Principles

We are committed to providing an excellent service to all our clients and believe that our clients have a right to be heard, understood, and respected. We also believe that our employees have the right to work in a safe environment and expect our clients to always treat our staff with courtesy, consideration, and respect. This applies to all means of communications, such as verbal, in person and written.

We promote a wellbeing culture among our employees and do not expect any member of staff to feel uncomfortable in doing their job. Our employees are supported and encouraged to make individual assessments about any situation arising with a client that they feel uncomfortable with.

Policy

Our policy enables us to deal with unacceptable client behaviour professionally and consistently. It can be difficult to produce a list of actions that would be considered unacceptable, but we have provided examples below:

Aggressive or abusive behaviour

This consist of behaviour (written or verbal) that we consider might cause employees to feel intimidated, offended, bullied, or harassed:

• Threatening emails and telephone calls

• Inappropriate comments on social media

• Inappropriate banter, including innuendo, jokes or stories.

• Malicious allegations

• Any form of physical violent or threats of physical violence

• Derogatory racial, sexist, ageist, or homophobic remarks

• Comments relating to disability, perceived gender, religion, belief or any other protected characteristic.

Unreasonable demands and vexatious complains:

• Amount of information they seek.

• Nature and scale of service they expect.

• Volume of correspondence they generate.

• Time or resources

We accept that persistence is not necessarily a form of unacceptable behaviour. What amounts to unreasonable demands will depend on the circumstances of the complaint and the seriousness of the issues raised. Examples of behaviour that would fall within reasonable demands and vexatious complaints include but are not limited to:

• Refusing to follow the process set our in our complaints policy.

• Insisting on seeing or speaking to a particular member of the team when a suitable alternative has been offered.

Procedures

No member of staff should tolerate unacceptable or vexatious behaviour when communicating with clients. When this occurs, they have the right to:

• End the call.

• Not reply to an abusive email or letter

• Refer the call to a member of our Senior Management team

It is reasonable to expect that you are warned that your conduct is considered to be offensive to allow you the opportunity to moderate your behaviour. Where these circumstances arise, we may take the following steps:

• We will ask you to modify your behaviour and explain why.

• If the behaviour continues the member of staff will remove themselves for the situation.

• If the communication is by telephone/video call you will be informed the call will be terminated.

• The member of staff will inform a Senior management team member and the incident will be recorded.

• Our Senior Management team will investigate the situation and decide what action to take. This action may include the termination of your engagement with us..

• We will refer the matter to the police where we consider a criminal offence might have been threatened or committed.