Manager at work

[chris83]

Hi all
i have a manager that i believe has had it out for me since i started in my Role with the company i work for, She has always singled me out as a bad performer when i can prove that i am not but i would like some legal advice on a situation that happened about 3 months ago.

I was off sick as i have a condition call Gout and at the time i could not walk or drive and was in a great deal of pain anyway we have at work a spreadsheet that needs to be filled in to track our hours for billing purposes i would usually have filled this in while i was off but i didn't have my laptop with me because the day that i took ill I went to hospital and my manager took my laptop from me and said that i could collect it ( this never happened because i couldn't walk and my manager refused to tell me where the laptop was and refused to give it to someone else so they could give it to me but thats another story). So while i was off sick my manager called me and explained that i needed to fill it in and i advised that i couldn't walk let alone get to the office to fill in one excel spreadsheet so she contacted our HR department who said on this occasion as i was ill and couldn't walk that i wouldn't need to fill it in, I was happy with this and hung up the phone on my manager. As far as i was concerned this was the end of the conversation and the matter i would fill in all required information when i returned to work some week later.

About an hour or so after my conversation with my manager i got a phone call from my girlfriend who also works for the same company but in a different department and with a different manager she was not aware of the conversation i had with my manager and asked why she got an email from my manager asking her to forward on an email to me.

It turns out that my manager after speaking to me had emailed our HR department to confirm everything that had been said and then after sending the email to HR she then forwarded it onto my girlfriend so she could send it onto me even though my manager could have called me and got my information or just waited until i returned to work and i would have seen the email myself.

Anyways my question is would my manager sending the email to my girlfriend (she had only been my girlfriend at this stage for a few months so was very new) be a breach of confidentially i believe it would be as this information is private by nature as it is about my pay and is used for billing and tracking purposes also the conversation itself was between my manager myself and HR no one else and i did not tell my manager she could contact me via my girlfriend.

Sorry about this being so long and thinks for the advice.

[jaguarsuk]

Re: Manager at work

I would imagine your company would have a privacy policy and that this would be against that, but equally it's also protected y the Data Protection Act 1998.

By all means you can put in a grievance against you manager, you company handbook will probably detail how you do that and make this something formal. Often going nuclear like this can be more detrimental long term than simply airing a grievance.

The manager calling you to fill in the spreadsheet while off work sounds to me like they were getting bothered by someone and didn't know how else to stop that person bothering them about it than have you complete it. As they sought advice it very much sounds like they wanted to cover their own backside for the reason you didn't complete it.

I don't think they have maliciously sent your information to your girlfriend, they should have sent you a letter asking you to complete your information and let you return that, but in a digital world it's all to easy to just ping an email off. It sounds like an unthinking moment to me.

If it was me, when you return to work I would ask for a chat with your manager. Express your feelings about them having it in for you and tell them that you didn't appreciate them giving your personal details to your girlfriend without consent. Make them aware you know it's against company policy to do that, but you preferred the two of you had a chat to resolve it rather than going down the formal route.

Firstly, you have tried to resolve the issue by doing this. Secondly, just because you had a chat about it doesn't mean you couldn't later bring it up in a grievance letter should similar behaviour occur.