Back in late 2014, I made a huge error at work. I was sorting records In Excel and messed up the filtering. It caused mail to go to the wrong addresses, addressed to other clients. Then, in early 2015, I was asked to provide a file to a communications person to give to a client who wanted to know how many addresses were outdated. I made the mistake of providing both the old and new addresses. She gave them the file with only the old addresses.
After the second incident, I took a deep look inside and tried to figure out how I could be better at this stuff.
So, I started by shutting off everything I was doing in Excel and moved it all to MS Access. I also overcommunicated.
Since I was doing everything in Access, I learned that tool really well and built a tracking database for this big annual project where we sent out like 5 million regulatory notices. The tracking DB cut down the time needed to generate reports to like a 1/10 of the time as the previous year.
Normally, if you were on a PIP, you got an automatic ‘Needs Improvement’ rating on the annual review. My boss fought to get me a “Meets Expectations’ so I’d get a bonus.
I just kept on doing what I could to make processes and stuff better. 2 years after that, I got the highest rating possible on my review and the last 3 years, I got 110% of my slotted bonus amount.