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The People Experience with Megan Bernard-May · Disengaged

• James A. Seechurn: Hello and welcome to another episode of the as discussed podcast. First of all, thank you so much to everyone that's been listening so far. I'm truly surprised and very grateful to the number of people that have been listening across various platforms. you so much. If you do listen and if you do enjoy it, please, please provide a rating, please give it a thumbs up My goal is to share new ways of thinking with many people as possible. each person tells someone else about that, that's a great way to ⁓ allow these ideas to spread. My guest today is Megan Bernard-May, founder of Pollinate XD. Meg came into this work ⁓ people experience from a user experience background. and she's now spent years applying user experience and product-led thinking to people problems. Meg works at the BBC where she ran the People Experience team. and helped to embed UX and product-led thinking into the way that the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, ran their people function. co-runs the PX Dojo ⁓ I'd love to just start off with your thoughts on what people experience means to you and specifically how it differs from traditional HR, which is very much still the mainstay of with Adam Axon. Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: and the PXDojo is a three month cohort program. like corporate America and basically corporate rest of the world. So yeah, how does it differ to you? for HR practitioners learning how to do this work. So if you are interested in the people experience and what that means and how that operates, I recommend checking out PXDojo. Megan: It is a great question because when I was in user experience, I actually wrote a blog post about how people experience is just another flavor of experience design. And I think that sums it up quite nicely in that the way that I see people experience is that it is a design function or a product function, right? Like the James A. Seechurn: In our discussion, we talk about what people experience means, how it differs from traditional HR. talked what a product way of thinking is ⁓ and how differs from traditional ⁓ HR thinking mentality. We talked a about practically speaking, what a product led, a people experience mentality looks like when applied to common problems in HR. And we talked about ways Megan: The content in which you're designing is about the human experience at work, but fundamentally the approach that you take is that of a designer. And I think that is quite different to traditional HR, which is built around policy, compliance, risk management, and is perceived by the people in the business, including leaders, to be there for the business. I don't think that's why a lot of James A. Seechurn: People might be able to implement some of this thinking into their organizations. Megan: people get into HR, think HR people often actually want to do more people experience type work, ⁓ but the industry, the of HR, the ⁓ training around HR has ⁓ moulded us into this of traditional HR being there for the business ⁓ and that ⁓ we after people it suits us. Whereas I think people experience has a fundamental mindset. HR people often actually want to do more people experience type work, ⁓ but the industry, the of HR, the ⁓ training around HR has ⁓ moulded us into this of traditional HR being there for the business ⁓ and that ⁓ we after people it suits us. Whereas I think people experience has a fundamental mindset. James A. Seechurn: We also talked about the role of people experience and the type of organizations in which it can be used most effectively and the risks that an autocratic organization. pose to the successful use of people experience and getting the most out of the workforce. Megan: difference, which is starting from a place of, let's find the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for business, what's good for customers, and building solutions with that mindset in mind rather than those being trade-offs. difference, which is starting from a place of, let's find the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for business, what's good for customers, and building solutions with that mindset in mind rather than those being trade-offs. James A. Seechurn: If you're new to the concept of people experience, I highly recommend listening to this episode. without further ado, I give you Megan Bernard May of Pollinate XD. Yeah. And to your point, when I speak to a of HR people, they do want to think about these things. And I think to your point, they do want to get into it for the right reasons. And I think time is a big factor ⁓ because it's quite an under-resourced cost function. People just don't have the time and space to maybe take more of an experiential thinking ⁓ about the topic. Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: So how does a design perspective then from ⁓ maybe the way that ⁓ HR is sort of built to think about problems? Megan: question. I suppose a non-design perspective is to just start with, to be given a problem and say, here's the best practice solution. We've seen this problem a million times before, here's what you do when this problem exists. A design perspective takes the assumption that the problem that's being surfaced is not actually the problem, but a symptom of the real problem. And that there's work that needs to be done to uncover the root cause of that problem and understand the system in which that problem is surfacing so that you can identify what else might be influencing that problem or impacted by that problem so that you can then design the right solution for that problem. Second to that is once you have the solution in mind, a traditional HR approach is We're the expert, we'll design the solution, we'll roll it out, we'll tell you what's happening. Whereas a design-led approach is taking the assumption that actually the people who will use that solution have the best ideas about what will make it work, and by involving them in the process of designing and developing it, that you will gain their buy-in and advocacy, and you won't need to do big bang launches, you won't need to do whole comms or change management approaches because you're building ownership within the organization around the solution to the problem. I think the other thing actually, when you were talking about the lack of time, ⁓ because I've seen this in UX too, I ⁓ first started out in UX and it well understood and it was perceived as something that was just like graphic design. And graphic design actually is probably more akin to that of a traditional HR approach in that it's like... very much focused on solution rather than the discovery piece. ⁓ Maybe there'd be some graphic designers out there who'd hate me for saying that. ⁓ it was the same when I was in UX, we'd always get pushback or we don't have time for discovery. And I would always say, well, do you have time to put a solution out that isn't going to solve the problem? And often the answer is no. But I think second to that is that I think a good designer treats themselves as a consultant, whether they're in-house or external, and that their job is actually to empathize and understand the stakeholder needs and involve them in that process as well, rather than just doing the work to them or for them. And again, I think that's a difference between traditional HR and people experiences, that you are very much seeing yourself as a facilitator of the work, rather than the expert who wears the hat who delivers. James A. Seechurn: There's so many thoughts I have as you're talking about this. So to your point, at one point, let's take just if we even just think about user hardware, at one point, a designer would have come up with an idea that they thought the market would like. And then you try and market that idea to the people that are going to use it. And user experience, I think, still is fairly unfamiliar to some legacy organizations. But the idea is that Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: You have no idea. need to, people need to tell you what that solution is. And that's the discovery process of user experience. Right. And I'm not an user experience. So I might be annihilating that, is that, is, that, but that shifts quite recent, right? User experience. Your point is, you know, it's taken a while for it to catch on. It's so logical, but you've had to deal with the pushback of companies that think they know what the customer needs more than the user experience person that's saying, well, none of us know what the customer needs. Megan: I think that's right. Yeah. James A. Seechurn: So let's take some time to figure it out. Megan: That's why I got into people experience actually, because as a UX designer I was finding that so much of my work was about trying to change the organization and the way they saw the way they should deliver value to customers from being this very top down approach of, we've got an idea, let's roll it out externally. And recognizing that that didn't always actually bring results for the organization. And I thought, well, there's got to be a better way for me to do this other than just through a UX lens. And that's when I then became aware of this idea that actually if our employees aren't feeling empathized with as if they were customers, then why would they take the time to do the same for their customers? So you've almost got to swim upstream, which is why I see this as a flavor of design because you're starting to design the whole ecosystem. I think that's also another difference between traditional HR and people experience is that often traditional HR thinks about what they need to do, their processes they need to deliver to keep the organization compliant and ⁓ in line with policy rather than what do we need to do to ensure that this organization is successful in delivering value for customers. Again, It's quite binary language, of course there are some people out there, and I know plenty of HR people who wouldn't use the terminology that we're using, who do think more in a people experience mindset, but it's a bit of a maturity curve that people have to go on. The same with user experiences, that you kind of move up through the rungs if you like and become aware that that traditional top-down approach doesn't get you the results you want you to change over time, but whether people use these exact terms and this terminology, I guess it's not something that's super well known, and it doesn't mean that you have to be using this terminology to be able to work in this way. And equally, you could be using this terminology and not actually working in this way. Exactly, yes. James A. Seechurn: which is even worse, maybe that just becomes performative. Many just break all trust with people. Yeah, it is an interesting path, isn't it? And I think that path towards a customer centric organization really went hand in hand with user experience. We're thinking about the views of the customer rather than the views of our designers now, intelligent people that might be able to come up with something. And where you do see true people experience, I feel it's more of an employee centric organization where the employees are a real stakeholder in the mix. So you've kind of gone from a world where it was heavily internally driven to heavily customer driven, but now I feel that there's more of an emergence of a more employee driven mindset, Megan: I actually think that part of the reason it's becoming more well known is because people who are in customer experience are becoming aware of this problem, that there's only so much they can do in terms of delivering customer value if they're not also looking at the internal experience of their people. And I'm actually seeing a lot of organizations now have leaders who are responsible for people experience and customer experience. It's in the organizations I've worked for, the ones that have the strongest product sense or customer experience capability, those are the ones that tend to be more leading in people experience because there's already a cultural expectation of working in that way. And so the leaders of that organization tend to take on the accountability to design the experience of work. in that same way and they see the value in doing that so they do that naturally and then they tend to bring the HR folk on the journey and say, hey we're going to do it this way, can you just make sure we're not doing anything we shouldn't be? ⁓ And in the process the HR function go, ⁓ wow this is actually way better! experience for us, we're not siloed, we don't have to do it all ourselves. We're learning a lot about how to have more impact and we're sharing the accountability and it's having impact on our customers. So it becomes much more of a cross-functional approach to delivering value for customers and the people who delivering value for customers rather than it being something that's totally driven by HR. I mean the same is true in UX when I've worked in organizations where I was the only UX person, it was so hard to change the organization to think in a customer-centric way, and I just felt like I was pushing a boulder uphill. Whereas when I worked in organizations where I wasn't that only person and I could bring a few more people on the journey and we'd be beating that drum together, it was much easier to make change. So I think, again, if you're in a HR role and only person in that role, finding a few people who can come along that journey with you makes it much easier. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, and I want to ask you a bit more about how you can, if anyone out there is interested in a more people centric or people experience oriented organization, how you can politically and practically sell it. But before we get that, and this might answer that as well, I want to ask a bit more about your journey from user experience to people experience. Cause it's not a very common career path. I think you're the only person I've come across that has made that leap, but it makes sense, right? Because it's that same mindset. So could you tell me a bit about what caused that shift? And if people are looking at it, is this a path that you might expect to see more of with people applying those skills? Megan: Absolutely. Absolutely. to be fair, ⁓ even though there aren't that many people out there who are explicit about having made that change, I myself have met plenty of people who come from a design background and have moved into people experience. So I'm by no means the only one. But how my journey happened was that... Originally, I actually studied architecture and I moved from architecture into user experience. So I'd already made a career transition where I became aware that the design approach and design principles can be applied to different contexts. And then when I was in user experience, as I said, I was really coming up against cultural challenges a lot around even being able to do my job. Being able to go and do user research to involve users in the design process, I had to try to gain influence in carving out the time for that, carving out the budget for that. And that was the biggest blocker to me in my role being successful, not only for myself, but for the business and helping the business have a greater impact on the customers and the value they were providing. And someone sent me a I it was, I had an Agile coach and she sent me a newsletter by a company that called themselves a culture design group. And because I'd made that shift from architecture into user experience, I thought architecture is a form of design, UX is a form of design, could culture design just be another form of design? And I then moved to London where I worked for a digital transformation agency and Through working there, I started to realize that if I'm in an environment, as I was talking about, where the norm is to work in a UX way, it actually opened up more opportunities to then look at the people experience. And the head of people came and tapped me on the shoulder when I was working on some feedback training and said, hey, this is kind of our thing. ⁓ And so we got talking, I shared some of my hypotheses around how maybe you could design the experience of work the same way you do for customers, and her ears pricked up and she managed to convince my managing director to allow me to work one day a week in her team, coaching her and her team on a design approach and applying that to particular projects. And it was through that experience that I realized, yes, this really does work, but also... The psychological contract between an employee or a colleague versus a user and a company is quite different. A user pays money to get something from a business, if they don't like the service they can just go elsewhere. Whereas an employee or a colleague, that's not as easy. They're selling their time, which you can't get back, unlike refunds. ⁓ They are investing their emotional energy, their relationships, they're so much more tied into that psychological contract that means that if they come along to a co-creative design session, they leave that room having to work with those people again, whereas users don't necessarily have to interact with each other ever again if they attend a co-creation session. So I realized a bit of a gap in my knowledge and decided to do a Master's of Organizational Psychology. just to round out my understanding of how humans work at work and how that might influence how they behave during the design process. once I got into that and I was surrounded by all these people who just got me in my way of thinking, I then realized I don't want to just be doing this one day a week. So I made the shift into people experience full time, first off in people experience strategy, and then I went in-house to a scaling startup. leading the people experience function but also helping the whole people team to take a people experience approach to work. And then I moved from there to the BBC where I was helping transform an 800 person HR function to more of a people experience way of working. So it was like a slow journey, but I think the key thing for me was probably that I treated it as an experiment. I had a hypothesis in the beginning and then... James A. Seechurn: Mm. Megan: It was finding ways to test that. ⁓ I just enjoyed that work, whatever I could do to get my hands on it was the priority for me. James A. Seechurn: Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting path. And to your point as well, like I don't have a master's in organizational psychology, I do find psychology interesting. What I find more interesting is the lack of its application in the workplace. So, you know, you've got so many answers for what it takes to motivate a person, what people enjoy about their work, why people stay, why people go. And all those answers seem to be ignored in the typical corporate workplace. Megan: ⁓ yeah. James A. Seechurn: And it's almost like, so the people experience is about design and it's about designing that experience or the work that people do. It's almost like organizations sometimes will do everything apart from redesign the work. Like the work is such a static concept, the roles, the jobs, the descriptions are so static. The only thing we can do is just tinker with incentives and reorgs and reporting lines. But the last thing we can really do is redesign the work. Megan: Mm. James A. Seechurn: But I feel I don't understand that. And one of the analogies I often think about is games are work. They're so well designed to be engaging. And people spend hours playing Tetris, which is terrible work. But that's addicting. But we'll spend so little effort redesigning work in the corporate world. Why is that barrier so large, do you think? Megan: Yeah. few things. mean, academia traditionally is its own world that doesn't necessarily have a good bridge into the corporate world. I mean, if you ever want to go and find articles on Google Scholar and then read them, often they're behind a paywall. it's hard to access that research as it is. I think with AI, that barrier is reducing and so I think there is maybe more democracy around that data now and maybe we'll start to see a shift. I think the other reason is time, like you said, think, fundamentally business leaders see that their job is to build a customer solution that will bring in revenue and their full profit. And they miss the part of the equation which is the people experience element of that, and they don't always realize that they're not just building a customer product or service, they're also building a work product or service that is very heavily tied to that and so they don't plan for that work in their capacity planning or road mapping or whatever else. It's seen as something that HR does that is, again, compliance, policy, risk management. And it's ⁓ a way of thinking that a lot of business leaders haven't come to. There are plenty of really good... leaders out there who've made that link themselves, but if you've grown up in a very traditional organization that doesn't think that way, then it's a huge mindset shift. I think a lot of HR people kind of fall into HR. I only know a handful of people who actually went through a traditional HR degree or then went and did some HR training. And the people who don't have any training behind them or haven't done any research into psychology, I mean I'm not saying you need to get a master's degree, I I've read your book, your book has so many articles in there that I covered in my master's, so there's a way to go and read and learn about this stuff without needing a degree, but I just don't think that we take the time, and you don't know what you don't know. So if there's no real career path... around organizational psychology that's really clear and available, whether that be for HR people or leaders. think leaders should, if you want to become a business leader, think you should go and study some organizational psychology in some way. But I just don't think we are aware that we should do that and that that's available to us. ⁓ I think we consider psychology to be the person you go to when you're mentally unwell. Whereas we don't recognize that actually there's a whole bunch of literature available to us that helps us understand how we function and how we can get the most out of people and how we can give people the best experience. ⁓ James A. Seechurn: And to your point as well, with AI, it's much more accessible. So if you want to know whether or not someone's going to like an incentive, your designing or something, anything, you can ask Claude or chat GPT what research would support or refute the idea that it's a good idea. And again, you don't need a master's to do that, but it will point you towards the research that says, well, actually you have an incentive. There's a pretty good chance you're to reduce people's intrinsic motivation and reduce their ability to solve problems in a good quality way. Megan: Mm-hmm. No. James A. Seechurn: So what are you trying to accomplish here? you trying to get more volume? Are you trying to get better solutions? If you don't know it's a question you should ask, then you're not going to ask the question, of course. Megan: Exactly, and you might not ask the right questions. think that's the other challenge. Having gone through my degree, we had a whole module which was called Scientist Practitioner, which we admittedly all hated because it was so difficult. But one of the key points of that module was to learn how to discern what is good research versus what isn't good research. Because you can make research say anything, which is one of the challenges. You can make data say anything. And if you aren't able to ask really good questions and interrogate how that data was collected, then you can end up in a position where you're just confirming your own bias. So there is an element of knowing how to ask good questions and not inform those questions with your own bias that then gives you the answers that you want. Because I could probably say to Claude or chat GPT or whatever else. ⁓ know, some framing of that question that then tells me yes, if you put a bunch of incentives in place then it will motivate people, right? Like, James A. Seechurn: ⁓ Also, I'll there's research and research as well. ⁓ Research by a private company looking to sell something ⁓ that is behind closed doors and no one's peer reviewed is not research me. That is just ⁓ an opinion. ⁓ Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: So when we talk about research, we're looking for peer-reviewed research that's actually gone through the rigors of the scientific process. And the data and the analysis underneath it has actually been looked at by people other than those doing the research. That, to me, is good research as well. There's a difference, I think. So ⁓ want to ask you this. So practically speaking, then, so conceptually, ⁓ think the best way to understand people's experience, like you said, is a version of user experience. It's putting the... putting the people, your workers in the organization front and center thinking about what the work means to them. And the idea is that if you do that, you're going to get more productivity and people are going to stick around because they want to be there. Not just because you're shackling them with equity grants or whatever it may be. So, but practically speaking, I'd love to talk to you a bit more about some examples of what that might be. So I've got a question for you. let's take a typical problem in an organization, which is ⁓ at least a perceived problem, is that people aren't doing enough work, like the productivity is too low in a given team in a typical autocratic organizational setting. Now, the common reaction to that is some form of performance management is required or some form of incentive. That is what I would say is the traditional product way of thinking. OK, there's a solution that we have for this. It's called performance management. There's a solution that we have for this. It's called a bonus. We're going to do that. We're going to incentivize people. And therefore, we're going to get performance. And of course, the research that I would find is that, well, that's probably not going to solve that problem. It's going to get people performing in a way that ensures they get paid. So what would people experience? Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: approach to that kind of scenario look like Megan: Yeah, I I've come across it in almost every organization I've worked. First off, what does it mean to be productive? I think that whenever you start a piece of work, we either jump to solution or we jump to discovery. But there's something that needs to happen first, which is what is the business trying to achieve that they don't feel they're able to achieve? And having conversations with the stakeholders and the C-suite about what it is they're trying to achieve. for example, at the BBC one of the really important things that was happening was we were trying to become more digital first because less and less people are watching TV, right? And the BBC is funded by the TV license and so if people aren't watching TV they don't think they need to pay the TV license and that's what funds the BBC. So they fundamentally needed to find a model whereby they were delivering value, whether that be entertainment, education, to viewers in a way that made them realise they should be funding the BBC. Now, if you're not able to be productive as an organisation in delivering on that, maybe productivity means you're not able to be agile enough or you're not able to experiment with new technology. Or it might be that you're not able to deliver quickly enough. Productivity is going to mean something different in every organization and you need to get really clear about what productivity means, what performance means, and what it's in service of. And that's a conversation that can happen first at the leadership level, but then at the layer down. So once you've got clear on what productivity means, what that's in service of, then I think there is some work to do on discovery and understanding the current experience. So why is productivity suffering? Is it because we've gone through a massive reorg, everyone's terrified of losing their jobs, and there's massive scarcity mindset, no one wants to share any information with each other because if they do, they make themselves perceived as redundant? Or is it they don't have the right tools to do their job well? Is it that the pressure is too high on them and they don't have the resources to meet those? pressures. There's all sorts of reasons why productivity might be suffering and I would say majority of the time it's not because people are just coasting. And if people are coasting it's probably a symptom of, well, there have been a number of people who were coasting and nothing was done about it and there wasn't any accountability and so everyone else just starts to coast. Most of the time people want to do good work. Coming back to my point around the price that people pay for a job is their time. They don't get that back. And most people want to end their life feeling like they've spent that time meaningfully. So I don't really believe that most people are not being productive because they just lack the motivation from within themselves. I think that lack of motivation comes from other... factors within the organization that we can control. And once you've identified why perhaps productivity is lacking, and also what productivity looks like for different roles, right? Because that's the other thing, you might find pockets of productivity over here and not over here, what's the differences between those teams? Then you can start to say, if this is the problem, what might the solution be, and that's where you can look to examples of other teams that are working well and see what you can borrow. You can start to make some hypotheses around what you might need to put in place, so if we've gone through a massive restructure and people are not performing their best, is it because we haven't distributed the work that's remaining very well and actually we need to agree on what we're going to drop versus what we're going to keep? Or is it that we're setting too high expectations around what we're trying to achieve and we need to balance that a little bit more. And once you've set those hypotheses, then it's about developing the smallest solution that you can to put in place and test to see whether it improves productivity over time and the experience of work and then doing that cycle iteratively until you get to the outcome that you want. But the key is that you can't see whether you're making any progress unless you've agreed on what productivity is at the beginning and how you're going to measure it. James A. Seechurn: And that process you've described, ⁓ which that you've got to things you can collect information. So you can only see where teams are happier, more productive in different parts of the organization if they're doing things differently. If you have a heavily top-down autocratic approach where everyone is basically a version of the same thing, there's no room to really experiment. And what's interesting to me is when I suggest experimentation, it often gets met with pushback. And that's intriguing to me because in the rest of our lives and in the rest of the company, on the product side, companies are wanting to try things all the time. They'll try out, they'll push products to market, they'll push out services, they'll test it, they'll A-B test things, they'll, you know, like they'll trial things and they'll fail and they'll give it another go and you go back to the drawing board. But when it comes to people, I find there's a hesitancy to apply that same thinking of experimentation when it comes to design. you find that as a similar barrier or is that less of an issue your projects? Megan: Absolutely, definitely there is a hesitancy. think we have this idea, if you ask someone what a good leader is, all you say to someone is a good leader is someone who knows everything, who gets everything right all the time, I don't know, is on a pedestal. Most of us would say no, a good leader is someone who listens to me, who takes my ideas on board, who is willing to have a go at things and if they get it wrong to admit to it. But for some reason, despite the fact that when we look back on our career and we say these are the leaders who have had a positive impact on us and these are the ones who maybe we didn't love as much, we still for some reason tend to think that a good leader is someone who quote unquote has their shit together, right? James A. Seechurn: That knows that knows how to do everything. All right. That's yeah. ⁓ Megan: Yeah, and I think that comes from an insecurity within us about how we will be perceived if we experiment with something and it doesn't work. Fundamentally, an experiment is successful when you've learned something. And we often learn things by getting them wrong. And so when we say we should experiment, the shortcut is We should get a few things wrong so we know what we need to do right. And most people aren't willing to get something wrong because they don't want to have a negative impact on people. I think the way around that then is what is the smallest thing we could get wrong that if it's wrong it's not going to have a really big negative impact. It's finding smart bets that you can take that you might get it right and if you do great it's a step forward. If you get it wrong people will forgive you. It's not going to damage your reputation. It's not going to damage your ability to deliver quality to clients or customers. There's something about figuring out how to make an experiment ⁓ consumable, I suppose, so that it's not as scary to take that step forward. James A. Seechurn: There's a few things in here I want to dig into because you points out people are afraid of getting things wrong. And my counter would be you're already getting things wrong. Like if you look at engagement data and productivity data and happiness data in the workplace and turnover data, there's very few metrics that say anyone's doing anything right in the corporate world, particularly in bigger sort of blue chip companies. So the one way of framing it is like, Megan: Yes. James A. Seechurn: Look, I mean, we couldn't do a lot worse if we tried, to be honest. So like, not try something in the corner of the organization? But the approach that you'll take and use the word earlier and possibly just again a second ago, hypothesis, that's all we ever have really. If you take a scientific mindset to work and people experience, we only ever have a hypothesis. We never know the right answer to anything. But we kind of pretend we do with current systems. We pretend the right answers are from management textbooks, which are basically from the 19th century in terms of how we organize work and assign accountability. So we pretend we know with the status quo and people are so attached to them. But with the way you're describing it, we're trying to develop a hypothesis, and then we're trying to test that hypothesis. And to your point, that's worth something. I think that that feels like an idea that one can sell. ⁓ when we're thinking about testing this concept of people experience in a new organization. Megan: Yeah, that's so in my masters, just to, I'm going to take a little segue and come back. But in my masters, one of my favorite courses was called Mindful Mindfulness and Leadership. And it was all about how to be able to take a moment to pause before responding to be in tune with your own insecurities and how that might make you show up and I think that this is another fundamental difference between the traditional approach and a people experience approach, is that whether you're a leader, a HR person, or anyone else in the organisation who wants to take control over designing the experience of work, there is work that needs to happen internally first. Which is that you need to separate your identity and your self-worth from your work. And I needed to do this in user experience. Early on in my user experience career I said to my Agile coach, I don't like getting feedback on my work. And she said, I think you're in the wrong job then. And the honest truth was that it wasn't that I didn't like being wrong, it was that I didn't like it when I'd invested all this energy into a solution, just to be told that all that energy and time and investment didn't provide the results. that I was hoping it would. And I may be frustrated in people in the process because I worked away in some dark corner and then came with a big bang solution. And when we work in that way, when we're opening ourselves up more for this kind of beating against our identity when we get things wrong, because we've invested so much of ourselves in the solution without involving other people. Whereas if you can separate out your identity and your self-worth from the work you're doing and you make yourself more about this person who involves people, who brings opinions in, you become someone who cares about people and their ideas, then you're much more able to take this experimental approach because your self-worth is not tied to the outcome of that piece or your idea in that piece, but rather the way that you've delivered it. that then means becoming much more comfortable in the discomfort of not knowing what the problem is or what the solution is, and trusting that you know the approach to take to uncover the real problem or the solution that's going to best fit and to involve the right people in the process. But it is a huge internal shift that needs to happen because Without that, you're just going to continue to think you've got the right solution and if it's not right then you get upset because people don't like your idea. I think the other thing in that is if you're not in an environment that allows you to take the time to do that and you can't build the influence around why you should work in that way and you're continuously being pressured to just deliver something. Well, then you're in an environment that's not going to bring out the best in you and that's going to reinforce that idea that you need to come up with the right ideas and build the right thing. James A. Seechurn: As very sage advice, it reminds me of a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he said, most people are uncomfortable, steeped in ignorance. ⁓ And those words stuck with me. thought, you're absolutely right. But there's no good reason to be. We spend our entire lives steeped in ignorance, essentially. We're just always working on assumptions about our understanding. But to your point, it's always to be personal to some degree. But yeah, separating the work and personal identity to the extent possible ⁓ is ⁓ helpful. Megan: I heard someone say the other day, we didn't, we weren't born knowing how to cut an avocado or to skip a rope or to do any of the things that we do. We weren't born knowing how to solve organisational problems. So maybe we should give ourselves a little bit of slack and recognise that no amount of training, no amount of experience is going to make you perfect. I still... I still find myself sometimes not following my own process. I I talk about this, but the truth is that it takes work continuously. No matter how many times you do it, you need to constantly remind yourself that it's okay to get things wrong, it's okay to not know the answer. Because we're just ingrained, I think, to be like, is the way that we should do things. ⁓ But we weren't born knowing how to do that, and so... Treating ourselves as a work in progress constantly, I think, is the way in which you get into people experience. James A. Seechurn: And this seems to be getting to almost to the soul ⁓ of experience as a concept is the starting point is we don't know in a way, right? It's like you bring us a problem as a why is this a problem? But what we don't know, let's find out rather than assume we know the answer, which is perhaps why it's such a big shift and probably why user experience was such a big shift ⁓ to with, because it's the same ⁓ starting isn't it? It's we don't know, but let's do our best to find out. ⁓ So with that said, if an HR leader is listening and wants to bring some of this people experience thinking, where's the best place to start with this? Megan: The first thing is to understand the readiness of your organisation. Because if you want to go gung-ho with all of this, but your organisation doesn't even understand what people experience is, or have any conception of the idea that they should treat their people with kindness and care and whatever else, then you're not going to get very far. And you're going to be trying to solve the problem with the wrong solution. So doing a bit of discovery work on where your organization is at in terms of their mentality about all of this way of working is the first step. So that then you can identify what the best next step is for your organization. That might mean that if it's completely new, you might need to think about things like maybe starting a book. club around this topic and helping people to learn about these ideas themselves and bringing them on the journey. Even just getting to a point where other people are talking about people experience and saying, we should think about this and maybe this could be valuable to us. That's a win. Even if nothing has changed yet other than the language that people use. Once people are starting to talk about it, they'll say, okay, But how do we actually do that? If we want to take more of a people experience approach to things, what might that look like? And that's then where you might turn to user experience, product design, you might even go to those functions within the organization and say, we're interested in taking this approach to our people experience. Could you teach us one or two ways of working or frameworks or methodologies that maybe we could apply to our next project? And it might be that all you do for your next project is you develop some personas of the types of people that that solution is for and what their needs are and what their pain points are. That might be all you do. And you might still then just deliver whatever solution you want, but it's a step in the right direction. And once you've gotten to this point where you've got a number of frameworks that you might like to use and you're experimenting with them and you're starting to see the impact of that, but also where maybe you're not making enough traction, you'll go from this place of wanting to experiment or dabble to actually we want to systematize this approach a little more. So maybe we need to invest in figuring out how we create a bit more capacity for that. Maybe we need to bring in certain capabilities. We might send our people on some training or we might hire a UX person into our team, even if it's on a part-time basis. But think the next step is then starting to systematize that approach and applying it more broadly to the work. And once you're at a point where you can confidently say we're running most of our projects in HR in this way, the next step from there is often, hmm, this works, but it's not making as much of an impact as we would like. And that's, think, one of the big fundamental shifts then is moving it from it. being a HR thing to more of an organizational-wide thing and realizing that actually we need to create cross-functional teams that involve leaders, that involve people, and that fundamentally means that it's not HR's work, but rather it's the organization's work. And by bringing people on that journey, more and more people will start to want to own it, and so then you need to find a way to democratize the data around what problems are existing and the impact it's having on the organization, but also democratize the methodology around how you determine who works on that problem or that solution so that it becomes more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think the long term and where I see people experience going is actually that it's the leadership function who own the people experience and who recognize that their work is that They're a team who need to get the organization working really well and building some of those mechanisms that then drive performance and strong people experience in service of the customer and HR then become a stakeholder in that. And they become someone who is adding maybe some of the organizational psychology research or some of the compliance risks that need to be taken into account. But rather than it being HR pushing it, it's actually the organization's realizing what they need to do to improve as an organization in their ways of working. And HR is just part of that team that solves that. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, so the way you're describing it is, I mean, you're being very pragmatic about how change can happen in the organization. This isn't something that can be forced. It has to be adopted willingly. And the starting point is to show rather than tell that that can be done in a small safe place. And then... The way you're describing that change, if I of other case studies of companies that have similar, ⁓ centralized, more people-centric approaches to ⁓ work, like in a Handelsbanken or Haier or Nucor the US Steel company, ⁓ these are organizations then. allowed the work to shape itself by the people that are doing the work into a way that they wanted to do it. But it didn't happen. took leaders to do all of that. And it took years as well to change that way of thinking. And it's a turnover as well in those kinds of companies because the people that are used to that command and control, top-down approach of management, aren't the same kinds of people that are going to embrace a people experience model. So Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: If there's one, if there's one word I'm going to take away from your answer is patience as well. That's not a, that's not a quick process to do what you're describing. Megan: Patience and experimentation, think I'd be interested in your views on this, but there are two other things I think need to happen. One is the design of the organization may need to change, or at least the design of the HR function. If you have a Ulrich model of the HR function where you silo pay from people experience, from operations, from learning and development, then fundamentally you're going to struggle to work in this way because every part of the HR function is coming up with different things that need to be delivered so that they can prove that they should exist. Whereas if you can start to create more cross-functional teams where you can center these teams around the employee experience and spin up teams as you need to, it's going to allow you to be much more agile. So there is a big element of how the organization is structured. I think another part of it then is how you measure the performance of the organization. So if you're measuring people's performance based on output and results, but you're not looking at anything around how people work together, how people invest in the development of the organization, how they show up as leaders, then There's really no way to hold people to account to that. And I think that's a key thing, is if you have people who are really pushing against this and not coming on the journey but you haven't made it explicit that this is the journey we're going on and if you don't come with us, well maybe this isn't the right place for you, there's no way to hold those people to account. But I'd be interested in your views on that because from a motivational standpoint and that whole thing around intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, I've always made an assumption that we need to have clear measures around that, but I think we could end up in a place where people then just perform people experience rather than actually live people experience. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, it's ⁓ it's whenever I and that's a good question. Whenever I think about any of this, think, does it satisfy the conditions of self-determination theory? So whenever you're making any change, is it giving more or less autonomy? Is it giving more or less ⁓ opportunity competence? And is it giving people more or less opportunity for collaboration for interconnectedness? So when you take the people, so anything should be advancing down that path. It shouldn't be retracting. So whenever I see systems of control, I think, well, you're depriving people of autonomy. You're depriving people of opportunity to test their limits and stretch and grow You're keeping people in silos. I know what the result is that you're going to result in less intrinsic motivation and they're going to check boxes around results. So I think ⁓ when we talk about this world of people experience, the model that lends itself best to is a decentralized. Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: governance model, a more democratic, a more participative workplace. So I'll take Handelsbanken, and as an example, that's one of the most successful banks in the world in Sweden. It decentralized about 50 years ago, and has highly autonomous operating units that can figure out how best to get their work done. So then the questions become, well, how do you transfer knowledge, but also how do you measure performance? So there's a lateral and an up and down movement there. ⁓ So yes, there are still measures of control, but they're at the highest possible ⁓ level. So it's like, how well are you delivering on your objectives? And it's up to you to shape the work in a way that does that. And then I think the people experience model as a way to encourage them to think in that way. But you're not micromanaging. And then laterally, you've got to allow ideas to travel. So as soon as you allow less ⁓ centralization, you run the risk of creating more. silos, people doing their own thing in different ways and you obviously don't want everyone to reinvent the wheel. So then I think Spotify's model of having guilds like disciplines that run across those silos and allow people or encourage people to share ideas of how they've improved their people experience is the right way to do it. So I think I would love to see organizations set up people experience as a kind of guild that works across a less centralized organization. Megan: Mm-hmm. Yes, I agree. James A. Seechurn: I see people experience and a less centralized model of companies working really, really nicely together in that kind of capacity. Megan: think that makes sense. We're not saying remove metrics or measures, we're just saying don't use them to beat people with. And actually I think then if you build the rituals within the organisation which are to look at those metrics and say ⁓ did this thing that we do improve that or not improve that, can we draw a line between James A. Seechurn: No. Exactly. Megan: work we're doing and the results that it's creating for the business, or the change that it's creating, you then create this intrinsic motivation, I suppose, to solve that problem. And you start to use metrics as a mechanism for identifying where there's a gap between what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve, and that then creates a problem to solve, which is, hmm, we did this thing, we thought it would... improve these results. It didn't, or it didn't as much as we would have liked. Why is that? What should we do instead? How might we solve that problem? And make that then the thing that people are encouraged to work on and solve. yeah, the key then I think is like really, again, ⁓ moving away from ⁓ traditional measures performance of ⁓ Are you ⁓ excelling or, you know, this like rating system? instead ⁓ having real ⁓ around your experience or ⁓ your profitability kind of these outward facing metrics that then you use to measure the success of a team. But again, it's not. in order to say you're performing or underperforming it's to help drive a conversation around what's working, what's not working, what could we do differently. James A. Seechurn: Yeah. And another concept that aligns with that is treating an organization more of them as a marketplace than a pyramid. And in the same way that we run businesses and look for investment and present ideas and get feedback, it's not micromanaging a marketplace. It's just allowing natural supply and demand to see what takes hold. ⁓ a very good example of that. Its entire organization is basically treated like a marketplace. So they have some of those higher level metrics that are used to measure the success of business units. But it's up to them to collaborate with their peers and other business units to figure out the best way of achieving those goals. So there is still the element of control and element of competition. It's just not broken down into weekly and monthly and quarterly goals. And the process isn't prescribed to those business users as to how they should achieve that. And if they have new ideas, they're very welcome and open to explore those. And I think that kind of setup Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: itself more to that people experience concept Megan: Yeah, and I think there's something then in who you hire and how you hire, right? that where competition is an interesting one, because I think there are people who really thrive in environments where there's competition and then there are other people who don't. And there are people who thrive in an organization that is taking a people experience approach to work, and there are people who maybe aren't quite ready for that. ⁓ I'd like to think everyone could eventually get there, but... There are cultures in which some people are going to thrive and some people aren't, and being clear about the culture that you have when it comes to the design of people experience, and who are going to be the right people to have within that culture to help drive that ambition forward, and who are going to be the people who are maybe going to struggle with that at this point in time. James A. Seechurn: Yeah. is interesting and all the case studies I've ever read about companies that have changed in a way that has helped them and helped their employers and help their customers. There was a certain amount of pain in that process, like the long in the tooth leaders that subscribe and have spent their careers subscribing to a certain model of what a company should be. It's not easy to change those minds because you're asking them to sacrifice their perceived power in doing so. So a lot of those case studies did go through a period of somewhat painful change because it Megan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. James A. Seechurn: had to happen. You have to go through that to reckon and people will self-select out of those models if they don't like it but naturally you will also attract people that are more open to those new ideas Megan: Absolutely. James A. Seechurn: So I want to ask you a bit about pay. So obviously I write a lot about pay and I think a lot about pay. That's kind of where I spend most of my time for large part of my career. So I'm curious to get a people experience perspective on typical pay problems as well. So the most common pay problem is that people are dissatisfied with their pay. So you get a lot of companies and I get a lot of clients that come to me and say people need to be paid more. People leave them because of pay. They're not happy with their pay. And the default is often to get more benchmarking data or target a higher percentile or write new leveling guides or something of that nature. What would a people experience approach to the pay problem look like? Megan: This is a meaty one. James A. Seechurn: Take your time. Megan: Pay is one of those things that you're always going to have someone complaining about. And I think the complaint around pay is often a shortcut to saying, I'm not satisfied here. To your point, generally speaking, if people are paid well, then they aren't motivated by pay. If you have designed the organisation in a way that gives them autonomy, growth, connectedness, pay is not going to be as much of an issue. think in that book by, it was Dan Pink, I think, who said, you know, just take pay off the table, right? If you pay people well enough, that's not a question. So what that says to me is, say you've done your benchmarking and you feel confident that you're... James A. Seechurn: Yeah, drive. Megan: You're paying people what you've said you will pay them and what you've agreed is what you believe should be paid. And people are still feeling like they're not being paid enough and you can't budget any more from a pay perspective. Then the question isn't about pay. The pay topic is a symptom that people aren't satisfied for some other reason. And pay also often is a shortcut for progression because we don't design progression well and we link it so tightly to pay and we say you can't get a pay rise unless you progress into leadership or whatever else. And if people feel they aren't able to progress and therefore they're not able to get a pay rise, then that's another problem. So again, I think it's coming back to the point of almost like your employee value proposition or employer value proposition. What is it that you're saying to people that they will gain from working in your organization and are you actually living that? If people are complaining about pay, then you need to go back to that and investigate why they're complaining about that. Is it actually, it might be that they're complaining about that because someone in their team has said that they're earning X amount, they're in the same role and there seems to be a gap there. is that maybe the manager isn't treating everyone fairly, or maybe one person is getting more opportunities to progress than another. I often think it's not really about pay, there's always going to be some other root cause there that you can lean on. ⁓ A perfect example of this is... I was at a startup where we had a whole bunch of credit analysts who were dissatisfied with their pay. And you could also see from the engagement survey that they were low on all sorts of other things. They were burning out, they had high pressure, they didn't have opportunities to learn and progress. And when we went and did some discovery to understand what was going on and what was causing this data dissatisfaction which was showing up as, can get paid more elsewhere so I'm going to leave. It turned out that the role of the credit analyst actually had two parts. One part of it was credit analysis, the other part was a whole bunch of operations that they then needed to pick up because the product team had designed the product in a way that resulted in all these manual operations that needed to be done. And that work hadn't been accounted for anywhere in the organization, and credit analysts were the ones who'd come through a graduate scheme, they were the lowest paid, and therefore putting that work in their role meant it cost the least for the organization for that work to get done. I don't think that was an intentional thing, I think it just happened that way. But what that meant was that when a credit analyst applied for a role and was going through a very rigorous hiring process around credit analysis... and then doing a whole bunch of work that had nothing to do with credit analysis, they then thought, well, why am I here? Because I'm not progressing in my career. I'm not getting a whole bunch of skills that I should be getting in the credit analysis world. Maybe I even got into credit analysis because I could see that it's a high paying job in banks and whatever else. So why would I stay here? If I'm not going to get paid more, maybe I'll go somewhere else where I'll get paid more and I won't need to do all this operational work. But actually what we were able to do was say, well, maybe we need to hire an operations team who takes all this manual operations work if we're not willing to invest in technology to do that for us so that we can take that work out of those teams, allow the credit analysis team to do more of that work, but also then help them progress in that and increase their pay to be more aligned with the market because what we were doing was benchmarking that role as a mix between an operations and a credit analyst role rather than a pure credit analyst role. James A. Seechurn: So yeah, so again, you're kind of taking that work as a product mentality on you saying, well, first of all, let's look at the work again. That thing, that's the question that gets skipped over so much is, well, maybe we should have look at the work. Let us see, is the work, does the work make sense? And I do think a lot of people, well, this is called compensation for a reason, right? They feel like I'll do whatever as long as I'm fairly compensated. And the worse the work gets, the more they're going to ask for in compensation for that terrible work they have to do. Megan: Yes, exactly. James A. Seechurn: many I've spoken that have said, well, ⁓ I'll up with it for another year as long as pay me more. And it's this assumption that work has to be this thing that you loathe, ⁓ and as long as you're sufficiently compensated for it, then everything's and the transaction is complete. Megan: Thank So there's two other things to say on that. One is, again, if the work is the product and you're investing your time into that, what are you getting in return? If you're not getting any of the other things that we mentioned, then you're going to think, well, at least if I get paid well, it doesn't matter. Which is true, a lot of people are happy to do a job they don't love because they get paid really well and that enables them to live the kind of life they want outside of work. But that's, wouldn't say it's majority of people. And so if you can increase the value proposition and actually pay them in a way which makes them feel like that time investment is worthwhile, it doesn't have to be in pay, but then that question doesn't come up as much. The other time I've seen this question come up a lot is when your pay processes are really opaque and there's really no conversation about performance throughout the year. People don't understand how well they're doing in comparison to their expectations, people aren't clear about where they could improve, they're not getting any feedback, they don't have any touch time with their manager. All of the performance side of pay, mean a lot of organizations tie performance and pay and they don't do that very well or intentionally. So even just improving the performance side of that can help you solve a lot of that problem because people don't get to the pay review cycle and think, I thought I was going to get a promotion and I didn't, and I don't know why. ⁓ But second to that I think is being really clear about how you determine pay and what your compensation philosophy is and how you benchmark. All of that can be a really good thing to be somewhat transparent about so that people understand how it's worked. working because often when people say they're not being paid enough, what they're actually saying is, I don't think I'm being paid fairly. And they don't think they're being paid fairly because they don't know how that decision is being made. So if you can help them to understand how decisions are being made and involve them in that decision over the course of the year rather than just once a year, then you can improve that experience a hell of a lot more. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, it's so true, isn't it? think last time I checked, think 23 % of the Gallup-studied employees said they had an impact over their pay or they had a reasonable impact over their individual pay outcomes. So all that pay for performance stuff, there's so little data to show that anyone actually agrees that it's working. I think it's one of these great tramps of marketing over actual action. We'll go down a rabbit hole if we go down that one. ⁓ the ability to accurately measure everyone's contribution in a collaborative organization as individuals, just think, is a losing battle. ⁓ Megan: You Yeah, I think it's like that whole piece of if you feel some autonomy in that decision, then it makes it feel a lot better. James A. Seechurn: Yeah. And there's something you mentioned actually as well. The way that we've set organizations up is that everything's an economic event. So. If you, like I say, if you want, and this is part of the reason I think why we have such lousy managers a lot of the time is because to get the money, you have to become a manager, even with dual career tracks and everything. So the people that achieve those goals, particularly in bigger organizations, are the best politicians. Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: and the best people that can best appear as though they're going to make good managers and probably the greediest as well because they're the ones that most want or need that extra pay increase. So to me like that inevitably leads to a path of what we need to flatten organizations. We need to starting people out on this ridiculously low level of pay that is completely unaffordable and then Megan: Mm-hmm. James A. Seechurn: make the only way that people can get to an affordable existence through promotion. That to me is completely backward because then you're creating a complete disincentive between people looking for better work versus people just looking for more and more money and taking the path of least resistance. again, like they exist, they just don't exist a huge amount in the big corporate world, but there are plenty of companies that have much flatter pay structures and then can have much more meaningful performance conversations as a result. Megan: Yeah, I think it's going to be a long time before we see the corporate world changing because they are such large organizations, they have so many people to bring on the journey. And typically people in large corporates have grown up in those organizations, they haven't often worked elsewhere and so they've spent 20 years being indoctrinated with this idea of you have to go through the trenches to get where I am. ⁓ So it can be quite hard to create change in those large organizations. James A. Seechurn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, which brings me to a point, actually I wanted to get your thoughts on, which is that a lot of ideas start with good intentions. And even performance management really starts with a good intention, but ends with total dissatisfaction for most people. So how can people experience avoid falling into that trap of continuing to actually drive both... employee and organization or betterness without turning into another system of control. We talked a bit about this Megan: There's a big part of this which is not tying individual performance and pay decisions to that the same way we shouldn't with anything else. that's probably a big one. And instead highlighting how doing this work can improve the quality of the customer experience, improve your own ability to learn and grow and develop. All of those. things I think are a big part of it, but I think another big piece is that we tend to rely a lot on quantitative data and then use that quantitative data to measure ourselves. But we don't take a lot of time in the qualitative space, and I actually think it's in the qualitative space that we are able to really get a sense of what it's like to work somewhere. then that prompts for us what the solutions should be. I qualitative research breeds intrinsic motivation, where quantitative research maybe doesn't as much. I feel that through applying the people experience approach, you can avoid that trap so long as we don't start to have it as a measuring stick that we beat beat people with if they don't do that work. I think it needs to be something that's seen as being in service of the business, in service of the quality of the relationships between people, in service of helping people develop and grow, rather than it being something which is, if you don't work this way or if you don't do this, in the top 10 % we're going to get rid of you. Performance can be measured as anything and if you treat people experience as a performance measure and then you just use those performance measures in the same way you would any other, then you're going to fall into the same trap. So it comes more down to how you go about treating performance management and if you haven't fundamentally changed that and you just try to apply a people experience approach without changing your fundamental mindset about how to measure performance and drive performance, well, nothing's going to change. And then it's just performative. And that's where we end up with teams who say they ⁓ have a people experience approach, but actually it's traditional HR with a new title. yeah, I'm not sure. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, I you mentioned the Auric model a moment ago and HR fits very firmly in the Auric model, which is top down, which is vertical. It is a system of control. And the companies that move away from that have very, very small centralized HR functions. And they'll cover the basics, Contracting, employment agreements, legislation. There's some, I think, ⁓ Luke O'Mahoney described as table stakes, know, there's some things that do need to happen probably in a centralized capacity. But it seems to me that the way you're describing it is that it's not a replacement for HR. It's more a way of thinking. And if it falls into the same trap of being a top-down type ⁓ model, then it might fall into the same trap being ⁓ reinterpreted as another system of control and measurement, which will lead to the same So it's almost like HR remains a vertical ⁓ Megan: Yes, yeah. Yes. James A. Seechurn: service provider, but people experiences, to use that Spotify term again, a guild, a way of thinking that people can adopt and should adopt across the organization to get the most out of people. Megan: It's funny, and I have two thoughts about this. One, which is I think the future of HR is people experience. what I mean by that is I think there are whole bunch of people in HR who probably aren't interested in the legal compliance operational aspects of HR. And for those people, I think the future is people experience, and I think people experience needs to sit outside. of HR but with HR as a stakeholder. ⁓ And then there is the side of HR, which is all of the compliance work, that is really important that probably needs to be its own function. And similarly, in UX, you don't expect a UX person to have all of the legal knowledge that they require about the digital product that they're building. Often you will have a legal team or people who have that knowledge that consult on that alongside the UX people. So think it's really about understanding what the subject matter is and what type of expertise they need to have. All of the work around compliance and policy is needed, but that ultimately is an expert on content, whereas people experience you're an expert on process, you're an expert as a facilitator, not necessarily the content of the work. You might bring in people who are an expert in learning or an expert in performance. ⁓ And ultimately it becomes more about bringing the right people into the room rather than being the one who knows everything. And so it might even be that you don't have a dedicated people experience team, but rather it becomes a set of skills that's required across the organization. within everyone's role, and arguably in user experience it was the same, really good product companies recognize that user experience is a skill that actually engineers should have, data analysts should have, there's all sorts of roles that if they take on some of that, it takes less of the onus on one person and one role and makes it more of a collaborative activity, which I think is also true for people with experience. You still need to have the expertise that you're building in that approach, but I don't think that's unique to people experience. think that is something that carries across product and therefore why I talk about people experience as a flavour of experience design. think then that whole guild approach that you're talking about... becomes something that isn't owned necessarily by HR or people experience, but carries across both customer experience and people experience. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, and again, we started off talking about how the parallel between user experience and people experience. And again, with a user experience driven organization, engineers and designers are, again, willing to say, we don't know. Again, that standpoint, They're not engineers and designers that say, ⁓ I've got a great, I know how to do this. I've got a good idea. They're saying, well, what is the good idea? And we need to be told what the good idea is so that we can figure out a solution then. aligned to that. So in a people experience organization, it's almost getting that same admission from HR, from managers to say, we don't know, but those of you that are people experience oriented, help us figure it out. Meg, so I'd like to ask you a couple of final questions. And the first one is, what are you working on right now? So I know you've got PX Dojo, which you're collaborating on with a colleague, I believe. And you're also, you've also now got your own company as well. But what else are you working on and what are you excited about that you can share? Megan: So PX Dojo is probably one of those core things. Adam Axton, who's based in Melbourne in Australia and I'm based in Brisbane, we both have had this same thought process, which is that the concept of people experience as a product can be a little bit hard to get your head around, and we wanted to make it a little more consumable for people, but also help people do exactly what I was saying, is start where you are. You can't run before you. and walk, and so we've called it PXDojo because in the world of martial arts you start with a white belt, you don't become a black belt overnight, you have to work up through the belt system. And so we've applied that same methodology and mindset which is let's help you get started and learn some of the fundamental mindset shifts that this approach requires so that you can start experimenting with it in your work. And then once you've started experimenting, then we offer a Blue Belt course, which is actually building a case study and going through the process specifically on one piece of work, which then enables you to demonstrate the work more broadly to your organization or to other organizations, or even help you shift organizations and demonstrate that work if you're trying to get into people experience. So we're really excited about that because we want to... build a community, think, Australia of people who are thinking in this way. Second to that is I'm running Pollinate XD, which is all about helping organizations to take people experience out of the HR function and into the leadership function, and helping them to understand how you link people experience to the performance of the organization and build your performance through a people experience lens. by having your leadership be the ones responsible for people experience. So I'm loving that work because it helps do that dual approach of supporting HR folk and people in more people-based roles to learn about that slowly, but then also working with organizations on setting themselves up for success in tying people experience and performance together. James A. Seechurn: I like, I first of I really liked the name PXDojo That's got a real to it. ⁓ and, ⁓ I, you mentioned case studies. So this is something I think is so powerful. It pay case studies to me is just storytelling in the corporate world. And so your point, when you're trying, we talked earlier about how you get change to happen, building internal case studies is a really powerful way to do that because then you can get people excited about new ideas when they, when they realize that they've got colleagues. in the same organization that tried something different and it was really, really cool, then that's how that change happens. And also the word pollinate is the same principle, Once you get ideas out there, that pollination happens naturally in the spirit of white belt, ⁓ if someone ⁓ listening likes the sound of this ⁓ and wants to challenge concepts, And by the way, I'm a big fan of defining your own role. You know, you can try things and you can test things. ⁓ So if someone's out there listening to this, ⁓ maybe an HR VP or maybe an HR manager and thinking, how can I get a white belt in people experience? What something or maybe one or two things that actually practically speak and might be able to go away and try? Megan: The first thing is that when anyone ever asks you to do anything, to ask a few more questions about why and the impact that it's intending to have. So really getting clear on what business value does this bring and what assumptions do we have about what the problem is that this solves. I think that is the most important thing to do because then you're breaking this habit of jumping straight to delivery mode and just ship it to making sure that you're solving the right problem and measuring success in the right way. The other thing is not waiting for permission. So often I think we feel we need to go and show some stakeholder that we're going to do something different or ask for a bit more time. I fundamentally do not agree with that approach because you will never get permission, you'll spend all your time trying to get permission that you could have just spent squirreling away and going to speaking to five people. So next time you have a piece of work land on your desk and you've asked a few more questions to understand what the problem is, come back and say, okay, here's how I'm going to solve that and why. And I'm going to go and speak to these five people about that problem so that I can validate that that is the real problem and I'm going to involve them in defining what the solution might be. And it doesn't have to be much, you can just start with five people but ⁓ don't ask for permission, go and do it and learn from the approach and then demonstrate, hey when I did this thing, this was the impact. And it's through demonstrating that a new approach works that more and more people will want to get involved. ⁓ The third thing I would say is document your work. as a UX designer, my whole career was drummed into me to always document your work so that if you ever need to change roles, you've got a portfolio ready. And I think the same is true in HR. We should be documenting the work that we're doing, the problem that we were trying to solve, how we went about solving it, and the impact. The reason I say that is because the more you document the work, the more you learn for yourself what works and what doesn't in your approach, but also the more confident you become about talking about this and getting exposure and whatever else, and more opportunities will come your way. James A. Seechurn: Good advice. So one was really understand the problem. Don't just react to it. Second was, I'm going to paraphrase this with some lesson, some words I was given when I was younger, which is it's much easier to beg forgiveness and ask for permission. So go ahead and do things. And three, document those solutions for yourself and for anyone else. Megan: Mm-hmm. I think would summarize all of that to say ⁓ treat it an experiment. ⁓ Learn in the way that suits you. If you're someone who likes to listen to podcasts, go and listen to podcasts and then apply the learning. If you're someone who wants to do a course, go and do a course and then apply the learning and reflect on the impact. It's always about getting inspiration for a way of working, having a go at it, and then reflecting on whether it worked or not and what you would do differently next time and then developing over time. James A. Seechurn: Yeah, you mentioned something earlier actually, which is a book club. think that's a great idea. Like if you and your colleagues are interested in doing things differently, there are so many books. And again, you can use AI to figure out what those books are and where to get them that you could sit down and read together and share ideas and extract from that what you think might be effective in your organization. I know we're in a world of LLMs these days, but the humble book, I think, is still the best way to really get to grips with new concepts. Megan: Absolutely. I think so. And the conversation around it, ⁓ actually, I'm running, I'm a moderator for an experience design circle as part of Humaniya, which is an online HR community in Australia. And we're running a book club on Jessica's ones, latest book for that exact reason, because it's a really, yeah, I haven't read it yet. So no spoilers, but ⁓ it's a really great way I think to not feel so alone. James A. Seechurn: ⁓ yeah. ⁓ I've got that book. Can I join? Megan: in the process and to seek inspiration but then figure out what to do with it. James A. Seechurn: Excellent. Well, Meg, thanks so much. I think you're doing some really interesting work and I hope people listen to this and think, how can I bring this people experience mentality into the workplace? Because there's just so many people I think would benefit in the workplace, just humans, just people out there that would benefit from different way of thinking about work. ⁓ So thanks very much for your time. It's really, really interesting. yeah, let's speak soon. Megan: Thank you so much for having me, James, it's been a really great conversation and it's nice to be reminded that there people out in the world still learning this. Bye! James A. Seechurn: Oh no, they're out there, yeah. All right, take care of them. Okay, bye.