Council Staff Report Almost Double The Number Of Incidents In One Year

The Invercargill City Council has reported an increase in hostile behaviour towards staff, with 29 cases of verbal abuse in just two months.

The Risk and Assurance Committee were briefed by health safety and wellbeing manager Tash Anderson at a meeting on Tuesday.

Over the past year the number of reported incidents by staff had almost doubled from 200 to close to 400, but injuries had dropped significantly, as a result of improved hazard identification and risk mitigation efforts.

Tash told the committee that council’s Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) had been effective, which staff could use for either work or personal issues.

“In the regulatory space we get challenged, and that’s hard on staff.”

Cr Evelyn Cook questioned whether there was an uptake of community pressures and that was having a flow on effect to staff.

Tash said post-Covid people were more reactive and quick to anger, but management were keeping abreast of it.

Staff were also being offered resilience training and a more accessible and user-friendly reporting system had been implemented - which could account for the higher incident reporting numbers.

Of the 79 incidents reported from December 2024-January 2025, 29 were for verbal abuse and a further five psychological harm.

The EAP service was currently seeing about seven employees a month, and offered 168 counselling sessions during 2024. That had risen significantly from 2022 when the service was only used 64 times.