National Investigations Symposium

Last week I attended the 9th National Investigations Symposium at the Novotel Manly Pacific. The conference is run by the Independent Commission Against Corruption NSW, the NSW Ombudsman and the Institute of Public Administration Australia (NSW Division).

 

The aim of the forum is to help investigators and complaint-handlers to increase their investigative knowledge, skills and techniques by:

 

• hearing about best practice methods and new techniques
• learning from distinguished international and national keynote speakers
• attending workshops on managing difficult complainants, the basics about how to conduct an investigation, investigative interview techniques or administrative law for investigators.

 

One of the sessions I attended was a workshop run by the NSW Ombudsman on Unreasonable Complainant Conduct. With the support and involvement of the other Australasian Parliamentary Ombudsman, the NSW Ombudsman began a joint project on managing unreasonable complainant conduct in 2006. The project sought to minimise the often disproportionate and unreasonable impacts of difficult complainant conduct on organisations, their staff, services, time and resources by proposing a framework of strategies for managing such conduct.

 

The outcome of this project has been a practice manual titled Managing Unreasonable Complainant Conduct and the associated workshop. The manual provides an extensive range of strategies for dealing with unreasonable complainant conduct, including circumstances where it is not possible to terminate services to a complainant.

 

I found this workshop to be quite helpful as it was useful to hear of the experiences of other complaint handlers from different organisations. However, the star of this project is definitely the practice manual. Divided into seven parts, the practice manual provides guidelines on identifying unreasonable complainant conduct, preventing such conduct and responding to and managing the same. There are also some helpful suggested semantics for dealing with unreasonable complainant conduct. 

 

An example of one scenario that has a scripted response is around when a complainant presents in the organisation’s office and advises they will not be leaving until the matter is resolved. 

Complainant: I’m not leaving. You’ll have to carry me out of here.

Respondent: I’m not going to force you to leave. It’s really up to you what happens next. I’m going to leave and if you want to stay here a little while to think, then that’s fine. But if you aren’t gone in twenty minutes, we’ll have to contact security/ the police to escort you out of the office. It’s up to you.

This script is firm but fair. It reminds the complainant that they have a choice in their behaviour and also demonstrates that the respondent is in control of the investigative process. The majority of the scripts offered by the NSW Ombudsman have this same approach.  

Needless to say, I have placed this practice manual in an easy-to-reach location on my desk because I know it will become a highly used resource.

If you would like to know more about the NSW Ombudsman’s Managing Complainant Conduct project, click here.

To find out more about the 9th National Investigations Symposium, click here.