Best Employee Engagement Software - May 2020

The companies who are the most successful with an employee engagement platform have been thinking about culture for a while.  They probably have instituted some sort of OKR system.  Many of their managers already do 1:1’s with colleagues.  They are focused generally on a high performance culture to drive their business forward.

So, it’s probably not a huge surprise that the companies who struggle when implementing employee driven software are those who are way behind the curve when it comes to culture, people analytics, and workplace culture.  If it’s going to be a massive behavior change to start tracking OKRs, give employee recognition, get employee feedback, etc, then you may want to re-think buying one of these platforms and instead start with small steps to move your company culture efforts in the right direction.  Of course, the right solution can also help you kickstart your efforts.

Disengaged employees are not going to turn into superstars overnight.  But, by taking in employee feedback, using those insights to change the culture, and starting to build an overall engagement strategy, HR teams can increase employee moral while decreasing turnover.  It can be a long process, but one worth starting today.

The other big pitfall that HR/People teams fall into when getting these solutions setup is in the implementation.  Like many HR tools, employee engagement systems can take time to integrate with the rest of your HRTech stack.  Beyond that, it’s important to develop a strategy for rolling this out in a way that employees and managers see this as a value add, not just another chore.  

Pro Tip: When you get started with one of these solutions, pick one or two modules that are the most interesting to you as a starting point.  People analytics teams shouldn’t get overwhelmed by the myriad modules in these tools, and they shouldn’t give their employees a chance to either.  You can get a lot of value out of something as simple as employee recognition - and allow the rest of the modules to slowly become a part of your people processes.

We wrote a bit about cross functional buying committees.  They really are really important in our opinion when buying this type of software.

A cross functional buying committee is a group of 5-10 people who care about a given topic, in this case culture/retention.  They brainstorm, and then figure out the best way to tackle the issue is to execute some sort of initiative, in this case buy employee engagement software.  Then, there are usually 1-2 leaders in the group who do all the work of executing the initiative.  They usually have KPIs related to the results of the initiative - and of course in this case will be the people who are in charge of talent management.

There are some huge benefits to having this committee.  First off, getting budget for your initiative is so much easier.  You now have leaders from marketing, sales, engineering, etc on your side when you go to the CFO to get money.  They can help you pitch, and throw their weight behind the initiative.

You also have the help of every organization during implementation.  This is especially useful when rolling out a tool like employee engagement where individuals need to be bought into the initiative across all different functions.  Having the person from your engineering team who’s on the committee tell their team why they need to use a solution can resonate a lot more than someone from outside of the organization doing the same.

When you get on a demo with one of these vendors, you’re going to want to understand a few key concepts regardless of your industry or specific use case.

• What is the core philosophy behind your product?   Some vendors are focused on employee health, others on company health.  Some started by operationalizing OKR tracking, others employee recognition.  Find the vendor that best aligns philosophically with your organization, you’ll find their product is the manifestation of their beliefs in what the most important aspects of culture are.
• While there is feature parity across many of these vendors, you should definitely be keeping a list of key features that you want and when they will become available for vendors who have them on their roadmap.  We have an organizer spreadsheet here that you can use to keep notes across your various demos (it also has lists of sample features you will want to take a look at).
• People matter, and we really encourage you to touch base with whomever will be your customer service rep as that will be a key part of using any performance management system.  In this category more than others, we found HR people again and again talking about how their sales rep / customer success manager made or broke their experience.
• AI is now a part of these software platforms through sentiment analysis which can give high level overviews into how a given team/office/function/etc is feeling - and what the key weaknesses are in a given sub-culture.  Understand how AI is part of the solution you’re looking at, or how the team is thinking about using AI to improve their product over time.
• Definitely ask for the best practices for internal communications around rolling our a new employee engagement program.  You don’t want to start sending employee engagement surveys without the proper warning.  A pro tip here is to definitely communicate the “why” behind this new program to employees - and especially play up how this will increase the employee experience.
• Understand how the HR team is able to see employee feedback.  Is it mobile friendly, are reports sent automatically to the team, how long after a survey is sent out are you able to see information.  This last point is especially important for solutions that aggregate all information anonymously as they typically will not allow leaders to see results until a certain number of employees have given feedback.