Mistakes

What happens when something goes wrong at work? What do we say? Voicenote clips Sometimes there'll be a message from somebody that says 'hi' and I almost think 'Oh no! What's coming? What have I done?' It's that guilty feeling that is maybe leftover from being told off at school or something like that. So, I think, you know, you just have to accept that things can't be perfect all the time and it's OK to make mistakes. Just long as you learn from them.

In this episode of Office English, we'll talk about the language we can use when mistakes happen at work.

Welcome to Office English from BBC Learning English. In this podcast we help you with business English for difficult situations. I'm Phil.

And I'm Pippa. And today we're talking about mistakes at work. We try to avoid them, but sometimes mistakes happen. We've already heard from colleagues at the BBC that finding the language to deal with mistakes is complicated, but what about you, Phil? What do you think?

No, I think it can be complicated. Whenever you're talking about mistakes, you're dealing with how people feel and often you're dealing with how you feel yourself.

Yes, I get really stressed if I make a mistake at work and that can make talking about it difficult. You're also sometimes worried about making a mistake. You might feel like you'll be blamed or that it'll be bad for your career. So I think it's a really stressful time and so it's difficult to know what to say.

Yes and in this episode we're going to talk through language for admitting you've made a mistake, apologising and fixing the problem.

Let's start with owning up to a mistake, or telling somebody something has gone wrong. Do you have any suggestions for that, Phil?

OK, so here's a phrase: there's an issue I need to draw your attention to. What d'you think about that one?

Yes, I think that's a really, really good idea. So it's good to be clear that there is a problem. So, saying there's an issue I need to draw your attention to, straight away we know there's a problem. So if you were saying that to your boss, they know there's a problem and you're being really clear about it.

And I think it's quite interesting that here we're focusing on the issue not, at this point anyway, not who did it or why they did it or... It's saying, 'Look, here's a problem. Let's sort it out.'

Yeah. Because if you need to fix a problem, you can worry later about how that happened, what went wrong. Just saying 'there's a problem, we need to sort it out' is probably the best way to start. Any other phrases, Phil?

OK, we've got this one: I've realised that my team made an error in the report.

I like that because it's quite factual. We know immediately what the problem is, so you've explained the problem quite clearly, there's an error in the report. There is a bit of blame going on here. So it's my team made an error, but we're not saying someone specifically. We didn't say 'Oh I've realised that Phil made a mistake on this'. It's just somebody in the team, something's gone wrong.

I guess ideally, you'll also be thinking about how you can make things better. So we've got this one, you could say something like I've accidentally sent the email out early, but I have a plan to fix the problem.

Yes. So if you're worried about looking bad to your boss if you've made a mistake, maybe, if you have time, if you're able to think of a solution straight away, you can go to your boss with the solution rather than just the problem. So I've made this mistake, but I already know what we can do to sort it out is probably a good way of thinking about it. Especially if you know it's just you that made the mistake and it's a simple thing.

Right, so we have some phrases for when we notice a mistake and need to own up, admit that we made the mistake. But what about if somebody else notices?

So this might happen, say if you work with customers or clients, and they notice a mistake or a problem. So we might need to start by apologising. You could say something like I'm really sorry about that. Let me investigate the problem and get to the bottom of how that happened so that it doesn't happen again. So that's really good for clients and customers.

There's a lovely phrase there, get to the bottom of something. If you get to the bottom of something it means you, kind of, you understand why it happened, you're looking deep down into the bottom of the problem and working out what made it happen.

Mmm, yeah and that's a good way to apologise as well. So not only are you saying sorry, you're saying 'I need to work out what's gone wrong here and I'm gonna sort it out for you.' It's reassuring for a client, or a customer, or a colleague. Another thing we might want to think about when we're apologising is trying not to say 'if'. So don't say 'I'm sorry if you are upset' because that might make the other person think that you don't take their complaints seriously. Instead, you could say I'm sorry that you are upset by this mistake. I'm sorry that you're upset instead of 'I'm sorry if you are upset'.

I mean, if someone's talking to you about the problem, it's probably quite clear that they are upset. So saying 'I'm sorry if you are upset' yeah, I don't think it would help the situation. It's suggesting that you kind of are saying 'I don't think you should be upset' or something like that, or it leaves that open and I think that's probably a dangerous place to go.

Yeah. When someone's complaining, they usually just feel like they want somebody to listen to them and somebody to say that they've heard their complaint, that they understand why they're upset or why there's a problem. So trying to kind of say 'if' and get out of kind of admitting blame or a problem probably won't help the situation if someone's upset or angry. OK, so we've acknowledged our mistake, we've apologised if we need to. Now we might need to think about fixing the mistake. What phrases could we use here, Phil?

OK, people will often talk about offering assurances and that means you're showing that you'll stop the same thing from happening again. And you could do that by saying rest assured, we've taken steps to prevent mistakes like these occurring again. And this using this rest assured it's like saying be certain we're taking this seriously.

Mmm yeah. So it's a little bit like our apology where we said about getting to the bottom of a problem, This would be maybe the next thing you would say to the client once you've actually got to the bottom of it, you can say rest assured. So it's... it's really reassuring to somebody who, who might have a problem with your company.

OK and then for customers or clients, you could give them an offer or a discount to make up for the mistake, if you’ve got the authority to do that. So: can I offer you a discount on future orders to make up for the inconvenience? That classic offer structure there can I offer you... can I give you...

Yeah. People generally feel a lot better if they feel like they’ve got something out of it. As you say, you need to be sure that you are authorised, that you're allowed, to offer a discount, but that might just make up for it. And sometimes apologising is enough, sometimes the mistake is just an honest mistake, it's just a small thing and you don't need to do a huge investigation to get to the bottom of what went wrong and you don't need to offer a discount. It will depend on how big the mistake is, I would say, Phil.

What things do you think are important to include in an apology?

I think you need to be really genuine. So you need to show that you understand why the person is annoyed or upset, explaining potentially what the problem was, so it might just be a computer problem or an error that's really outside of your control, so if you explain that people can be more reasonable with you about why something's gone wrong. But, yeah, you really just want to be really genuine, don't deny that there is a problem if you can, because usually that makes things worse later down the line. So, dealing with mistakes is stressful, but using clear language helps us sort out the mess.

Let's listen to our BBC colleagues again. Voicenote clips Sometimes there'll be a message from somebody that says 'Hi' and I almost think 'Oh no! What's coming? What have I done?' So I think, you know, you just have to accept that things can't be perfect all the time and it's OK to make mistakes, just as long as you learn from them.

So, Andrew said there that learning from mistakes is important as well as showing that you've learned, so showing somebody, maybe your boss, that you... that you took on feedback, that you realised there was a mistake and you've... you've made sure it won't happen again. So how can we do that, Phil?

Well quite often you might be explaining why the mistake happened and then, yeah, just saying how you are going to do things differently in future to make sure that that doesn't happen. All of these of course depend on what the mistake was. It might be there was something you didn't know, it might be that there was something you needed to find out or you hadn't been told. All of these things could be there, but finding the root of it and showing you understand the root of it is important, I think, and that helps stop it happening again.

Yeah. And some companies will do something called a debrief which is basically organising a formal meeting to talk about what went wrong, to come up with an action plan to stop it happening again. Sometimes people do that even if something hasn't gone wrong. So, say you have a big project or an event at work, people might have a debrief just to talk about 'how can we make that better?' So if you're always showing that you can... you can learn, that you can make things better, that you can do the same thing again but even better, even if you haven't made a mistake, that's always a good thing to do.

That's it for this episode of Office English. Next time, we'll be heading to a work event and working on our small talk and networking.

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