Restorative Practice
Restorative practice is based primarily on a set of core values and the explicit promotion and enhancement of particular skills such as the ability to empathise and to find solutions to specific problems. This practice allows for building trust between and with people. It provides a structured approach in the form of a scaffold, which helps build and sustain relationships, and provides a focus which allows for the potential growth of positive relationships to become established between people. The development of each relationship is based on a set of core values. These values include respect, and being respectful of everyone, including towards people someone maybe doesn’t always see eye to eye with or even like.
Through the development of empathy, and promoting understanding of perspective taking, people can learn to respect each other and where someone is coming from in terms of their own expression of thought and feelings. In our efforts to show empathy, as human beings we are able to harness the notion of fairness into our relationships, and therefore can also account for our own actions and hold others to account for theirs.
Difference With Mediation
How is Restorative Practice different from mediation?”
Mediation is the primary method of alternative conflict resolution; how different could another ‘alternative conflict resolution’ practice really be?
In many ways, mediation and restorative practice are, in fact, similar. Many mediators will use some elements or even a completely restorative approach within their work. The main similarity is that these two approaches may look structurally similar in practice.
But we think there’s a key difference that’s important for clients to understand.
The primary difference between mediation and restorative practice is the core question that sits underneath each approach. Meditation generally asks, “What can we both live with?” and seeks to elicit agreement on specific issues with an aim towards conflict resolution. Fundamentally, mediation seeks ‘agreement’.
Restorative approaches ask, “What’s important about what has happened and how you’ve been affected, how can we repair the harm and prevent any further harm?” and seeks to elicit understanding and collaborative repair of harm. Restorative approaches fundamentally seek ‘repair’.
Restorative approaches look through the lens of relationship and harm repair. They additionally include flexible approaches such as group circle work, and proactive interventions like relationship and trust building. Restorative approaches are focused on needs identification and a response to those needs.
Practically, restorative approaches may require more individual preparation time than mediation. Restorative approaches don’t assume that a facilitation is the best way to move forward, where mediation you typically seek agreement to participate in the entire process from the outset.
In restorative practices, we strongly encourage participants to speak for themselves, and we strive to create an environment in which they feel safe to do so. This means that we do not use advocates or lawyers as representative speakers in a restorative process. Support people are welcome to be present and to speak in a process when appropriate from their own perspective. This is because of the key principle of restorative practices that the focus is on the people most affected by a situation. Through a restorative lens, this ‘focus’ means trusting that those most affected (and responsible) know what they need to repair the impact of the harm they experienced (or caused).
So while these two approaches may look similar on the surface, simply asking different questions with different aims (agreement or repair) can lead to remarkably different responses, and remarkably different outcomes.
RP in The Workplace
Restorative Practices are a shift in perspective
It might sound like ‘restorative’ is the new buzzword in HR. However, restorative isn’t actually a tool, it’s a shift.
It’s a shift in thinking, a shift in systems, a shift in culture, but most importantly a shift in perspective.
In a typical workplace, when conflict arises, focus is placed on policy, processes, and definitions. The shift in perspective to restorative practices lies in being able to place the individuals at the heart of the conflict by making sure their voices are heard and their needs and perspectives are taken into account.
Employees deserve better.
Having solid policies and processes in place are important, but they serve best as a guide. They aren’t designed to repair conflict in a sustainable way. They manage a bureaucratic procedure.
Current strategies are often interpreted as either doing nothing, investigating (and then doing nothing and/or severing relationships in the process, even when the allegations are upheld) or, at times, even perpetuating “cancel culture”. The conversation around bullying, harassment, and discrimination in the workplace has never been louder. It’s clear that current practices that sit within hierarchy and bureaucracy perpetuate these toxic workplace behaviours.
Employees want and deserve to work within a safe and positive community.
The solution: Restorative Practices
Why do we spend so much time trying to prove who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong? And why does our work finish once the investigation has determined an outcome - when the processes have oftentimes caused even more harm than the conflict in the first place?
What’s the alternative?
Restorative Practices are a relational way of repairing and preventing harm.
They arose out of a restorative justice framework, and so give those directly involved in a situation the choice of how to respond to their situation with the support they need to do so. Those involved not only include those harmed but also those responsible for the harm. The approach empowers people to take control of their situation to create solutions that work for them and their community.
Restorative Practices inherently recognise that managing conflict is NOT a one-size-fits-all approach.
In this perspective, we first seek to listen, and ask those most impacted:
“What’s important about what’s happened?”
“How have you and others been affected?”
“What do you need now to see things put right?”
These guiding questions ensure that we are placing the needs of individuals first, helping to guide any next steps.
Founded on the values of Relationship, Respect, Responsibility, and Repair, Restorative Practices develop social and communication skills and enable conflicts to be resolved peaceably in a way that promotes mutual understanding and restored mana and dignity for all involved. A restorative approach seeks to reduce rather than compound harm.
Relationships and conflict belong to the people experiencing them, they don’t belong to HR. Restorative practices help us to prioritise those people’s humanity - not their place in a process.
Understanding the HR landscape, Restorative Services knows that we can create more connected, thriving communities when we focus on supporting individuals to actually repair harm done and prevent it from happening again.
It’s what employees deserve. It’s how employees are retained. And it’s how employers become part of the change towards a safer and more sustainable workplace.