All businesses face workplace grievances. It is a fact of life that when people work together there are going to be conflicts—both minor and serious. While minor cases can often be handled with proven conflict management strategies, the more serious conflicts and wrongdoings often require a process that can adequately address the emotional impact of the harmful behavior and its aftermath. Restorative Solutions brings the best practices of restorative justice into the workplace so that workplace grievances can be fully resolved at all levels—substantively, emotionally, and procedurally.

Workplace Conferencing

Restorative Solutions works with businesses to bring the process of Workplace Conferencing to bear on any number of workplace grievances. After carefully interviewing key people, facilitators of the Workplace Conference bring together those who have been most impacted by harmful or destructive behavior to speak openly and honestly about the harm that has occurred and to discuss ways on how to make things right.

The process has its origins in the justice system and has recently been used quite successfully in businesses, schools, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and communities.

Goals of the process

Workplace Conferencing seeks to:

• bring all affected staff together to understand the impact of the incident from all points of view, rather than having to rely on office gossip for the truth.
• create a safe space where people can come together to resolve the incident as a community, rather than as fractured interest groups.
• address not only the facts but also perceptions, feelings and emotions which are often the keys to real satisfaction.
• hold those who have harmed accountable for their actions and those who have been harmed a chance to be heard.
• give those affected a voice in “making things right” rather than having to rely solely on management to deal with the issue.
• provide conference members the responsibility for coming to a fair and just solution, ensuring ownership of any agreement by all parties.
• review the workplace culture and processes to address any issues that might have contributed to the problem.

Different than Mediation

Workplace Conferencing is different than mediation in that the conferencing process is better able to handle issues where there is an imbalance of power between co-workers and is specifically suited to include a variety of members of the working community who have perspectives and potential solutions to share in successfully resolving the issue.

Examples of Cases

The Workplace Conference is able to handle a wide variety of conflicts, mistakes and wrongdoing, including the following:

• Employee misconduct
• Workplace bullying
• Aggressive management
• Sexual harassment
• High level conflict among staff
• Performance issues
• Discrimination

The Training Modules We Offer to Businesses are:

• Workplace Conferencing for Managers and Organizational Developers
• Using Circle Processes in Business Settings
• Introduction to Restorative Processes in Business

Our trainings provide businesses with the restorative tools and principles necessary for creating a new way of handling grievances in the workplace.

In addition, Restorative Solutions is able to facilitate, and model, Workplace Conferences for special or large group cases.

To get further information about Restorative Justice in the Workplace contact us at info@restorativesolutions.us

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