Episode Details

Employee experience design is often assumed to be about perks, policies, or expensive culture initiatives — but in this episode clip, Dean Carter reveals how the most powerful transformation he ever led cost the company nothing.

It started with a radical experiment in employee experience design at a time when the idea of a four-day workweek barely existed in mainstream business thinking.

Instead of reducing output, the team re-engineered how work was structured — condensing schedules into longer days and closing the office every other Friday. Internally, this became known as the "980 model": nine-hour days across a two-week cycle, creating consistent extended weekends without reducing overall output.

What made this shift powerful wasn't just the schedule change — it was what it unlocked in employee experience design.

The employee experience design experiment behind the four-day model

Rather than guessing what employees needed, the team co-designed the change with them.

They didn't ask: 👉 "What benefits do you want?"

They asked: 👉 "What's getting in the way of you doing your best work — and living your life?"

This reframed employee experience design away from perks… and toward real life outcomes.

Measuring employee experience design beyond productivity

Most organisations measure output. This experiment measured something deeper.

Working with a university, they tracked how employee experience design impacted real human outcomes:

• Relationships at home

• Time with family

• Health behaviours (doctor visits, nutrition, self-care)

• Time outdoors and recovery

• Overall productivity and energy

The results were clear:

• 90%+ reported improved relationships

• 87% reported better family time

• 74% reported more time for meaningful life activities

Employee experience design wasn't just improving work — it was improving life outside of work.

Why this became a "non-reversible" employee experience design change

What made this shift different was permanence.

Once employees experienced better balance, stronger relationships, and higher energy, the benefit couldn't be taken away.

It became embedded into the culture — not as a perk, but as a structural part of employee experience design.

And crucially, it cost the organisation nothing.

The SME lesson behind employee experience design

Dean Carter's story challenges a common leadership assumption:

👉 Employee experience design is not about spending more 👉 It's about designing smarter systems of work

For SME leaders, the key shift is this:

• Stop designing for policies and programmes

• Start designing for lived employee moments

• Build structures that improve both performance and life outside of work

Because when employee experienc