Dart Lindsley, the head of global process excellence for people operations at Google, joins the Gartner Talent Angle to share why he thinks work is one of the least designed products on the market today. Dart argues that if HR leaders applied design principles to work they would view employees not as inputs to production but rather as customers buying the experience of work. This reframing of the relationship between the organization and the employee can help managers rethink how to approach their roles and help HR more precisely shape the employee experience.

Dart Lindsley leads Global Process Excellence for People Operations at Google. Before joining Google, Dart led the Human Resources Transformation Planning and Analysis organization for Cisco Systems. While at Cisco, Dart founded the business architecture and experience design teams. By focusing these two very different disciplines on questions of talent, Dart and his team came to an important insight: employees can be framed as customers of work, and employers therefore must sell work as a product. Ever since, Dart has been using tools from marketing and product design to delve into what people really want from work and ways in which companies can build and deliver an extraordinary work-experience product.

Aaron McEwan is a behavioral scientist, psychologist and futurist. As vice president of research and advisory for Gartner’s HR practice, Aaron provides strategic advice to the world’s leading companies on the future of work and talent and helps leaders manage their most critical relationships across the c-suite and board. Alongside his current role, Aaron is a Fellow of the Australian Human Resources Institute, serves on the national committee for the Australian Psychological Society’s Interest Group in Coaching Psychology and is an Associate of Macquarie University’s Centre for Workforce Futures. He was recently named a Top 100 Global HR Influencer and one of 5 HR Leaders to Follow in 2022.

*This episode is an excerpt taken from our 2022 interview.