An Interview With Alex Borekull, CEO Qlearsite

In March 2022, Stanton Chase signed a partnership agreement with Qlearsite, a UK-based technology company that provides an innovative employee feedback platform, delivering actionable insights about employee experience with listening technology, powerful people analytics and shorter, better employee surveys proven to drive growth.

In today’s fast-changing business environment, remote/hybrid workplace, employee experience/wellbeing and change management initiatives toward building inclusive and successful workplaces have been top of mind and common challenges organizations are facing.

We take the opportunity to discuss these topics with Alex Borekull, CEO of Qlearsite, and gain his perspective from supporting organizations to shed light on employee insights and make change happen.

Stanton Chase: What is your vision for Qlearsite and the change you help bring to organizations?

Alex Borekull: Our vision is to redefine the future of work: We want to see a world where every organisation is people-centric. That’s because understanding your employees is the cornerstone of organizational success. We help deliver that using better employee surveys and insightful listening technology, to deliver actionable people insights that can inform your strategy.

Stanton Chase: In such a challenging external environment, from so many perspectives, employee experience and organizational effectiveness are at the top of most leaders’ agenda. How does Qlearsite help organizations pinpoint and address key areas for creating the culture that enables a sustainable successful future?

Borekull: It can be hard to know where to start, when asking for employee feedback. We created our Organizational Fitness framework to help leaders understand employee experience holistically. By sending one survey, you can view your score in 16 key areas — from ‘tools’ to ‘leadership’ — and quickly identify strengths and areas for improvement.

Whatever survey you send on our Employee Feedback Platform, it’s backed by powerful listening technology. This reads thousands of written comments as a person would, summarizing the most common themes so you can understand the reasons behind any low scores.

Stanton Chase: The return to the office, post-pandemic, is the time for organizations to create more tailored responses to new workplace challenges. With surveys on the topics that matter, from onboarding to exit, and from innovation to inclusion,Qlearsite’s platform offers employee surveys on a wide range of topics to help organizations grasp their employees’ experience better. According to your experience, what are the topics prioritized by companies and employees today?

Borekull: Unsurprisingly, a lot of leaders are keen to understand the impact that hybrid working is having on their employees. Many organizations are now entering an ‘evaluation’ stage, to understand if they need to adjust or expand their working location policies.

Wellbeing also comes into play here. How is hybrid working affecting employees physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially? And how is their wellbeing post-pandemic, and in the light of new challenges — from war, to the cost-of-living crisis.

Employee retention is also a key topic. With the effects of the Great Resignation felt across the world, leaders need to understand why people leave — and, just as crucially, why they stay. That’s where listening to employee feedback becomes crucial.

Stanton Chase: The business case for diversity, equity and inclusion is strong and growing stronger. According to recent research an inclusive culture is a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining top talent and for innovation, among other benefits. In your opinion, how should organizations approach the journey toward a more inclusive culture?

Borekull: The benefits – morally and financially – of diversity are well known. But as we know, diverse teams aren’t sustainable if you don’t prioritise inclusion. The challenge is that inclusion is a feeling, which is hard to quantify.

We created an Inclusion Survey to address this. By asking employees to share their lived experiences, you can offer a safe space to give our feedback on inclusion in your organization. By measuring aspects like how accepted people feel, or if they feel safe, you can get a quantifiable inclusion ‘score.’

By using our insightful listening technology, written feedback is also analyzed — picking out those common themes driving scores, so you can understand how employees really feel.

Stanton Chase: We live in a data-driven world where businesses are looking to become more successful and drive change by making smart, informed decisions about their people. How does Qlearsite help organizations in that direction?

Borekull: We deliver actionable people insights. Unlike other survey providers, where it’s hard to define your next steps based on the results, our platform is built to help you make an impact. On your results dashboard, there’s clear color-coding and demographic/departmental filters to make exploring your data easy. There’s also a summary of the top themes discussed — thanks to our listening technology — so you can quickly and easily understand what you need to consider when defining your next initiatives.

Stanton Chase: To attract and retain talent, drive engagement and performance, organizations need to really listen to their employees more than ever. What makes Qlearsite different in enabling this dialogue in a modern, efficient, and impactful way?

Borekull: Insightful listening. It’s easy to ask for employee feedback, but it can be hard to hear what’s really being said. Our technology uses machine learning to understand written text and has been trained on vast amounts of employee data, so it reads comments just like a person would — just at a massive scale.

From that instant analysis, you’re presenting with the ‘top themes’ people discuss – uncovering what really matters to your employees and giving you a solid basis to take action.