ASTER GRIEVANCE

We were holding one of our regular supervision sessions at Aster with the restorative experts in the organisation, during which it transpired that two of the people present, Jack and Dave, had been involved in the same case. It was a case that had gone to Grievance and then to a restorative process; Dave, was involved as the investigator in the formal Grievance and Jack as the facilitator in the restorative process. Neither realised that they had both been involved in the same case and it was only when Jack was sharing their participant's unhappy experience of the formal Grievance process that Dave said "I was the investigator on that grievance, I hated it too".

The case was as a result of an alleged homophobic remark made by Party A to Party B. Party B went to HR who offered them a restorative conversation but they said that they wanted to go down the formal grievance route.

Dave, who had been assigned the Grievance as investigator said during the supervision session:

"As soon as I got the case I thought, 'why aren't they doing restorative, this makes no sense'. The whole way through, everything the harmed party was saying, I was just thinking, 'restorative would make this better.' I did the investigation, I hated it, it is all about proving right/wrong and evidence and in most cases it is almost impossible to do that, it is one person's word against another. In the end there wasn't enough evidence to prove anything and no one left happy."

The harmed party went back to HR and they were again offered a restorative conversation and this time they said yes. Jack, from the supervision group was invited to hold the conversation.

Jack said:

"I was nervous about it and I did lots of preparation work with them to make sure it was going to be positive dialogue. They both left the restorative conversation feeling so much better. The harmed party felt heard and the harmer was really clear that they had heard the impact and felt remorse. They went away chatting and when I did a follow-up afterwards they both said that everything was fine and the air was cleared. I loved the whole experience from start to finish."

Had both Jack and Dave not been present in supervision we would have never heard these two diametrically opposing experiences that sum up the difference in the outcomes for everyone of formal processes compared to restorative conversations. As a result, both men then came to the annual RJC conference in 2020 and shared their markedly different experiences of the two processes. It was a pleasure to hear them illustrate the difference at the RJC annual conference.