You may have heard about the recent mishap which affected an unfortunate HR team at Aviva, Britain's second-biggest insurer by market value. Basically the stuff of HR nightmares they accidentally sent out a termination letter to all 1,300 staff instead of one.
Human Capital Online wrote an article in response to this, however I actually disagree with most of their points. I will summarise their tips here (my comments are in green). I'd be interested to know your thoughts in the comments below. I am assuming this article is referring to more serious email breaches rather than typos or small non-confidential leaks etc.
1. Forget about retrieving it; you can’t “unsend mail”. – An IT Administrator could theoretically retrieve emails but even then it’s probably not an option.
You can retrieve emails from outlook. If you open the email and click on actions in the toolbar. It gives you the option to either delete sent mail from the person’s inbox or replace it with a new email. If the person has already opened it, outlook will show that the sender tried to retrieve it.
2. Ignore it – most people don’t read all their emails anyway.
I find this quite unprofessional. HR often sends formal communication and advice and thus if it goes to the wrong recipient we need to rectify the situation.
3. Apologise – but only to your boss.
May depend on the seriousness of the error and the amount of people it was sent to but I think recipients need to know if they received something that was not intended for them. This follows on from my issue with point two.
4. Do the full letterman – face-to-face apology is a must to someone you offended.
This one I actually agree with – obviously not in the case of a reply all but if it’s clear the outlook retrieval did not work (it will tell you) then a phone conversation can have much more tact than a further email. This may of course follow up with an apology in writing.
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