From the desk of Franzi Schimm, Founder of Cape Consulting — There was one thing I kept thinking about after my conversation with Danielle Ratcliffe, an experienced workplace mediator. Why are we so much more comfortable offering people a formal process than we are giving them a safe place to have an uncomfortable conversation?
Danielle works with organisations and individuals to help navigate workplace conflict, particularly where relationships have started to break down or communication has become difficult. When we first spoke, I found myself asking her question after question about mediation, from when it works and what actually happens in the room, to why so many employers seem to consider it only once a situation has already escalated. We quickly realised these were probably questions our clients had too, so we decided to record the conversation.
What stayed with me most was the idea that workplace mediation can be far more useful when we stop treating it as the last stop before things fall apart.
At Cape Consulting, we’re often brought into situations when something has already happened. There may be a grievance on the table, a relationship may have deteriorated, someone may have made a complaint, or people may simply have reached the point where every interaction feels loaded. By then, everyone is carrying history into the room, and that makes it much harder to separate the original issue from everything that has happened since.
That is why I wanted to understand more about what mediation could look like much earlier in the process.
Workplace mediation doesn’t have to be a last resort
One of Danielle’s clearest points was that the chances of reaching a positive outcome are often much better when mediation happens earlier. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it’s not always how organisations behave.
Someone makes a comment in a meeting that doesn’t land well. A manager and employee begin finding communication more difficult. Two colleagues come away from the same situation with very different views of what happened. Someone feels dismissed, misunderstood or overlooked, but nobody raises it because it doesn’t yet feel serious enough to warrant a bigger conversation.
Then something else happens. Another comment lands badly, an email gets read in the worst possible tone, or a meeting becomes tense. Before long, the original disagreement is no longer really the problem. The problem is that weeks of frustration have built up around it, and each new interaction gets interpreted through that history.
This is where managing conflict at work becomes much harder, because the issue is no longer simply what happened. It’s what people now believe about each other.
Sometimes the most useful intervention is recognising that something clearly is not right and creating the right environment for people to talk about it. That might mean an informal conversation, a manager facilitating something carefully, or an independent workplace mediator stepping in where neutrality matters. The important point is that intervention does not always have to mean escalation.
Conflict rarely stays between two people
Another part of our conversation that really resonated with me was the way Danielle described conflict escalation, because it reflects what we often see in employee relations work.
When someone feels deeply caught up in workplace conflict, it starts taking up a huge amount of mental space. They replay conversations, worry about meetings, second-guess emails and start anticipating the next difficult interaction before it has even happened. That stress can affect their work, their confidence and, in some cases, whether they want to be in the room with that person at all.
Then other people get drawn in.
Someone talks to a colleague because they need to vent. That colleague understandably forms a view. Someone else hears another version. Over time, people can begin taking sides without necessarily having the full picture, and what started as a difficult relationship between two people can begin to affect the wider team.
At that point, the organisation is no longer simply trying to repair one working relationship, instead they’re dealing with the ripple effect.
There are, of course, situations where a formal process is absolutely necessary. Serious misconduct needs to be taken seriously, allegations may need investigating, and there are times when an organisation has to establish facts before it can decide what should happen next. But having a formal process available does not mean it always needs to be the first thing we reach for.
What I like about mediation is the ownership
I think some of the nervousness around mediation comes from the idea that two angry people are simply put into a room together and expected to sort themselves out. That is not what Danielle described at all.
A proper mediation process creates structure and boundaries around the conversation. People usually have an individual, confidential conversation with the mediator beforehand, participation is voluntary, and the mediator facilitates the discussion rather than deciding who is right and who is wrong.
That distinction matters because, with mediation, the people involved retain ownership of the outcome.
Formal HR processes sometimes require somebody else to reach a conclusion, and that can be entirely appropriate. Someone investigates, someone reviews the evidence and someone makes a finding. Mediation asks a different question: can the people living with this situation agree on a way forward themselves?
I think that can be incredibly empowering. It gives people an opportunity to explain how they have experienced the situation, hear another perspective and help shape what happens next, rather than simply waiting for an outcome to be imposed on them.
A safe space doesn’t mean an easy conversation
Something else I took from our conversation is that creating a safe space at work does not mean removing discomfort. In fact, sometimes the conversation people most need to have is uncomfortable.
Someone may need to hear how their behaviour landed, even if that was never their intention. Someone else may discover that the motivation they had attributed to another person simply was not there. Both things can be true, and that nuance often disappears once people become entrenched in their own version of what happened.
Danielle talked about mediation in situations involving serious allegations, including bullying, racism and sexism. Those are not lightweight conversations, and mediation will not be appropriate in every case. But she has also seen situations where, after the right process and preparation, mediation has created genuinely positive and sometimes moving outcomes.
That stayed with me, not because mediation magically fixes every relationship, because it does not, but because I think we sometimes underestimate people’s ability to resolve conflict when they are given the right environment in which to do it.
My takeaway for employers? Don’t wait for the paperwork
If something feels wrong within a team, pay attention to it. You don’t need to label every disagreement a grievance or turn every awkward interaction into an investigation, but you also should not ignore something until everyone has taken sides and the relationship has become much harder to repair.
Sometimes an early conversation is enough. But sometimes people simply need help saying something they have not known how to say, and sometimes an independent mediator can give both sides the confidence and neutrality needed to have that conversation properly.
For me, that was probably the biggest takeaway from speaking with Danielle. Mediation is not just something to consider once workplace conflict has reached crisis point. Used well, it can be a way of giving people a better chance to sort things out before it gets there.
Watch the full In Conversation with Danielle and Franzi on YouTube
Explore workplace mediation, employment mediation, different approaches to dispute resolution, when mediation works best and what the process actually feels like for the people involved.