Council, April 2026.
Introduction
The Council interacts with people everyday who are seeking assistance, requesting information or a service, or making a complaint. On occasion, these interactions can become unreasonable or abusive towards kaimahi (staff) and can have a disproportionate impact on our ability to undertake our services, our time or our resources. This can occur when people are distressed and may act out of character.
This policy is part of the Council’s approach to addressing issues and formal complaints from external parties. It addresses the process and strategies we will follow to manage behaviour that unreasonably impacts the Council, our kaimahi or our ability to allocate resources fairly across all the complaints we receive.
Before this policy is applied, all standard policies and procedures should have been followed, with the intention to achieve a satisfactory resolution where possible. The policy should be read in conjunction with the Council’s Customer Services Standards and Principles Policy and the Management of Formal Complaints Policy. Kaimahi should also ensure they are familiar with and adhere to the processes set out in our Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Policy.
Purpose
This policy sets out our approach to managing unacceptable behaviour to ensure our kaimahi are safe and well supported while they are at work.
Unacceptable behaviour
The Council has a duty of care under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) to provide a work environment that is without risks to health and safety. Unacceptable behaviour can negatively impact our ability to work effectively and potentially threaten the health, safety, and security of kaimahi. The Council does not tolerate any violence, harm, or threats towards kaimahi.
Examples of unacceptable behaviour could include, but are not limited to:
- Being verbally abusive to Council kaimahi, including shouting, swearing, insults, slurs, threats, racist comments, inappropriate remarks, and hate speech.
- Physical aggression or threats of violence, physical confrontations, assaults, gestures indicating harm, intimidation, or damage to property/facilities.
- Harassment, including sexual misconduct, discriminatory remarks, inappropriate comments, stalking, and online/digital harassment (repeated hostile messages, threats, derogatory comments via phone, email, online forms, or social media).
- Persistently making the same complaint, despite it having been fully investigated under this policy, or persistently seeking an unrealistic outcome.
- Repeatedly changing aspects of the complaint or the desired outcome part way through an investigation and being uncooperative.
- Making unreasonable demands that have a disproportionate and unreasonable impact on the Council, kaimahi, services, time, or resources. This includes persistently demanding solutions that are not feasible and requests for information that have been responded to previously.
- Non-compliance with facility rules, conditions, or code of conduct after reasonable warnings.
- Engaging in illegal activities, including presentation of firearms or dangerous weapons, possession of illegal drugs, sexual indecency, criminal activity, substance misuse on Council premises, vandalism, or other unlawful actions.
- Demonstrating continuous misconduct or repeat of prior misconduct/breach of current suspension or conditions imposed.
Managing unacceptable behaviour
Our response to unacceptable behaviour will initially be dealt with through informal behaviour management techniques to attempt to minimise the impact of the unacceptable behaviour. In some circumstances, more than one approach may need to be used to address individual cases of unacceptable behaviour.
We will give the person or party an opportunity to engage in a reasonable manner by clearly communicating:
- the specific actions or behaviour that is of concern;
- what changes to behaviour are expected in our facilities or when engaging with Council kaimahi; and
- an awareness of the consequences should the behaviour continue.
This may include, for example, asking for language to be moderated, frequency of interactions to reduce; or to interact with a single point of contact within the Council.
An exception applies where the affected kaimahi consider the behaviour and its impact on the Council to require immediate action, including:
- using alternative legal mechanisms where appropriate to restrict access to our services, including kaimahi, and/or our premises, such as trespass under the Council’s Trespass Procedure
- referral to an appropriate external agency
- reporting the behaviour to an appropriate external agency, such as the Police or health services
- referral to an external review agency, such as the Environment Court or the Ombudsman.
If an external person or party is already being managed under this policy, the Council may exercise discretion to apply the same approach for interactions on new subject matters or different locations. Consequences for unacceptable behaviour are intended to be clear and consistently applied across all Council services.
Kaimahi who are subjected to unacceptable behaviour should, as soon as practicable, record the incident in the Council’s health and safety incident reporting system (currently Noggin) and notify their manager. This may include securing any evidence, e.g. CCTV footage, phone recordings, and any other evidence that may document the interaction.
Record keeping
The Council will retain records of any formal decisions made in respect of managing unacceptable behaviour. The record will contain:
- the name and address of the person or party who acted unreasonably towards Council kaimahi
- what actions were undertaken by the Council kamahi and communicated to the offending person or party.
- any restrictions that were put in place, and the period of time the restrictions apply (and if a review is required before the restriction is uplifted).
This data will be made available as required pursuant to the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987, the Privacy Act 2020 and the Ombudsmen Act 1975.
