Can Coworker's Documentation Harm Her?

I have such a co-worker in my office. She keeps a “file” on employees and has advised me to do so also – “just in case”. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to her comment because I’m not there to document employee behavior and just put it off to her bossiness. However, as I have been here several years now, I no longer view it as bossiness but a need to control.

This person is in an administrative support position. She has no desire to further her education beyond her high school diploma. She supports positions that require a degree. She tends to be extremely defensive and sensitive (the “why is everybody picking on me” type). She regularly puts out there that the admins are supported by executive level staff and pretty much how what she says goes. She got the opportunity to review a couple of managers on their performance reviews. She pulled her “little black book” out and blasted them with “offenses” they had done throughout the year and bragged to me about it later.

She is supported by executive level staff because she has done so well in the past and was a tremendous help to the office. However, those executives do not reside in our office but across the state. They don’t see her daily or the things that she does. When her behavior was reported in the past, basically nothing was been done. Now everyone just tiptoes around her and hopes that she is not wirting about them or telling mgmt.

I really don’t care whether I am in her book or not (I so know I am). I do my job so noone can complain. We have gone toe-to-toe on a few things which have gone to higher ups. However, just as she has her past reputation to go by I have a current excellent reputation in my company. I keep my direct boss up-to-date on EVERYTHING which helps alot. People are starting to take notice of a few things and she has started to back down with her bullying.

If you believe she is documenting you in any way and you know what it is about, just keep your own notes on the situation. It really doesn’t mean much unless someone approaches you on it. As long as you are doing your job efficiently, you really have nothing to worry about.

I myself make notes about other employees as well as myself. I am an office manager in a place of business with approximately 15 workers. The owner actually suggested I keep track of my personal phone calls, incidents in the office and other things such as employees taking long breaks, personal phone calls, notes about customer jobs, etc. We do this so when confronted about an issue we can look back on our notes and be able to better estimate the time and day an occurrence happened and what approximately happened. It has proved very beneficial since in most cases later down the road nobody seems to be able to “remember” what and when something happened when the incident is raised. I don’t feel guilty about documenting things because if another employee complains about another employee getting 4 personal phone calls a week – I can look at my notes and say, no actually she only received one personal call or I can look at my notes and say, your right she received 5 personal phone calls, we will have to talk to the person. So depending on which way you are looking at it you can defend yourself or another employee or use the information to raise concerns about an employees bad behavior. Why be worried if you have done nothing wrong?

As others have mentioned, this is an example of an employee trying to control the work environment, build an unfair treatment case, or simply looking to make others uncomfortable. It also sounds like the Company has not handled this situation or employee very well.

I’ve dealt with hundreds of difficult employees and many situations similar to this. I don’t think there’s a one-approach-works-best way to deal with this, but I would strongly advise taking some specific actions based on the personality of this employee and how co-workers and the Company have/haven’t taken action to date.

What should you do?

1) Maintain your focus on your direct work and ensuring that your direct supervisor and other managers are aware of your performance an contributions. Bottomline – do not allow the only record/voice of your actions be based on this employee’s notes. If your direct supervisor/manager is well-regarded by others in the management team, you can also ask your direct supervisor to anonymously share that other employees are uncomfortable with whether they are/aren’t using this employee’s documentation as part of performance or business decisions that are not applicable.

2) If this employee is using this documentation as a weapon, get some management and HR help. Ask your management team and HR to ask the employee to keep her documentation completely to herself. It’s hard to exactly restrict an employee from taking her/his own notes, but it’s not very hard to note that the Company will not be using these notes to make judgments about other employees. Even if this employee indicates he/she performed in any particular situation in her/his mind better than others, the management and HR team need to emphasize to this employee that the documentation has very little influence unless specifically called for such as during a self-appraisal discussion.

3) Request an external consultant facilitate an environmental assessment. If there are issues that need attention, it actually helps when a company is proactive in addressing an issue. Some companies aren’t aware that spending time and money on an external consultant to try to resolve this issue now or at least prevent it from causing other work environment problems can be the most efficient (time, money, and free of extraneous history/info) way for the Company to also avoid a costly legal defense if this person’s trying to build a lawsuit against the Company.

4) If there is someone close to this employee that you can trust, ask that person to share with this troubled employee that the behavior is bringing the tension level up. Don’t define what actions or behaviors are resulting – just inform that the attention and tension are noticeably different.

5) Don’t take on resolving this issue if it’s something your management and HR team should be handling. It’s always better to inform company representatives and hold them accountable for people management rather than trying to take issues on concerning your peers and co-workers.

If none of these actions seem feasible, then your situation probably requires immediate and intensive management and HR attention. Your management and HR team should know that ensuring a reasonable, non-hostile/discriminatory/threatening work environment is a part of their responsibility. Companies are given a certain amount of latitude when it comes to managing performance and work environments, but they often need to be reminded or pushed to get involved.

Hope this helps.

@ Amanda
It’s more accepting if you document things employees do because you are an office manager. However, I believe we are talking about a person in a non-management type of position.

Also, when documenting things, you have to be very, very careful that what you are documenting is accurate. I once worked at a company where I dealt with a lot of vendors, subonctractors and suppliers. I worked with these companies over the course of several years and as a consequence got to know many. In my duties, I regularly spoke to these individuals each week. One person had been out for major surgery, another lost a parent, one other had a new baby. When they would call me, I would say how are you feeling today? How is the new baby? and so on. My boss would come upon me speaking with these people and assume I was on a personal call. Instead of asking me, he documented it. It appeared on my performance review. I explained that these were people we did business with and I would just keep a good rapport by asking after them and their families. I kept it to a minimum. I might point out that I never, ever used the company phone for personal business because I used my cell phone. If I couldn’t take a call during my lunch, then I would stay over to compensate for the time I took the call.

AAnyway, long story short my boss didn’t believe tthey weren’t personal calls and he went to HR (even after I limited my speaking even more). I was pulled into the office and told of the complaint (he still didn’t face me – the coward). I asked to pull something off the computer and was granted the request. I had begun documenting every single call I got, including my cell phone. I showed the log to HR and they commended me in handling the situation in a proactive way. However, after that my boss and I had a terrible relationship because he still felt I was lying and I ended up leaving the company.

This was a case where I wasn’t doing anything wrong but it still ended up being a bad situation.

I know I’m late and this conversation is over, but I’m going to post my opinion anyway.

I don’t care what excuse a person comes up with! Keeping a journal of the things a co-worker has done, or things you think he/she has done wrong, is sneaky, unethical and cowardly. Instead of stabbing people in the back, maybe these note-writers should concentrate on their jobs. They should also “man up” and confront their co-workers with their issues.

I speak as someone who recently found out that a former co-worker kept a journal of all the things she thought I did wrong. She told me that the reason she never confronted me with her issues was because she didn’t feel it was her place. But I think she was a coward. If she was so worried about the things I did she should have confronted me, and given me the opportunity to either state my case or make an effort to improve. She should have confronted me in an effort to stop what was going on, if she thought it was so terrible. Instead, she stabbed me in the back. Her refusal to talk to me about her issues tells me that she wasn’t as concerned about what I was doing as she claimed. Instead, it tells me that she wanted to get me into trouble.

If you find out that a co-worker has been keeping a journal of the things you’ve done, do not stay silent. Confront them. If you have to, take the issue to the supervisor.