What it is not
Not arbitration. Not an HR investigation. Not a PIP with a different name.
Workplace mediation at Percipio Company is a restorative process grounded in the work of John Ford and Ron Kelly. It is power-aware, structured, and confidential. It does not determine fault. It does not replace legal counsel.
What it does: it creates the conditions for two or more people who need to continue working together — or coexist in the same organization — to reach a durable, functional agreement about how they will do that.
Matthew Cahill works closely with employment law counsel, including The Mitzel Group, when legal context is relevant. The mediation process is designed to complement, not conflict with, the legal process.
Who it's for
When formal processes have run out of runway.
Executive pair conflicts where both individuals are too valuable to lose and too entrenched to resolve it alone. Leadership team dynamics where unaddressed friction is degrading decision quality.
Cross-functional disputes that have calcified into permanent territorial conflicts. Post-investigation environments where the investigation is over but the damage to team trust and psychological safety remains.
Matthew works in situations where HR has done what HR can do, and what remains is a human problem that requires a human solution.
The process
Structured. Confidential. Time-bounded.
A typical mediation engagement spans four to eight weeks and includes individual sessions with each party, a joint session, and a follow-up agreement review. All sessions are confidential.
The process surfaces underlying dynamics — power imbalances, unspoken expectations, accumulated relational debt — and works through them systematically rather than papering over them.
Most engagements conclude with a written working agreement that both parties have co-authored and committed to — not a legal document, but a behavioral compact.