Confidential Email

I have a question I am hoping you can answer as I have been searching the Internet for about three hours now and have found nothing. I did what was probably a really stupid thing to do. I was very ill and so not using my best judgment I wrote an email to our (evil??) HR lady. In this email I expressed my gross intolerance for a coworker. I posed, in a not so nice way, the question of why someone as inefficient as them could be allowed to keep their job for so long. I then went on to make a few snide remarks about the company for letting this go on so long. I know, I know, I know..... never in writing, but like I said I was sick and my judgment (not to mention my patience) was a bit off.

Come to find out the email had been forwarded to the COO (small company...about 40 employees) of the company and then to my direct supervisor from the COO. Now I feel like a total idiot. What I want to know is if the company's HR rep violated any laws by doing this. I know it was completely immoral, but was it illegal?

Well, it's not illegal (she says in her non-lawyer, non legal advice way). HR people are not required to keep a confidence as a doctor, priest or lawyer is. In fact, part of our job is to blab. Which means that I'm also going to suggest that it wasn't necessarily immoral either.

Let the angry evil HR comments begin.

HR represents the company, not the employee. This sometimes requires following up on a complaint. Now, your company is small, so you probably actually have a relationship with your HR person. If I'd received such and e-mail and I knew it was out of character for you, I might have e-mailed it back and said, "Did you mean to hit send?"

But, having a productive workforce is part of HR's long list of responsibilities. I have to assume that if you tell me a co-worker is a complete slacker that you want something done about it. Not knowing your company culture or the organizational structure I can't comment on whether it was appropriate to forward the e-mail to the COO.

Actually, I can. I would think the proper thing to do would be to find out myself if there was a problem with your co-worker, or with you, and then decide who needs to know. But in a company that small, the COO very well could be the right person.

We understand that sometimes steam needs to be blown off. We also sometimes over-react. Some people would send off an e-mail like this and wonder why in the heck no one brought it to the COO's attention! You can't win in this HR business.

What should you do? Apologize for losing your temper. Get back to work. Hope your co-worker doesn't find out about it. Address it head on with your boss. And finally, read the comments here, as my readers will have better advice.