Episode description

In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product.

Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs.

What we covered:

• Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like instead
• Meg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the work
• Why corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"
• The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solution
• Pay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the market
• A case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problem
• Why dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlock
• Self-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?
• Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approach
• Where people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the business
• Three things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the work

People referenced

• Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX Dojo
• Adam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in Melbourne
• Dan Pink - "take pay off the table" framing
• Luke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HR
• Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory

Books

• Purpose and Work - Jessica Zwaan
• What Pay Costs - James A Seechurn
• Drive - Daniel Pink

Organizations and resources

• Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership function
• PX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-belt
• Humani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book club
• Handelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating units
• Spotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplines
• Haier - the marketplace model of the organization