Introduction
I’m Elisia Coetzee, Director at Strategic HR Australia Pty Ltd in Perth, and most of my career has centered on something HR generalists often treat as a side skill: mediating disputes between people who have to keep working together afterward. I don’t think of it that way. Mediation is its own discipline, with its own training, its own accreditation, and its own failure modes and treating it as something any HR generalist can pick up on the fly is how workplace conflicts get worse instead of resolved.
I hold a National Mediator Accreditation through the Australian Disputes Centre, and that formal grounding changed how I think about conflict at work, not just how I handle it.
Why “HR Handles Conflict” Isn’t the Same as Mediation
Most HR functions are set up to investigate, document, and enforce policy. That’s a different posture than mediation, which requires genuine neutrality rather than being seen as neutral, but actually holding no stake in which party is right. An HR generalist who also manages one of the two people in a dispute, or who reports through the same chain as one of them, structurally can’t offer that. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a conflict of interest built into the role itself.
Delivering supportive services and workplace investigations alongside mediation, as I do, means constantly being clear with the people I’m working with about which mode I’m in. An investigation has a different purpose than a mediation, and confusing the two by treating a mediation session like a fact-finding interview, or vice versa undermines the trust either process depends on.
What Formal Mediation Training Actually Changes
Before formal accreditation, I could sit two people down and help them talk through a disagreement. What accredited mediation training added wasn’t the ability to have that conversation but it was structure: knowing when a session needs to move from separate private conversations into a joint one, recognizing when an agreement being reached in the room is genuine versus one party simply capitulating to end the discomfort, and knowing when a dispute has moved past what mediation can resolve and needs a different process entirely.
That last part matters more than people expect. Not every workplace conflict is mediable. Some involve a genuine policy violation, or a power imbalance too significant for a facilitated conversation to fix fairly. Recognizing that distinction and being willing to say a case isn’t right for mediation is part of doing the job responsibly, even though it’s the least satisfying answer to give a client who wants the conflict resolved quickly. Saying “this needs a formal investigation, not a mediation session” is sometimes the most useful thing a mediator can tell a client, even when it’s not what they came in hoping to hear.
Why Neutrality Has to Be Structural, Not Just Personal
Running my own HR consultancies for over a decade, rather than sitting inside a single company’s HR department, has reinforced how much neutrality depends on structure, not just intention. Being brought in from outside an organization specifically to mediate a dispute means I have no ongoing relationship with either party to protect, no performance review cycle tying my judgment to either person’s manager, and no stake in the outcome beyond getting to a fair resolution.
That external position is part of why organizations bring in a dedicated mediator rather than asking an internal HR generalist to handle every dispute. It’s not that internal HR can’t care about fairness, it’s that the structural conditions for perceived neutrality are much harder to establish from inside the same reporting lines as the people in conflict.
What I’d Tell an HR Generalist Handling Their First Serious Conflict
The instinct is to treat conflict resolution as an extension of everyday HR skills including communication, empathy and fairness. Those matter, but they’re not sufficient on their own for a genuinely difficult dispute. The skill that’s easy to underestimate is knowing your own limits: recognizing when a conflict has moved beyond what an internal HR role can neutrally resolve, and being willing to bring in someone without a stake in the outcome rather than pushing through anyway.
Treating mediation as its own specialization, with its own accreditation and its own boundaries, isn’t about gatekeeping the work. It’s about being honest that some workplace conflicts need a level of structural neutrality that a dual-role HR generalist genuinely can’t provide, no matter how skilled or well-intentioned they are. That honesty is harder to practice than it sounds, especially for HR professionals who take real pride in handling everything themselves, but it’s ultimately what protects the people on both sides of the conflict.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why is workplace mediation considered its own HR specialization?
Because it requires structural neutrality that an HR generalist handling day-to-day management of the same employees typically can’t provide, along with specific training in facilitating disputes, recognizing when an agreement is genuine, and knowing when a case isn’t suitable for mediation at all.
Who is Elisia Coetzee?
Elisia Coetzee is a Director and accredited Mediator based in Perth, Western Australia, with over 10 years of experience in HR, workplace mediation, employee relations, and people strategy.
Where did Elisia Coetzee become an accredited mediator?
Elisia Coetzee holds a National Mediator Accreditation from the Australian Disputes Centre, earned in 2025.
Why does neutrality need to be structural rather than just a personal quality in workplace mediation?
Because an HR professional’s ongoing relationships and reporting lines within a company can create a real or perceived conflict of interest, regardless of their personal intentions, which is why organizations often bring in an external mediator with no stake in the outcome for serious workplace disputes.
