Restorative Workplace Accountability: An Alternative to Traditional Performance and Conflict Management
The tools we’re using to manage work performance, navigate conflict resolution, and hold staff accountable are not working. And more than that, they’re causing harm.
If you’re ever led a staff, you’ve probably struggled to navigate these tricky dynamics. And if you have ever had a manager, you’ve probably been harmed by traditional workplace accountability practices, especially if you are Black, a non-Black person of color, a woman of color, a transperson, neurodivergent, a disabled person, or someone who has been incarcerated.
A leader of an organization might be dealing with personnel issues like interpersonal conflict and turnover. Or management issues like retraining, repeating the same coaching conversations over and over, struggling to know when to escalate to a performance improvement plan (PIP) or even termination. And then there are the larger cultural issues at work like addressing microaggressions, staff being resistant to values-aligned change, and marginalized people reporting unfair treatment and harm. These are not personnel or individual problems, these are actually systems problems, and that system is accountability (or lack thereof).
The tools we’re used to:
Performance Improvement Plans:
Often, a performance improvement plan comes too late and is used as documentation before firing someone. PIPs rarely work because they’re built for compliance and liability, not learning and repair.
Without clear feedback channels, feedback gets delayed or withheld while resentment and frustration builds and the escalation to a PIP feels like a surprise to the employee. Additionally, when there’s a lack of structure dictating who gets a PIP and why, we find it’s often neurodivergent people or Black women who get hit with PIPs the most. The feedback sometimes reads like a list of personality defects, without a structured support plan to work toward improvement.
Mediation:
Mediation assumes a conflict is symmetrical. It treats the situation like two people just misunderstood each other. But often one person feels harmed, and the other person doesn’t even register their behavior as a problem. Or one person holds more informal power, or communicates differently, or is neurodivergent, or comes from a culture where direct confrontation is high-risk. So the conversation becomes about managing feelings instead of changing behavior.
Everyone was polite, everyone said the right things, maybe even apologized, but still walked away feeling unfinished, and the problem never actually disappears. So now you’re back to managing tension in meetings, side conversations, and the slow resentment that drains everyone’s energy (not to mention the person who feels harmed has not gotten repair).
“Just communicate directly”:
We know that conflict avoidance is a characteristic of white supremacy culture, but I also know you can't just say "be direct" without creating a container within which doing so is safe. We’re asking people to unlearn generations of cultural expectations and trauma. Not everyone can or should be expected to give direct feedback all the time.
Indirect feedback is still valid feedback, and if we’re only willing to receive feedback in one narrow way, we’re not actually open to the feedback that matters. The problem is not a lack of willingness to communicate, it’s a lack of structure and accessible feedback channels, and gossip culture is usually a product of that.
People don’t talk behind each other’s backs because they’re immature or malicious. They do it because they don’t know where feedback is supposed to go, or because it doesn’t feel safe to take it directly to the person.
Accountability comes too late and is used as discipline
Without early intervention systems and processes for accountability and feedback, we default to dominant culture and informal power dynamics. And informal power tracks race, gender, neurotype, communication style, proximity to leadership, who’s protected, who’s policed. That’s when bias, inconsistency, and burnout happen. People begin feeling like they’re being treated differently even when leadership is doing their best to be fair — because every situation becomes custom.
Even leaders with equity intentions avoid feedback entirely, giving a bunch of chances under the guise of support. But what happens is that staff are not being invested in, they don’t know they’re not meeting expectations, tension builds, resentment builds, and then they get singled out. Avoiding feedback isn’t kinder, it often sets someone up to be blindsided later. This is why ‘good intentions’ aren’t enough. If equity is real, it has to be structural.
This isn’t about bad bosses or individual shortcomings, the workplace systems we inherited are built on a punitive, policing-based model that’s been normalized as ‘professionalism’. These systems center compliance, liability, risk management, and control. Then accountability becomes about determining fault and deciding consequences.
Even equity and justice-centered organizations are operating in this structure, and that’s why it feels bad, and that’s why we avoid it. When feedback isn't normalized or practiced frequently enough, accountability feels like going nuclear. The only time someone gets “called in” is when something serious happens, which means every call-in feels like you’re in trouble, even when the feedback is minor. And when accountability feels like punishment, you sacrifice psychological safety.
Reframing accountability
Believing accountability only means owning when you fucked up, apologizing after harm has already happened, or “getting called out” when something goes wrong, makes the idea of accountability inherently feels like punishment. But accountability isn’t just about harm or mistakes.
We’re accountable to each other. We’re accountable to our work. We’re accountable for getting XYZ done. And when we can systematize proactive accountability with a universal structure, it de-personalizes feedback and makes it easier to deal with things directly. And I think we can find that structure in restorative justice.
What’s restorative justice?
Restorative justice is an alternative to policing: responding to harm with accountability plans, reflection, remediation, and repair — not punishment. It’s coupled with call-in culture, which is a way to address micro and macroaggressions without public shaming (call-out culture) and cancellation. Restorative justice is built on the assumption that everyone is capable of redemption if given the opportunity, and that punishment and isolation are ineffective strategies to guide them there.
Restorative justice was built by and for community. And our workplaces are communities. So I’ve built a model to translate these systems into work culture, not just for conflict resolution, but for performance management too.
Cultural accountability is how you show up with your team — behavior, bias, microaggressions, norms, and conflict.
Work accountability is what you’re accountable for doing — deadlines, follow-through, quality, reliability, communication.
Performance and culture are intertwined. The ways we show up in either category can cause harm, especially when power and bias are in the room.
What does Restorative Accountability in the workplace look like?
The specifics will look a little different for each organization, and I recommend co-creating these policies with staff.
Call-ins, feedback channels, and annual reviews
A normalized call-in structure that can be adapted for brief check-ins or more serious feedback, with a built in way to indicate feedback is coming and standards for closure
Feedback channels that flow upward and downward and catch issues early, before things are already tense
Transparent, collaborative reviews and ongoing feedback rituals as prevention rather than evaluation
Accountability Framework
Pre-determined tiers of intervention for correction from self-reflection tools, to supported work plans that replace the traditional PIP and actually invest in employee development
Guidance for what tools to use and when
Early intervention before things escalate rather than choosing between avoidance and blowing things up
Clear closure practices so people can move on together
Ethical termination
Clear criteria for behavior/performance that could lead to termination, ensuring everyone in the organization knows what that looks like
Transparent communications when someone begins approaching risk of termination, and walk them through what the process looks like
Collaboration on final day, severance, and unemployment benefits
A documented strategy for how feedback in exit interviews will be addressed and integrated
Restorative Workplace Accountability is about changing conditions, rather than just changing behavior. Equity cannot be achieved through values alone. It requires structural operating systems that make fair treatment the default outcome. This is how we stop recreating policing inside nonprofits. This is how we prevent accountability from being impacted by bias. This is how we build workplaces where people can grow, repair, and be treated consistently — not punished, avoided, or managed on in the moment decisions.
Workplaces are one of the largest daily governing institutions in modern life. If they are organized around domination, society normalizes domination. If they are organized around shared humanity, society practices shared humanity. We can use workplaces as the mechanism for changing how humans relate to authority and to each other by transforming workplaces from sites of managed labor into sites of shared stewardship — so that people practice justice daily, not just advocate for it abstractly.
Restorative Accountability Training
Join me in a 3-part training to learn my framework for Restorative Workplace Accountability and leave with practical tools you can implement right away to start shifting the accountability culture at your organization.
Restorative Accountability is a 3-part live training series designed for leaders and HR/Ops professionals who want practical, equity-centered ways to address performance, conflict, and harm — without relying on punishment, shame, or informal power dynamics.
Tuesday Cohort: Feb 24th, March 3rd, March 10th– 10:30am-12:00pm PST
Thursday Cohort: Feb 26th, March 5th, March 12th – 4:00pm-5:30pm PST
Single seats and team bundles available. And if your whole leadership team would benefit from a shared approach, I’m offering limited customized team sessions as well. (Also helpful if the class schedule doesn’t work for you)