The choice to co-create performance changed everything

Russ said the best thing about this approach was the buy-in that came from people seeing their own fingerprints in the final values.

What happens when HR stops guessing and starts co-designing with employees?

In this episode of The EX Factor, Meg sits down with Russ Heptinstall, Director, Global Talent Management at Pixelogic Media, to explore a genuinely iterative approach to building a performance and talent management culture from the ground up.

Pixelogic is a global media services company working with Hollywood studios on scripting, subtitling, audio, and mastering — operating across multiple continents and languages.

Russ shares how his small-but-mighty team has built something most HR teams only talk about: a co-created, values-led performance experience that employees actually want to use.

In this conversation you'll hear:

• How Pixelogic went from 50 possible values down to the handful that every employee across the globe genuinely owns
• Why broad, open-ended performance reviews were failing managers, especially new ones — and what they did about it
• The "accidental" conversation that led to their most-adopted tool ever
• Why taking complexity on yourself as an HR team is actually the secret to adoption
• What iterative experimentation really looks like in practice, including the failures

Whether you're just starting out on your performance management journey or looking to make what you already have more meaningful, Russ's story is a practical and refreshingly honest look at what it takes to build experiences that land.

Megan also wrote this conversation up, including what happened when the values did not land in performance reviews the first time and how the team iterated from there: The choice to co-create that changed everything.