Workplace Restoration
The investigation answers what happened. Restoration addresses what happens next.
A complaint, an investigation, a mediated settlement, a difficult departure. These events resolve a dispute, but they rarely repair a workplace. Colleagues who were witnesses, respondents, or complainants still share a lunchroom. Managers are expected to lead teams that no longer trust them, or each other. Left alone, that damage quietly compounds: disengagement, absenteeism, turnover, and often the next complaint.
Workplace restoration is the structured, deliberate work of rebuilding trust and working relationships so a team can function again. It can follow an investigation or mediation, or stand alone wherever conflict, disruption, or a breakdown in leadership has left a workplace strained. Ella works with organizations across Canada, in person and virtually.
What restoration looks like
Every engagement is shaped by an initial assessment, but a typical process draws on some combination of:
Workplace assessment. Confidential interviews and review to understand the state of the workplace, the sources of strain, and what repair requires, including formal workplace fairness assessments.
Facilitated conversations. Carefully structured one-on-one and small-group conversations between colleagues whose working relationships have broken down.
Group and team processes. Facilitated sessions that rebuild shared expectations, working agreements, and communication norms across a team or department.
Leadership coaching. One-on-one support for the managers and leaders who must carry the workplace forward. Ella is a certified organizational coach (University of British Columbia) and a member of the International Coaching Federation. Coaching within a restoration engagement is informed by 20 years of employment law, but it is coaching, not legal advice, and no solicitor-client relationship is created.
Follow-up and measurement. Restoration is not a single meeting. We build in check-ins so progress holds.
Why Ella
Restoration sits at the intersection of law, conflict resolution, and human behaviour, and Ella's career spans all three. She is a certified Workplace Fairness Analyst trained in advanced workplace restoration, a certified organizational coach, a Qualified Mediator with the ADR Institute of Canada trained in intensive mediation at Harvard Law School, and an employment and labour lawyer with 20 years in practice. Before law, she spent more than a decade in front-line therapeutic, behavioural, and counselling work with children, youth, and adults in crisis, experience that still shapes how she reads a room, structures a difficult conversation, and cares for the people in it.
She also knows this work from the inside. As a senior university executive, she was recruited specifically to repair a deeply strained relationship between a faculty association and a leadership team, standing up a new office, rebuilding processes, and re-establishing working trust between parties who had stopped talking. It is the same work restoration engagements demand: patient, structured, and human.
When to call
An investigation has concluded and the team needs to move forward
A complaint was resolved, but the working relationships weren't
Conflict between leaders, or between a leader and their team, is affecting the whole workplace
A restructuring, merger, or leadership change has left a team strained
A manager needs individual coaching support through or after a workplace conflict