Founder and principal consultant

Working with HR leaders, CEOs and boards on workplace conflict, culture and conduct risk.

Janet Vantriet is one of Australia’s few Certified Organisational Ombuds (IOA). She’s an AMDRAS-accredited mediator, ICF-certified coach, CAHRI-certified senior HR professional, and holds an MBA in Human Resources Management. The full list is below.

After two decades inside people and culture functions: in resources, in government, in large corporates, Janet kept seeing the same pattern. Talented people avoiding hard conversations. Leaders caught between fairness and compliance. Organisations reacting to problems that could have been prevented if there had been a way to surface them earlier.

Traditional HR structures, she came to believe, weren’t designed for that work. They were built for process, not for the kind of conversation that defuses something before it hardens into a complaint. EquipMe Coaching & Consulting was founded to fill that gap. A confidential, independent partner sitting alongside HR, the C-suite and boards, helping handle conflict, conduct and culture in ways the internal structures couldn’t.

The work draws on the international ombuds tradition of confidentiality, neutrality, independence, informality – and brings it into Australian organisations that want to handle these matters differently. And it is animated by an advocacy leadership philosophy: the belief that leaders who are willing to advocate — for people, for fairness, for honest conversation — even when it is uncomfortable, build more resilient organisations than those who defer, delegate or wait for a formal process to force their hand.

Janet has lived and worked across cultures. That experience shapes the practice. It means recognising that identity, communication style and cultural value-set influence how conflict shows up, and that the same intervention will land differently depending on who’s in the room. It also means a strong default to humility: asking before assuming.