About Us
We are Colleen and Santiago, and we found each other in the worker cooperative movement, pulled together by its promise: that workers can share power, that work can be more just, and that organizations can hold themselves responsible to each other and the greater good. We are also good friends who enjoy working together. That joy, combined with our complementary skills and perspectives, enables us to provide an exceptional client experience together.
Too often we watched essential missions undermined from the inside, not by bad intentions but by gaps in the ways the people are supported: a team without shared clarity, colleagues who don’t know how to give or receive feedback, the everyday collaboration skills that democratic work asks for but collaborators don’t always arrive with. We built Fractal HR to meet that need, to serve and help scale a movement we both believe in. Our aim is at once simple and enormous: more workplaces where power-sharing is the norm and human dignity is at the forefront.
Our Team
Colleen Skemp, Co-founder
Colleen is a senior HR consultant specializing in democratic organizations, drawing on over a decade of experience as a cooperative worker-owner and workplace leader. She pairs compliance with essential collaboration techniques to help workplaces live their values together. By bringing nonviolent communication, sociocracy, and restorative practice into balance with traditional HR, she offers clients holistic solutions that honor their values, deepen community, and support a different way of doing business. She lives and works in La Crosse, WI.
Santiago González Núñez, Co-founder
Santiago is a holistic cooperative business expert. He understands worker cooperatives from many sides: governance, people systems, IT infrastructure, sales, marketing, operations, and accounting. A social worker by training, he holds a master's degree in cooperative business management from Mondragon University in Spain. He brings more than a decade in cooperative research, development, and movement building. He is Colombian-American and works from Bogotá.
Our Approach
We do HR differently.
For a lot of people, HR calls to mind something rigid or distant, a function built to protect the organization more than the people inside it. We believe it can be something else: a practice that helps a workplace and everyone in it thrive.
What makes our support distinct is what we bring together. Three kinds of expertise that rarely live in one practice:
Solid compliance and structure.
Clear policy, sound processes, and legal footing that protect your organization and ensure everyone is treated fairly and consistently.
Fluency in democratic and cooperative workplaces.
We understand how member-ownership, shared governance, and consensus reshape what HR is called to do, and we build people systems that fit these structures.
Facilitation, mediation, and culture support.
Rooted in Nonviolent Communication and restorative practice, this is the relational work that helps groups build trust, move through conflict, and return to connection.
Our Services
HR infrastructure, customized for your culture and structure
HR infrastructure consists of the core people systems every workplace needs to function effectively, fairly, and sustainably. We design and build these foundational systems in close collaboration with your team, including policy and handbook development, hiring and onboarding processes, performance frameworks, compensation structures, and succession planning.
Written with restorative practices in mind, this infrastructure does more than ensure compliance; it provides the structural foundation necessary for psychologically safe and highly collaborative teams.
Facilitation, conflict mediation, culture and connection support
The relational work that helps a group build trust, move through conflict, and return to connection.
Rooted in Nonviolent Communication and restorative practice, this work may include group facilitation, consensus building, conflict transformation and mediation, restorative circles, and other practices for building new norms that keep your culture aligned with your values.
Capacity building: advising, consulting, and training for leaders and teams
Whether providing strategic guidance for a key leader or full-team training, we help you strengthen your people systems from the inside.
This may include advisory support, HR and people-systems consulting, leadership guidance, and interactive workshops in Nonviolent Communication, restorative practice, feedback, and collaborative decision-making.
Sensitive processes: accountability processes and
investigations
When sensitive issues arise, we help you handle them cleanly as an outside partner, holding the perspectives of all parties. We protect internal relationships while ensuring processes remain fair, objective, and trustworthy.
Key services include:
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Outsourced accountability processes
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Outsourced investigation processes
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Terminations and separations
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Complex conflict mediation/ transformation
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Consensus building & facilitation for critical collective decisions
Pricing
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À la carte. $125/hour, no minimum commitment.
Ideal for leadership coaching, evaluating personnel situations, advising on systems, communication practices, compliance responsibilities, and general workplace advice and support.
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Project-based. Scoped to match the specific needs, deliverables, and timeline of your organization.
These can be custom-made policies, training, workshops and other consulting engagements.
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Ongoing packages. A set number of hours each month at a predictable monthly rate, for teams who want steady, semi-embedded support.
Flexible for project work, coaching, training, and ongoing guidance as desired.
How we work with you
Flexible fractional support
Executive-level HR without full-time overhead, tailored for cooperatives, growing teams, small organizations, and nonprofits.
An outside perspective you can trust
When something sensitive comes up like an investigation, separation, or conflict, asking an internal person to facilitate can put them in an impossible position. Between relational loyalties and internal politics, true neutrality is rarely possible from the inside. As an outside partner, we hold that space cleanly and impartially, protecting your internal relationships while ensuring the process remains fair, objective, and trustworthy.
End-to-end support
From initial discovery and understanding through infrastructure development, training, implementation, and norm setting, we provide customized and personal support to your team.
We provide follow-up to ensure long-term success.
Let's talk
