Our Background

Some History of Workplace Conferencing in New Zealand

Workplace Conferencing is an organisation that bases its corporate management processes on principles of Restorative Justice.

Workplace Conferencing is the one of the only organizations in New Zealand that is equipped to bring these processes and principles into the business arena.

Howard Zehr a leading American advocate of Restorative Justice talks of these principles as:
     1. focusing on the harms and consequent needs of all participants
     2. addressing the obligations that result from these harms
     3. the use of inclusive, collaborative processes
     4. involving those with a stake in the situation
     5. seeking to put right the wrongs.

These principles are rooted in a set of values which recently have been put forward by the Restorative Justice movement in NZ as: Participation, respect, honesty, humility, interconnectedness, accountability, empowerment and hope.

A key development in the development of restorative justice conferencing in Australasia is generally agreed to have been NZ’s 1989 Children and Young Persons and their Families Act. Under this legislation, a process traditionally used by Maori was modified and adopted for use in the national juvenile justice system. This process is known as a family group conference. Elements of the NZ reform were imported into Australia and further developed by Transformative Justice Australia into what is now known as Workplace Conferencing, to deal with incidents of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. Early clients of the process ranged from the coal and steel industry, through to firms in electronic media and information technology, and to personnel agencies and church communities.

A conference allows for the structured expression of emotions, which in turn encourages the gradual minimization of negative emotions and the gradual maximization of positive emotions. Another useful framework for understanding the philosophy and practise of conferencing is provided by the peoples of North America who identify four points or four directions for the development of human potential: the intellectual, the emotional, the physical and the spiritual. Conferencing addresses these four points and generates over time systemic change.

Our facilitators in NZ were trained in Workplace Conferencing by Margaret Thorsborne of Transformative Justice Queensland in 2001. All trained are currently practising restorative justice facilitation in NZ via provider groups contracted to the Ministry of Justice pilot on Restorative Justice. Workplace Conferencing took this process into the corporate sector, with stunning results for a variety of applications.