ALMOST half a century ago the great Australian actor Peter Finch won an Academy Award for urging everyone to stick their heads out the window and shout “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
In one of the greatest screen monologues ever, Finch’s character looked into the camera and declared “We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy.”
That was almost 50 years ago and in many ways things have gotten worse.
So many aspects of life – from politics, social media, entertainment, and even retail shopping – have an ever more vicious tone.
We live in an increasingly hostile and angry world and those problems are magnified in strata schemes when we have neighbours, not just on either side, but above and below us.
Hardly a week goes by when there isn’t a resident manager ringing ARAMA in a stressed state to say they are being bullied and harassed in their complex.
Chris Irons, formerly Queensland’s Commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management and now the director of Strata Solve, Queensland’s leading strata dispute resolution and problem-solving firm, has previously said that bullying and harassment is probably the most pressing issue in strata.
Well, like Peter Finch, I’m as mad as hell and so are our ARAMA members. We’re not going to take bullying and harassment anymore.
We have introduced what we believe are powerful tools to stop such behaviour and we have been bolstered by a recent landmark court case that proves resident managers and their contractors are protected by legal provisions against bullying and harassment in the workplace.
Workplace bullying is defined as “repeated and unreasonable behaviour directed towards a worker or a group of workers that creates a risk to health and safety.”
“Unreasonable behaviour” means “behaviour that a reasonable person, having considered the circumstances, would see as unreasonable, including behaviour that is victimising, humiliating, intimidating, or threatening.”
Bullying and harassment in strata is not just directed at caretaking service providers, but it also often involves unit owners bullying and harassing other unit owners.
There is aggressive behaviour which may be interpreted as bullying and harassment directed from unit owners towards committee members, or to chairpersons and as a result a lot of really good people who otherwise would serve on a committee, are repelled by the bullying and harassment they see.
It often pushes good people away from volunteering for community title schemes, and often you end up with bullies on the committee, because they’ bullied everybody else off it.
The same goes for body corporate managers, and we hear many stories about bullying and harassment of them, too. It should stop!
However, there is a great deal at hand to help.
Recently under the Fair Work Act 2009 a society representing a major primary producer was unsuccessful in stopping a volunteer director seeking a stop bullying order against its president. These applications are available to workers “who reasonably believe that he or she has been bullied at work”. The Society objected asserting that she was not a “worker” given that she was not paid and did not receive any other benefits from the position.
But the Fair Work Commission ruled that a person need only perform work “in any capacity” for a PCBU [person conducting a business or undertaking, including work] in order to satisfy the definition of a “worker”.
On this basis, the director was a “volunteer” making her a worker under the Workplace Health and Safety Act.
ARAMA is committed to creating psychologically safe communities for our members and all people who live work and invest in Strata.
The community title scheme is our workplace, the committee meeting room is our workplace, the common area is our workplace, our office is our workplace.
And we have protections against being bullied and harassed as a result of that under the Workplace Health and Safety laws.
What this recent legal case just showed was that caretaking service providers and committee volunteers, as well as body corporate managers and contractors, have strong protections under the Workplace Healthy and Safety legislation.
If you worked at any large company, it would be unacceptable to be screamed at or threatened, to be coerced or be extorted. It is just as unacceptable for those things to happen in our workplace, too.
Trying to resolve disputes through the courts is always a lengthy, costly and protracted process. But at least the legal protections have been proved and there should be no doubt they exist to protect our members,
At the request of the Queensland Government looking into psychologically safe workplaces, I put together a special interest group consisting of three unit-owner representatives, two practising body corporate managers. a practising residential manager – Guy Elliott our National President – and myself.
All of us live, work or invest in strata and we have come up with what we call a statement of intent designed to help create psychologically safe communities in our industry.
We have designed an opening statement for strata meetings, which is designed to nip bullying and harassment in the bud.
Most of the time, bullying and harassment is evident in a committee meeting or in a general meeting when owners come together. They will disagree with each other over something.
Most of the time it’s unit owner on unit owner. They’ll disagree and that disagreement will erupt and it’s on for young and old. And then it continues after the meeting and goes out into the strata community.
The special interest group decided to distil everything down to a simple opening statement to set the tone for the meeting.
The intention is that at a strata meeting, the chairperson opens the meeting, welcomes everybody and reads out the Statement of Intent.
The statement declares:
“We the attendees at this meeting understand and agree that Respect is our Common Ground. We agree to listen to each other and not engage in personal attacks, even when we don’t agree. We commit to respectful interactions with each other and to leave any disagreements behind in the meeting room.”
The intention is that the chair asks for the meeting to endorse the statement and that it be entered into the minutes, assuming the meeting agrees. It could also be distributed with the agenda as the first item of business if that is the will of the committee.
So it kind of sets the ground rules.
We deliberately haven’t said “this is what you should do”. We deliberately haven’t said “these are the only words you can use”.
But we’ve said, “please consider it”.
It’s a real light touch. It’s the first step in the quest to create psychologically safe communities, and it would certainly identify potential troublemakers who don’t belong in that meeting, if they’re not even going to agree with that basic element of respect.
This statement of intent is recommended for strata schemes all around Australia.
If we can at least get people at the meeting to respect each other and not use personal attacks, then we go some way towards creating psychologically safe communities.
Because the converse of that – and what we’ve been hearing far too often – is that we have members who are severely affected by bullying and harassment to the point where they can’t think properly.
A couple of years ago ARAMA introduced our Member Assistance Program, A-MAP, which is a reactive measure against bullying and harassment.
We have also been running our ARRM program, – the ARAMA Relationship Revival Masterclass – which shows resident managers that they have a responsibility to do all they can to nip bullying and harassment before it starts.
But out statement of intent is there as a preventative measure.
Let’s be clear.
Bullying and harassment is not someone just wanting you to do your job properly.
Resident managers have to do all they can to promote good relationships at a scheme.
Disputes over performance are common in relationships between customers and service providers and they are the easiest dispute to fix.
Resident managers and everyone else working in strata have an active role to play to prevent disagreements festering into bullying and harassment.
When some (thankfully a small number) of the people come along to our Relationship Revival Masterclasses, they realise they’re not being bullied or harassed and, in fact, they might be the problem.
At first, they’re not happy to hear that.
But when they hear it from their peers, they get it. When they walk out of that room you can see that they’re affected positively by the realisation that if they changed certain things and if they use certain different skills or language, there would be less likelihood of conflict which lessens the perception of bullying and harassment.
This statement of intent is designed to stop bullying before it even starts. It is designed to create a positive environment and to create psychologically safe communities.
If you have a problem where people are yelling at you in a meeting, take this statement along and ask the committee, “Hey, will you agree to this?”
There is nothing in this Statement of Intent other than identifying the fact that respect must be the common ground for everyone to benefit.
It would stop a lot of people being as mad as hell.