statements. |. Policy change that is a big deal to staff that works on it, but very in the weeds for the general public (regulation is going to be changed in a way that is technically important but at most a medium-sized deal), Fairly real examples that would be much bigger deals: Thats also real life. Heck, at my agency were cautioned to not use work email on our personal devices (unless were management or its an emergency) because records requests could potentially get our personal devices as well. Im sorry, but I think you were fired with pretty good cause and it would be important to own that or you wont be able to spin the story for future employers. I agree that you can learn how to share without breaching confidentiality. That said, if this was going to be public anyways, your boss may have been inclined to write you up rather than fire you if you were sufficiently remorseful/petrified/mortified. If any of those connections were being intercepted by an unknown third party, however, you've just put your customer's data into their hands. And it could be part of the reason why the story was a bit incoherent, too she went from sort of uncomfortable to really, really uncomfortable. My guess is thats where some of the defensiveness in the initial letter comes from that no one would have known if not for the self-report. That means that you definitely shouldnt get into anything about anyone ratting you out; that would make it sound like you dont think it really should have mattered. She did her job. I was wondering the same thing. I feel your pain. This is so true. Besides the stuff that has already been discussed upthread like potential for insider trading, unfair advantage in things like competing for federal contracts or grants, or derailing a communications strategy, one of the biggest reasons to keep work information private is due to counterintelligence concerns. You knew better. If she had been doing something perfectly acceptable, seen by someone who misunderstands the situation, and fired because of that, then she would be an innocent victim of a very unfair employer. You want to minimize this, and thats natural. You shouldnt be upset at your coworker, if anything she should be upset with you for putting her in that situation. Good Lord, no. Wouldn't employers just throw my application to the bin once I declare I have been dismissed for gross misconduct? Thats the real clincher here for me) and on a personal level with management your position is one of trust and you violated the basis of your work. I would not immediately snap into how can I report this? Oh my. Where I work, there are policies that state an employee that finds out about certain kinds of misconduct is mandated to report it or face consequences if it comes out that they knew and didnt report it. But Im a journalist whos covered federal agencies, so I know super exciting to agency employees does not necessarily equal huge news for everyone else. Additionally, J. K. Rowling won a lawsuit against the lawyer and the firm. Libel or slander or posting comments about individuals that are not related to your work environment are not protected. Like X candidate is running for president!. How you analyze the situation and internalize the lesson is more important than wording for future employers right now. I was sent home, and then fired over the phone a few hours later. It was a couple of telling E-mails that helped bring down Bear Stearns with the subprime loan mess crashing . Youve got some great feedback from Alison and I hope it all works out for you. In my job I often get embargoed advance copies of speeches that politicians are going to give they send them out to press to help us start working on getting most of a story written and cleared so we can just drop in a few quotes and crowd reactions and publish the story within 5-10 minutes of the speech ending. and that person did what they were told to do and reported it. That mindset is just so messed up. I dont feel like we need that caveat though, there of course will be exceptions, but this is kinda derailing. Yes, or that appalling line by E M Forster, written just before the Second World War: if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. You really think a lawyer would publicly (extremely publicly) admit to doing something he hadnt done, for which he was sanctioned and fined by regulators, and permanently ruin his own reputation in the process? you get to a point where you just really really need to share. Yeah, I agree. Understand the true risk of accidentally hitting send to the wrong person. Choose your time limit (you can only choose from between 5, 10, 20, and 30 seconds) Hit save changes at the bottom of the page. You can bet Id be gone with no second chance despite my almost-20-years and ton of good work. Compare someone in law enforcement happening to find out the (secret) address and phone number of their friend-groups favorite celebrity, or finding the contact information for the cutie in the convertible, after their roommate catches the license plate numberand sharing. Resist the temptation to gossip about fellow employees and don't express your disdain for your. There wasnt any risk, my judgment was good!. You will find another employer who will trust you and will give you that chance to shine for them. The fact that her co-worker actually followed the rules of her employer does NOT make her a rat. This is NOT a myob type situation at all. Yes, when I worked at a financial firm I believe that exact question was on a privacy training test: If I run across the name of a celebrity in the client management system while performing my duties, its okay to tell friends and family about it, True or False?. Finally I decided to own it at the next interview and I got the job. Some projects you could talk about with a trusted friend as long as you didnt get specific, but shouldnt announce on twitter. She probably felt she had a duty to disclose it and she may well have. They may. When I asked about the job move he said he had failed to make a required disclosure on a sale and so was fired, but how he took it to heart and had behaved since. Breach of confidentiality can be described as an act of gross misconduct, so deal with issues that arise in a timely manner, in line with your procedures and look at any previous cases to ensure fairness and consistency. Giving her information relevant to her beat and asking her not to share it is basically asking her to stand on the sidelines and fail to do her job, while somebody else gets the scoop. I work for a charity that offers a telephone service nationwide, and I take a lot of calls from people in quite distressing situations. My company is not going to jeopardize a $500M/yr contract over my mouth. My father worked on defense contracts for a large portion of his professional career. But sending e-mails about a seemingly innocuous hobby cost one . I disagree. And it makes sense that it is. Although paragraph (b) (2) does not require the lawyer to reveal the client's misconduct, the lawyer may not counsel or assist the client in conduct the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent. That has an impact on real estate values and could make a government employee excited. One day its pre-public FOUO information; what next? If you need to share with the boss do so. Ive been poking around in our payroll system for the last two weeks. Employees can't just post anything they want on Facebook or anywhere else. how trustworthy somebody actually is is never certain. If the coworker said that when that wasnt communicated to her, that was wrong as hell. The coworker could have totally done the right thing and the LW would still have a right to be annoyed and hurt by the action. LW doesnt seem defensive at all here, and its okay to feel upset while still taking ownership of their actions. So I guess maybe it is a generational thing? I think one can be upset at not getting a second chance without feeling necessarily entitled to one. Based on the post its probably public now, so I would guess its likely not too exciting. My worry, OP, is that you dont see this as sufficiently serious to warrant a firing but I promise you that in most communications positions, it really likely would be. I think that WAS her second chance, and I think something she said at the meetings (perhaps about how the problem is the coworker for being a rat) blew that second chance. My mom worked in sunshine law for state government, and what constitutes a record is a lot broader than most people realize. I think it most likely would be very boring, but some stuff like the jobs report a few days early would be very interesting to unscrupulous investors. I constantly have journalist friends asking for confidential tips, and there is no way I would ever give up any information. I understand your irritation with your former coworker. Wrong is wrong- regardless of scale of the offense, and LW has no one to blame but themselves. And there was no social media then, so 100+++ times that now. it really should be I made a foolish mistake, Its more a case of I broke the rules bigtime and expected someone else to cover up for me.. You believe your friend is trustworthy but, wow, the optics of sharing with a friend who is a journalist are really bad, and . The mistake was breaking company policy not that they announced to a coworker they broke company policy.. You kind of glaze over this, OP, but if you spoke in this meeting as you did here then I wonder if thats the real reason for the firing. Maybe thats the case in your field, but usually confidential doesnt mean that. And you might know that you trust that friend 100% to keep it confidential but your employer would prefer to make that call themselves, and thought theyd done so when they told you the information couldnt be shared. The HIPAA Rules require all accidental HIPAA violations, security incidents, and breaches of unsecured PHI to be reported to the covered entity within 60 days of discovery - although the covered entity should be notified as soon as possible and notification should not be unnecessarily delayed. Everyone absolutely everyone employed at a hospital has to undergo annual HIPAA compliance training. Regulation people have heard of is going to be changed/repealed and its a big deal Does that matter? You might not immediately get the same job you had before and might have to accept something more junior but be clear in your communications and you'll get there. That doesnt mean you need to go into all the details or give a lengthy mea culpa, but you dont want to sound like youre minimizing it. But imagine you are the government and someone leaked information. obviously i cant know that for sure though. You technically did something, your friend happened to be a journalist, victimless mistake, and so on. Even when it doesnt rise to the level of legal shenanigans might happen, it can be pretty serious. Is it possible to rotate a window 90 degrees if it has the same length and width? You violated your contract so your previous employer had little choice but to let you go - your new employer will understand this but if you show them you've accepted responsibility for it and will make sure never to do that again then I think you've got a good chance of getting another position. 1. 27 April 2021. It was a really bad decision on my part and I have learned a lot from the experience. Its sounds like you are pretty young and people tend to be a slightly more forgiving when you are young a make a mistake like this as long as you take ownership of it. When you don't know the sender, but the email is clearly confidential and sensitive, things are little more complicated and you have a decision to make. You hear something genuinely classified and blab it too because its so cool? But your processing of it has to be at one step removed. Its not a victimless crime and you have to understand the seriousness of what you did, even unintentionally. (They could be facing prison time.). Yeah, we dont want to go down the road if encouraging the OP to continue acting unethically that will ensure she stays unemployed. Im sorry it happened to you, though, and it definitely stinks. In other words, dont assume the information only went to the person you sent it to. The person is trying to make someone else feel bad about their own transgressions. I mean, yeah, absolutely! All mom did was hand dad the phone. So the judgment on trustworthiness is flawed. If that got into the wrong hands it could even result in the end of civilization. Organisations can set up static rules (for example, you can send emails to business A but not business B), but these traditional methods are rigid and unreliable. Send the attachment in a follow-up email and, in the future, attach the document before you even begin writing your email. I dont even share work release information (good or bad) early with my spouse. Well 1.) Was the friend a journalist, or is there something else that would explain why she said that? The reply: Yes, the friend I texted happened to be a journalist but doesnt cover the area that I was working in. As others mentioned, the breach is possibly a fire on first offense potential, but since they fired you after investigating slack that makes me wonder if you had too casual and friendly of chats with the journalists whose job it was for you to talk with. I was fired for technically breaking a rule but it was my first offense, and nothing bad actually happened, and Im definitely learned my lesson. Shes assuming the friend has more self-control than she does, which is precarious at best. I went to my boss explained the situation and let me boss make the decision if we wanted to share the report. One of the things your field requires is to be able to think and act dispassionately about the information you have custody over. Minimizing it will make it harder for future employers to trust OP, whereas frank ownership and an action plan will read as much more responsible and accountable. Its part of driving a media and product blitz where it basically shows up out of nowhere because everyone has been working on it quietly so it would all be ready for the big day. Id had excellent feedback up until then (if this is true), but I mistakenly shared some non-public information with a friend outside the agency, and they let me go as a result. Still wondering why there was no second chance, though. Any info I pull, I have to be able to explain why I pulled it and what I was doing with it. Im very aware of that reality, so I confine my work email to work stuff only. But if I found out a coworker was sharing this information with just anyone it would be a probably HIPAA violation and, yes, I would need to tell my boss. What am I doing wrong here in the PlotLegends specification? We will always be privy to confidential information in our roles, its the nature of what we do. I will be in so much trouble if anyone finds out! your blindsided coworker is not required to enter into a cover-up conspiracy with you. Thats pretty ratty behavior. It being Silicon Valley, not only was the phone found, it was immediately identified for what it was. (the confessional? And calling this victimless isnt a helpful framing; if you do something thats clearly forbidden and could result in real harm, thats a problem even if no harm resulted this time. The org needed to know in order to assess potential damage and limit future opportunities. It's really just a 30 . I empathize, having both been in government service where the people can let the boundaries get too loose and, separately, had a career-breaking moment in a toxic workplace. Im not sure whether this is something they can move on from or not, but they absolutely need to get themselves out of the mindset that their coworker ratted on them, because thinking that reporting things like that is tattling and childish is how corruption grows. Your failure to understand the gravity of your actions is alarming. I tell the character and imagine their response, and the urge to share subsides. I do a lot of trade shows and we always remind booth staff of what to say (talk points) and what not to say to trade journalists. The US is a large jurisdiction, and generally have what I consider very little protection for private data. Id say forgive that coworker NOWyou put her in a terrible position by being a big blabbering blabbermouth. "I made a dumb mistake and misjudged the sensitivity of some data" is both more accurate and less severe. What I ended up doing is learning to avoid mopped floors as much as possible and warning people to be careful around them. Ugh, yes. But what might walk that back to a performance plan would be a sincere, unqualified apology showing understanding of the gravity of the error. Not advising you to lie, but you can present the circumstances in as flattering manner as you like. However, were only human. I previously worked as a journalist. Please banish the phrase ratted out from your vocabulary and thinking. 1) Broke a rule (Im a journalist, there are only a few specific cardinal sins in our industry, so lets euphemistically call this a case of inadequate attribution.) I work in the auto industry in media communications. Keep rewriting what happened in the most factual, dispassionate way possible. This is awkward to frame as apparently it would have passed unnoticed if you hadnt taken aim at your own foot and then pulled the triggerit would be better if you were fired after fessing up to your superiors, rather than involving anyone else. I had the same thoughtthat was very unwise. Good luck with your job search! Many employers monitor emails, and some employees . LW, youve learned half of your lesson, but really need to keep working to get there. But even the first is really really, really bad. So to summarize, while an individual in your circumstance can be fired for the accidental dissemination of confidential employment information, their employer cannot press criminal charges against them, both because a private entity lacks the authority to make that decision and more fundamentally because the accidental dissemination of . Yes. The above divulged details to a journalist about allocation and resources they should not know about. Its too difficult to know which internally-discussed information is confidential and which isnt. This technique requires extra steps, but it . I went to a church where I attended youth group, sat outside, and repeated my news over and over to Jesus for about three hours before I felt certain I could keep it from anyone else (note that no one else was anywhere nearby). When it came up during her interview, the candidate said it was complex and that shed learned from it. Coworker Jean who would CC her boss and her grandboss when Jean thought shed caught somebody in an errorbut would then cease CCing once she realized that there was in fact no error? Yes. OPs best bet is to stop blaming their coworker or minimizing what happened. Just a bad situation. Age is hardly an indicator of a persons ability to consistently make the best choices at all times. Our grant program is going to be fully funded by Congress! An employer of mine got a FOIA request where they asked for every email wed sent to anyone from any regulatory agency. No work friendship is worth putting my familys financial security on the line. If each person tells just one person it can end up being a lot of people. OP, if everything that was predictably risky, harmful, dangerous, bad, illegal or wrong really felt bad on some core level, we would almost never need to make rules. There is a greater issue here regarding judgement. So you let the cat out of the bag about the cat your zoo bagged? Fascinating (and fun!) There isnt really such thing as a rat in the workplace. As someone who practices public relations, calling this victimless gives me a lot of anxiety. a. problem then you APOLOGIZE and APOLOGIZE rather than defend yourself. Perhaps Archie neglected to mention it. They may very well have not had the option to give you a second chance, whether you wanted to or not. While they may not state why someone was fired, Ive found it pretty common to state that someone was fired (or laid off etc) and if the person is eligible for rehire. I understood her to say she texted from her cell phone. Embarrassing or inappropriate communications sent via company email can damage professional credibility, reputations, and careers.
