In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with David Ryan Barcega Castro-Harris, founder of Amplify RJ, for a conversation about what restorative justice actually looks like when you bring it inside a workplace. David has spent years teaching restorative practices in schools, community settings, and criminal legal systems, and he's built Amplify RJ into a digital platform that helps practitioners understand restorative justice as a way of being, not a program bolted onto a compliance workflow.
What stuck with us was how different David's framing is from what HR leaders usually hear. Most workplace conflict resolution starts with a question like: who broke the rule, and what's the consequence? Restorative justice starts with a different question: what was the harm, and what does repair look like for everyone affected. That shift sounds small. In practice, it reshapes how investigations, discipline, and post-incident relationships actually play out.
What Restorative Justice Means Inside a Workplace
Restorative justice is a philosophy, not a tactic. It centers repairing harm, restoring relationships, and giving both the person harmed and the person who caused harm a voice in what happens next. It does not mean skipping accountability. It means building accountability in a way that is relational rather than purely transactional.
For HR and Employee Relations teams, the practical implication is that every reported concern is also a story about relationships. A formal grievance filed against a manager usually has more threads than the incident itself: a breakdown in trust, a pattern of small slights, a policy that never landed with the team. Restorative practices ask you to surface those threads before writing the disposition.
The research backs it up. SHRM reporting on workplace incivility found that employees who experience or witness rude behavior lose an average of 36 minutes of productivity per incident, with total daily cost in the billions across the US workforce. Punitive-only responses rarely bring that time back. Repair-oriented responses, when they are used well, change the conditions that produced the incident in the first place. You can read more in SHRM's data on manager-led incivility responses.
How Restorative Practices Map to ER Workflows
Does restorative justice replace the investigation?
No. A rigorous intake, documented dispute resolution path, and clear factual findings still matter. What changes is what happens after the findings. Instead of a memo and a warning, the resolution often includes a facilitated conversation where the harmed party can describe impact in their own words, the person who caused harm can take meaningful responsibility, and leadership can agree to concrete changes.
What kinds of workplace cases fit best?
Interpersonal conflict, low-level incivility, team breakdowns after layoffs or reorgs, and most situations short of a hostile work environment finding. Cases involving violence, sexual harassment, or clear legal exposure usually require a different process. Restorative practices can still support post-resolution repair once the legal piece is resolved, but they are not a substitute.
What Actually Works When You Bring Restorative Practices In
Start with training, not a new policy
Most failed restorative rollouts die because an HR team drafts a policy before anyone knows how to facilitate a circle. Train facilitators first. Run internal practice rounds. Only codify the approach once you have a small group of people who can actually hold a hard conversation without flinching.
Pair it with strong case management
Restorative practices sit on top of clean intake, documentation, and followthrough. If your case load is running through spreadsheets and forwarded emails, no amount of good facilitation will fix the trust gap. Teams using purpose-built HR case management to track concerns consistently are in a much stronger position to offer a restorative option, because the data, the timeline, and the people involved are easy to pull up.
Build in real consent
Restorative conversations only work when both parties genuinely choose to be there. Pressuring a harmed employee into a sit-down with their harasser is not restorative, it is coercive. Build a clear opt-in at the start, and make the alternative path equally resourced.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Employee relations teams are the natural home for restorative practices, because ER is already doing the work of sorting through the thorny cases that sit between coaching and termination. Tools like structured workplace investigation workflows and dedicated ER operating models give teams the scaffolding they need to decide which cases benefit from a restorative lens and which ones do not.
ER teams also tell us the hardest part of adopting restorative practices is not training or tooling, it is making time for the follow-up. A restorative agreement that lives in a Google Doc no one revisits is barely better than a written warning. Tie every restorative outcome to a scheduled check-in at 30, 60, and 90 days, and have the facilitator, not just the manager, own that review. The mediation playbook most organizations run on assumes the case closes when the document is signed. Restorative work assumes the opposite. The document is the starting line.
Aligning legal, compliance, and ER early
One of the biggest barriers to restorative work is an internal misalignment between ER, legal, and compliance partners. Get the three in the same room before the first case. Agree on which matter types route to a restorative track, which stay on a traditional disciplinary track, and how you document both cleanly for downstream risk review.
Frequently Asked Questions About Restorative Justice at Work
Is restorative justice appropriate for harassment cases?
Generally no, not as a first-line response. Harassment claims require a thorough investigation and a defensible record. Restorative elements can show up later, for instance in team repair after a manager is removed, but they are not a substitute for the investigation itself.
How long does a restorative process take compared to traditional discipline?
It usually takes longer on the front end because you are preparing both parties, building consent, and facilitating a real conversation. It tends to take less time on the back end because fewer cases return as repeat complaints. Most teams see the time even out within two or three quarters.
Who should facilitate restorative conversations?
A trained facilitator, ideally someone outside the immediate reporting line of either party. Many organizations train a small internal bench and also keep an external facilitator on retainer for higher-stakes matters. The worst choice is the direct manager of the person who caused harm.
How do you measure whether restorative practices are working?
Track repeat incident rates, time-to-resolution, self-reported repair on follow-up surveys, and retention of the harmed party. If the harmed employee leaves within six months, the process did not actually repair anything, regardless of what the signed agreement says.
Can small HR teams do this without a dedicated program?
Yes, if you start small. Pick one or two case types where the stakes are lower, train two facilitators, and run a handful of cases before you codify anything. A lightweight pilot beats a heavyweight program that never launches.
Additional grounding from SHRM's toolkit on managing workplace conflict shows that structured resolution practices reduce repeat incidents and shorten time-to-resolution compared to ad hoc approaches. Restorative practices extend that pattern by adding the repair layer that traditional conflict management often skips.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
David's work makes a case that HR leaders increasingly recognize in their own practice. Punitive responses are necessary in some cases and insufficient in most. The real question is whether your team has the training, the tooling, and the organizational backing to offer something better when a case calls for it.
Restorative justice is not a silver bullet, and David would be the first to say so. It is a discipline that takes investment, practice, and the humility to acknowledge that most workplace harm is produced by systems, not individuals acting alone. For teams willing to make that investment, the payoff shows up in lower repeat incidents, higher retention among harmed employees, and a workplace where people actually trust the process.
See how AllVoices supports repair-oriented case management across your ER team.
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