From witnessing unnecessary legal disputes to creating a digital suggestion box, Elker Co-Founder Shirli Kirschner says her web-based tool proves that early intervention is key to finding solutions and streamlining concerns so organisations can respond quickly and ensure issues don’t end up as problems. Is she a game changer? Let’s find out. I’m Tracey Spicer. Welcome to Game Changers.
Tracey: Officially, Elker is described as a neutral reporting platform that allows people to speak up about workplace issues. But you describe Elker as a digital version of the old-fashioned suggestion box with a difference. How so?
Shirli: I use that because I think when you’re talking to people of multiple generations, it’s good to use something they understand. And the difference is if you put something in a suggestion box, you don’t know where it’s gone. You don’t know who’s read it; you don’t know what happens. Elker allows you to put something in the suggestion box with a two-way chat, stay anonymous, and follow your journey.
Tracey: Where did the inspiration for this idea come from? And why is it so important for people to speak up right now?
Shirli: My background is in dispute resolution. But I spent a number of years sitting on the court as the industrial registrar, assisting people with workplace issues that had found themselves in court; think #wagetheft, hashtag all sorts of things. And it struck me clearly that if these issues had been brought early to the attention of people who care in management, they could have been resolved. And so I went home to who is now my co-founder, and said, ‘Would it be possible to build something where people could report stuff anonymously with a two-way chat so that things could be earthed early and resolved early?’.
Tracey: It’s so clever because you’re nipping problems in the bud. And that makes Elker more than a piece of software. It’s really a new business process, isn’t it?
Shirli: Look, I think it is also more than just that. Because if you think about an organisation or a leader, who cares, and I want to put in something like Elker, you’re thinking about a whole lot of business processes, like, who are going to be people report to? Who’s going to provide the support? What data analytics do I want to collect in my business? De-identified, of course, in order to pick up trends and resolve things early. And in that way, it facilitates a very shortcut into answering those incredibly important questions that we now need to answer, particularly in full employment.
Tracey: What is the difference between a reporter on Elker and the person who we’ve known historically as a whistleblower?
Shirli: If you think about things as a continuum, I’ve got something I want to say that’s not that serious; versus whistleblowing, which is something’s happening that goes to the core of the organisation’s safety? Elker is designed to get things much earlier in the continuum. You would never go into a whistleblowing platform and say, ‘My manager is taking us all to the local pub for our get-together and your allocation of roles, and I don’t feel safe there.’ You would not put that in a whistleblowing platform. But unless you put that in early, you might then be a person who starts feeling marginalised, put upon, and not someone who’s given opportunities, and that comes in early with Elker with an orange light, not a red one.
Tracey: It’s wonderful that people can remain anonymous because there seems to be something about the Australian culture where we don’t want to speak up. Why is that?
Shirli: Look, I think there’s a number of reasons. One is certain things are embarrassing, particularly for minorities. Also, you don’t really want to give your name until you know how it’s going to be handled because you don’t want to make a fuss. Retribution has been very common when what you’re bringing up is an outsider; you don’t want to be seen to be a whinger. So, just off the top of my head, I’ve given you five or six good reasons why people might not want to speak up. But with anonymity, you can also ask the questions and make sure you are safe and understand your journey before you give up. Give out your name.
Tracey: There is a wide range of experts involved in Elker, a very diverse range. How does that play into resolution processes?
Shirli: Both for our business processes within the Elker platform, you know, making sure the reporter has a good journey and also making sure the customer is collecting good data, you need a range of experts in terms of resolution. I’m a great believer that the service you get is a reflection of the people giving the service. Elker is basically a product that assists with inclusion. To assist with inclusion, you have to model inclusion. And that’s what our diversity is about.
Tracey: Makes perfect sense. And artificial intelligence plays a big part in Elker, as well.
Shirli: The artificial intelligence I’m going to unpack because that means different things to different people. So it’s about knowing how different things route and being able to say, for example, in a very standard form, you get 32 choices. And then, in the next form, you get another 32 choices. If you’re feeling trauma, that’s the worst thing you can have. So what this does is, depending on your first choice, your next questions will be curated so that your user experience is quick, seamless, and not clunky.
Tracey: And it takes some of the trauma out of reporting.
Shirli: A lot of the time we’ve spent and a lot of the people that you talk about as diverse is really thinking about and getting feedback. From a reporter perspective, what are the kinds of things that we need to have in place for it to be trauma-informed. And that means control for the reporter. That means control, that means transparency. And that means just being able to really have your journey your way in your timeframe. And that’s a lot of what we’ve tried to do in developing the reporter journey.
Tracey: As a startup from 2022, how did you fund Elker?
Shirli: We started in the middle of Covid because why wouldn’t you start a company in the middle of Covid? Right, like the world’s falling apart? I had a dispute resolution consultancy business called Resolve. I also did a lot of dispute system design for that business. So, if you think about it, Elker is kind of like an electronic version of that. So we funded it by bootstrapping it to that business. And that’s how we started. Then, I went on a kind of investor journey.
Tracey: That is incredibly impressive. What have been some of the unexpected outcomes in the businesses where Elker has been operating?
Shirli: There’s been a couple. One was a women’s community shelter. I put that in as a Christmas present, and we didn’t quite know what a woman’s community shelter would do with it. That was a really unexpected outcome. Because what we found is that 2am seems to be a witching hour. A lot of women at 2am, having had discussions during the day with social workers, used the Elker platform to write these extraordinary long reflections and thanks and feedback to support in the women’s community shelter. And a beautiful story around that is when they all got audited, they had all this data that had been collected, and they managed to get some funding for additional support in the middle of the night because they had data to show that it was something that was needed. So that was a lovely, unexpected outcome.
Tracey: That’s a terrific story.
Shirli: It’s a nice story, isn’t it?
Tracey: Yeah. So, what’s next for Elker?
Shirli: I think it’s really interesting because when we did this, it wasn’t so much in the zeitgeist. It’s about using this for psychosocial and respective work to make it kind of seamless and interesting, really getting the data analytics at the back end tight. And we’re doing some other really interesting pilots, like we’re working with a group on disabilities. So, putting Elker into group homes or alternative housing options so that people can report the stuff that has come through in the Royal Commission early and hopefully get action early.
Tracey: How is Elker changing people’s lives?
Shirli: It’s transformative. It gives people access for their voice, their way. And we are in the largest workplace reform that we’ve had in 60 years or in a lifetime. And that change means that the onus is now on employers to have a positive duty for psychosocial hazards and a workplace free of harassment. That’s hard. And so part of that, for employers, is giving people a safe space to speak up and having data analytics, so they know what’s coming and what’s going wrong. Beyond just a sentiment survey, and Elker is an important part of that. The other important part of that is building resources and capacity to be able to give people support and advice and to be able to resolve what comes in in an elegant way.
Tracey: Well, thank you for creating Elker, which is an absolute game changer. Thanks for your time Shirli.
Shirli: Thank you Tracey.
Learn more about Elker here: https://elker.com/