When you think of HR, you probably don’t immediately picture a wrestling ring. But if you’ve ever worked in HR, you’ll know that sometimes it can feel like you’re in one—dodging hits, trying to strategise, and occasionally finding yourself in a chokehold of policies, processes, and expectations.
At DisruptHR Cambridge, I took to the stage to talk about why HR is DEI’s biggest enemy—and how my experiences in wrestling have shaped my approach to fixing employee experience.
This isn’t about suplexing your HR strategy into submission (though, let’s be honest, some HR processes could do with a serious overhaul). It’s about moving beyond outdated, linear approaches to employee experience and designing workplaces that actually work for people.
“HR is DEI’s biggest enemy because they don’t design journeys like this where employees can have an employee experience that navigates multiple paths through the organisation.”
The problem with linear employee experience
Traditional HR processes often resemble a one-way conveyor belt: attraction, recruitment, onboarding, support, offboarding. Nice and neat, right?
Except that’s not how people work. Employees don’t live in straight lines. Their careers zigzag, they take detours, they exit and re-enter companies, and their needs shift as their lives evolve.
The problem? HR isn’t designed for that level of fluidity. And when you create rigid systems that fail to recognise the reality of people’s lives, you end up reinforcing inequality rather than solving it.
HR’s blind spots: The cost of poor employee experience
I shared a story in my talk about a working mother who spent her entire weekend cleaning her house before heading into work on Monday, exhausted.
Her boss, completely unaware of her financial reality, suggested she ‘just get a cleaner’.
That’s a classic example of a leader assuming their employees share the same context as them. But they don’t.
This isn’t just about financial privilege—it’s about how disconnected leaders can be from their people’s lived experiences. And when HR designs experiences without truly understanding those experiences, it widens the gap rather than closing it.
We’ve also all seen the now-infamous photo from a telecoms giant’s head office, where employees had set up a food table—not as a corporate initiative, but as an act of solidarity because their colleagues couldn’t afford to eat at the end of the month.
Credit: Big Issue | BT call centre sets up ‘food bank’ for its own staff
Instead of using that moment as a wake-up call, leadership went on the defensive.
The lesson here? Your employees’ actions tell you more about your culture than any engagement survey ever will. If people are informally stepping in to fill the gaps, you need to ask yourself: what’s missing from our employee experience?
“Learn from your employees’ actions. That company went on the defensive, they didn’t act and try and find what the right solution was for their employee experience.”
Culture clashes: Designing for everyone, not just leadership
Another story I shared was about an employee who watched the Barbie movie and had a moment of realisation about their own company’s culture.
They recognised that while the business was predominantly female-led, the way it operated was still geared towards a masculine audience. They raised it with leadership—only to be told that there was ‘no problem’ with the culture.
Here’s the issue: when leaders design company culture based on their own perspectives, they ignore the diverse realities of the people working there.
This is why so many employee experience initiatives fail—they’re built around what leadership thinks employees need, rather than what employees actually experience.
The solution? Design for the people who work there—not just the people in charge.
The hybrid work reality check
There’s been a lot of noise around hybrid work—who should be in the office, when they should be in, and whether remote work is ‘damaging’ productivity.
Here’s what I found when speaking to employees and leaders:
- A huge number of graduates told me they wanted to be in the office more so they could observe their bosses and learn.
- Their leaders told me they also wanted to be in the office more to mentor and build relationships.
- Yet, somehow, neither group was ever in the office at the same time.
Why? Because no one had taken the time to coordinate expectations.
HR loves to roll out hybrid working policies, but if no one is actually talking to each other about what they need, those policies aren’t worth much.
This isn’t about rules—it’s about creating the right environment for employees to do their best work.
“So that’s what I’m going to do now. That’s my life. I’m going to set out on this mission and apply human-centred design to design employee experiences to fix diversity and loads of other stuff.”
Breaking HR out of the headlock
So what’s the solution?
It starts with human-centred design—a concept that’s been used in customer experience for years but is still painfully underutilised in HR.
If you want to create workplaces where people can actually thrive, you need to design experiences with, not just for, employees.
That means:
✔ Listening to what employees actually need (not just running a pulse survey).
✔ Using real behavioural data to identify pain points.
✔ Building dynamic, adaptable systems that reflect how people actually move through their careers.
HR isn’t just about policies and processes—it’s about shaping environments where people can succeed.
The mission: Designing workplaces that work
This is why I launched Freeform—because no one else was doing it in the way I wanted to.
Employee experience shouldn’t be an afterthought—it should be the foundation of how we build our workplaces.
We need to stop treating HR as a rigid function and start treating it as a design challenge.
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