.jpg)
"SSR is the best platform to discover top 1% HR tools. Their 10 years of HR Tech experience makes their reviews the best in the industry! Every time I speak about HR technology, SSR is my number one recommendation to for people pros."
"SSR is my go-to place when it comes to researching HR tools. Their product reviews are real time-savers and trustworthy, and the online community is fantastic for bouncing questions and ideas off of others in the Talent space!"
"I trust SSR's HR Tech Reviews because they talk to so many experts, know the right questions to ask and uncover during in-depth product demos to come up with their best picks"
We spend all day researching the best HR software so you don’t have to. We never take money from vendors during our research phase and rely heavily on experts to refine our recommendations. We may earn a fee if you click on vendor links on this page. Learn more about SelectSoftware Reviews
In this Guide
- Top Employee Engagement Solutions
- Intro and Our Criteria
- Our Reviews of the Top Vendors
- What is Employee Engagement Software and What Are the Benefits?
- 3 Most Common Pitfalls Of Employee Engagement Software
- The Business Case Behind Employee Engagement Platforms
- 5 Questions To Ask On Demos with Employee Engagement Vendors
- Employee Engagement Software FAQs
- Final Advice on Employee Engagement Software + Our Best Pro Tip
Employee engagement software can supercharge company culture, and we’ll tell you how. Our experts tested dozens of employee engagement tools, and while our top picks are Deel, WorkTango, and Motivosity, you’ll want to read on to learn how we make our choices.
But first a difficult truth: some things cannot be fixed with an employee engagement platform. Employee engagement solutions cannot be used in place of a specialty consulting firm’s strategic plan for a badly damaged company culture.
However, for most the value is evident: these tools identify and magnify strengths, amp up the employer brand, and identify places for improvement. Read on to learn how to ensure your culture never breaks beyond repair.
Hand picked by our HR Technology experts after product testing, user research, and much debate - enjoy!
Browsing for excellent employee engagement software? You've come to the right place.
All too often, we find that companies don’t realize they need an employee engagement tool until it’s too late. Although this is a multi-faceted and complex topic, we have found the right employee engagement platform is critical to support your company’s efforts to keep productivity high and attrition low.
In this guide, we cover the entire landscape of employee engagement solutions. We start with a brief history to provide context, then we share the results of our research and experience. We hope to give you an end-to-end understanding so you can make a confident and informed decision on what to buy. But first, we share a list of some of our favorites and few words about how we decide who's the best among the best.
Our criteria: how we chose who makes the cut
We take research seriously. To ensure we’re offering our readers the best solutions in a given software category, we are methodical, rigorous, and expansive in our research. We consult with HR professionals, vendors, and industry experts. We cut through the noise to bring you a carefully curated list of vendors and other essential information to help you find the right software platform for your business.
Here’s how we chose the best vendors:
Product: We believe in gaining a comprehensive understanding of a product before recommending it, so we start by getting to know the software. We meet with a senior executive (CEO or Head of Product) whenever possible for a demo and Q&A. We also test the product ourselves to ensure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best-in-class offering.
User feedback: We go straight to the source and compile feedback on user experience. Real-world input supports our commitment to diligence in our software evaluation methods and the products we recommend. Keeping up with the everyday experience of HR pros also puts new vendors on our radar and keeps us close to our community so we can better connect the right products to the right people.
Financial metrics: We are certified finance nerds, so we use all the data we can get our hands on to make selections for our guides. We comb through data for concrete statistics like retention rates, growth, profitability, and scalability. We evaluate the bottom line of each product because we know making a software purchase can put your reputation on the line.
Best for a use case: Software is never a one-size-fits-all product. Sometimes the best solution is free or cheap. Other times it’s the one that is best for global companies or the one that’s sized right for early-stage startups. Keeping this in mind, we include solutions across the spectrum so our readers can find the best fit for their unique needs.
Here's more detail if you want to read more about how we research vendors. Our dedicated staff writers rely on hard data, impartial experts, and user feedback to ensure our reviews are helpful, truthful, and hopefully a pleasure to read!
Our Criteria: Here's how we chose who made the cut
We take research seriously. To make sure we’re offering our readers the very best solutions in a given software category, we are methodical, rigorous, and expansive in our research. We consult with HR professionals, vendors, and industry experts. We cut through the noise to bring you a carefully curated list of vendors, along with other essential information, to help you find the right software platform for your business.
Here’s how we chose who makes the cut:
Product: We believe in gaining a comprehensive understanding of a product before we recommend it, so we start by getting to know the software. Whenever possible, we meet with a senior executive (CEO or Head of Product) for a demo and Q&A. We also test the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best-in-class offering.
User feedback: We go straight to the source and compile feedback on user experience. Real-world input supports our commitment to diligence in our software evaluation methods and the products we recommend. Keeping up with the everyday experience of HR pros also puts new vendors on our radar, and it keeps us close to our community so we can better connect the right products to the right people.
Financial metrics: We are certified finance nerds, so we use all the data we can get our hands on to make selections for our guides. We comb through data for concrete statistics like retention rates, growth, profitability, and scalability. We evaluate the bottom line of each product because we know making a software purchase can put your reputation on the line.
Best for a use case: Software is never a one-size-fits-all product. Sometimes the best solution is free or cheap. Other times it’s the one that is best for global companies or the one that’s sized right for early-stage startups. Keeping this in mind, we include solutions across the spectrum so our readers can find the best fit for their unique needs.
Here's more detail if you want to read more about how we research vendors. Our dedicated staff writers rely on hard data, impartial experts, and user feedback to ensure our reviews are helpful, truthful, and hopefully a pleasure to read!
Best Employee Engagement Tools
We track thousands of HRTech solutions. These are the best Employee Engagement Tools and services per our research and expert council.
Why we love it
:
Deel is most known for their global payroll system, but they've expanded their offering a ton to give HR teams a great way to manage and engage colleagues internationally.
- Built in employee virtual hangouts
- Slack integration for pulse surveys increases engagement
- Segment-able dashboard of employee responses
- No performance management features yet
- Product doesn't have goal tracking and OKRs
- No built in coaching
Deel
Review:
Deel was built in a global, remote first way which shows up in many small ways throughout the product. For example, they have a feature called "connections" which enables colleagues to connect either 1:1 or in groups to get to know each other better. This is very much trying to simulate the interactions and bonds you'd experience in an office. This "connection roulette" is great for meeting new colleagues, or expanding your network within your organization.
Like any good HR tool for employees, you can work with Deel's employee engagement module right from Slack. Employees can receive pulse surveys and answer them, which drastically increases the number who actually do. You can also translate a survey into a slack group around shared interests with the click of a button. Now employees have something to connect on beyond the latest project they're working on.
Overall, it's impressive to see this level of employee experience software built our from a company that was originally started to solve a very different problem (global payroll).
Deel
Customers:
- Brex
- Doogle
- Duffel
- Andela
- HomeLight
- Makerpad
Deel
Pricing:
A cool thing about Deel is that you can sign up for free and play around with the tool, not being charged until you pay your first team member. Once you do, pricing for Deel will vary as follows:
- Contractors: At $49 per contractor per month, Deel takes care of payroll and compliance for contracts in 150 countries.
- Full-time: From $500, this plan lets you hire full-time employees in a new country without having to set up a legal entity there. Deel becomes an Employer of Record and hires the employee for you.
Best For
Why we love it
:
WorkTango combines engagement surveys, continuous performance management and employee recognition into one powerful platform to help you improve employee experience and by extension, company culture.
- WorkTango is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean, although the latter is only available for the performance management module.
- You can add modules as you go and these will be charged on a prorated basis.
- Billing is only done annually and all plans require a minimum agreement for a 24-month subscription (see our FAQs for more and their pricing page for full details).
- Several users have complained about the rewards redeeming process being not very intuitive.
WorkTango
Review:
WorkTango packs features for employee engagement, rewards and recognition, and performance management—all into a single user-friendly platform. Their three-pronged approach allows People teams to use one vendor that seamlessly shares data across all three modules.
To put it in stats, WorkTango sees over 80% of users engaging with their platform on a monthly basis. They also have a customer retention rate of over 90%.
WorkTango
Customers:
Allianz, Hitachi, Kia Motors, Patagonia
Allianz, Hitachi, Kia Motors, Meredith, Patagonia
WorkTango
Pricing:
WorkTango has three plans. The pricing of those plans depends on the modules included. For example, you can either purchase Kazoo’s Recognition or Performance solutions individually or have them combined in a single plan (i.e. the full platform). When billed annually, the pricing of Kazoo’s plans is as follows
- Growth: Designed for companies with 100 - 250 employees, this plan costs $5 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $9 per employee per month for the Performance module, and $12.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Standard: Designed for companies with 250 - 1000 employees, this plan costs $4.25 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $7.50 per employee per month for the Performance module, and $10.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Enterprise: Designed for companies with 1,000 or more employees, this plan has custom pricing. Contact WorkTango's Sales team for a quote.
WorkTango has three plans. The pricing of those plans depends on the modules included. For example, you can either purchase WorkTango's Recognition or Performance solutions individually or have them combined in a single plan (i.e. the full platform). When billed annually, the pricing of WorkTango's plans is as follows:
- Growth: Designed for companies with 100 - 250 employees, this plan costs $5 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $9 per employee per month for the Performance module, $2.50 for surveys, and $12.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Standard: Designed for companies with 250 - 1000 employees, this plan costs $4.25 per employee per month for the Recognition module, $7.50 per employee per month for the Performance module, $2.00 for surveys, and $10.50 per employee per month for the full platform (Recognition + Performance).
- Enterprise: Designed for companies with 1,000 or more employees, this plan has custom pricing. Contact WorkTango's Sales team for a quote.
Best For
Although WorkTango can be used by any company size, from SMBs to Fortune 100 enterprises, their 600+ clients are predominantly mid-sized to small enterprises in knowledge worker industries, such as software & tech, FSI, healthcare, and business services.
Why we love it
:
Unlike many vendors in the recognition space, Motivosity believes in an employee driven culture which manifests itself in a product focused on peer to peer recognition and engagement versus the top down nature of most incumbent players in this space.
- Employees can access this system from their phones, desktop, and apps they are in at work such as Teams/Slack
- One platform that combines rewards, recognition, employee engagement, and more
- Built in reporting with insights around potential attrition, most recognized employees, managers that need coaching, etc.
- Only has dollar (not points) based rewards. Their research shows dollars is more effective, but many companies want points.
- Some users claimed sometimes it can be a bit buggy connecting to Slack to notify people that an appreciation came through.
- It would have broadened the number of gift card options for users to choose from.
- There could have been an easier way to integrate the software with swag stores. For now, you have to transfer funds to a card and then link that card with the swag store, which slows down a bit the process to cash in funds.
Motivosity
Review:
Motivosity combines four products in one. Their platform allows you to connect with employees, understand their performance drivers, and recognize them for a job well done. What’s great about Motivosity is that it isn’t just for managers to use, but employees too. The platform facilitates peer-to-peer recognition so everyone’s feedback is heard.
Motivosity
Customers:
Instructure, University of Michigan, WGU, Cotopaxi, HealthEquity
KPMG, Bosch, Toyota, cotopaxi, WGU
Motivosity
Pricing:
Motivosity’s pricing works per module. “Connect” is included with every license of the other three. They do offer a free trial for each of them and the pricing is as follows:
- Connect: Free
- Recognize: $4 per person per month
- Lead: $5 per person per month
- Listen: $2 per person per month
Motivosity’s pricing works per module. “Connect” is included with every license of the other three. They do offer a free trial for each of them and the pricing is as follows:
- Connect: Free
- Recognize: $4 per person per month
- Lead: $5 per person per month
- Listen: $2 per person per month
Best For
Movitosity’s employee recognition software has customers from 10 person startups to 10,000 employee large enterprises. However, their sweet spot tends to be mid market (100-3,000 employee) companies that are looking to take their employee experience to a new level.
Why we love it
:
Aside from the fact that they snatched one of the best possible names for an employee recognition and engagement platform, Kudos® features robust people analytics that provide companies with insights into their employee experience and the overall health of their work culture.
- Unique, company culture-oriented features are present all across the platform, such as in the way they approach analytics, or on the actual Culture Accelerator module.
- Excellent relation of mobile / desktop functionality. You basically get all the bells and whistles on both versions.
- Unless you get a demo and start exploring the tool with the help of an insider, we’d say it’s somewhat hard to get a good idea of what features are like, how they work, and even what they do, just from their website alone.
- From our research, we could gather that the points system and how this works can get a bit confusing for some users.
Kudos
Review:
Kudos® is a cloud-based employee recognition and engagement platform. Leveraging the impact of peer-to-peer recognition, values reinforcement, open communication, and actionable feedback, Kudos helps organizations boost engagement, reduce turnover, improve culture, and drive performance.
With robust dashboards and real-time people analytics, Kudos® provides organizations with deep insights and a clear understanding of their workforce.
In addition to software, the team at Kudos® also offers consulting services for companies that need extra help.
Kudos
Customers:
KidsPeace, Kronos, DHL, Chewy.com, Make A Wish
ATCO, DHL Express, Bulgari, Arch Insurance, KidsPeace, Make-A-Wish
Kudos
Pricing:
Kudos has two editions which are priced as follows:
- Plus: For $5 per user per month, Kudos Plus helps you run effective employee recognition program with features for peer-to-peer recognition, optional rewards, and a lot more. Discounts are available based on the final user count and contract term.
- Enterprise: For $7 per user per month, Kudos Enterprise gives you everything the Kudos platform has to offer, with additional functionality to run Kudos across multiple countries, operations centers, etc. Enterprise customers also get insights from Kudos’ dedicated people analytics teams, culture programming assistance, discounts based on the final user count/contract term and more.
Kudos has two editions which are priced as follows:
- Plus: For $5 per user per month, Kudos Plus helps you run effective employee recognition program with features for peer-to-peer recognition, optional rewards, and a lot more. Discounts are available based on the final user count and contract term.
- Enterprise: For $7 per user per month, Kudos Enterprise gives you everything the Kudos platform has to offer, with additional functionality to run Kudos across multiple countries, operations centers, etc. Enterprise customers also get insights from Kudos’ dedicated people analytics teams, culture programming assistance, discounts based on the final user count/contract term and more.
Best For
Kudos® is best-suited for companies with large teams, from 250 to thousands of users in practically any country and industry.
Why we love it
:
Officevibe helps companies engage employees and increase their satisfaction - all while nurturing managers and improving how they tackle challenges in the workplace.
- Officevibe is easy to use and has a free plan that a team of up to 10 users can use.
- To ensure that feedback is truely anonymous, without the manager, or anyone with higher access being able guess who submitted what response, a minimum of 5 responses need to be sent in before the survey manager is able to access the anonymous feedback.
- The platform has a feature for peer-to-peer recognition, giving your employees the ability to praise one another for outstanding work.
- Some users have reported that Slack integration sometimes malfunctions.
- Officevibe does not include a complete performance management solution among their offerings. They have an OKR tool that lets you set goals but there isn’t a mechanism in place to track those goals or conduct performance reviews.
- There currently isn’t a mobile app that managers and employees can use on the go.
Officevibe
Review:
Officevibe is a cloud-based platform that focuses on employee engagement and manager growth. It allows managers to measure employee satisfaction through pulse surveys, then provides them with guidance on how they can improve work environment and culture. The platform packs several pre-made templates and questions to ease the survey creation process. It also offers features for polls creation, reporting, 1:1s planning, scheduling, and more.
Officevibe
Customers:
WeTransfer, Dyson, Bose, PayScale, Trivago
Officevibe is used by over 3200 companies worldwide, including PayScale, Bose, Trivago, Dyson, Nintex, and more.
Officevibe
Pricing:
Pricing: Officevibe has three plans:
- Free: This plan is free of charge for 1 team with up to 10 users.
- Essential: This plan allows for unlimited teams and costs $5 per user per month.
- Pro: Designed for larger teams, this plan costs $7 per user per month.
- Business: Available for companies with over 500 users, this plan has custom pricing. Contact Officevibe’s Sales team to get a quote.
Officevibe has three plans. When billed annually, they cost as follows:
- Free: This plan is free of charge for 1 team with up to 10 users.
- Essential: This plan allows for unlimited teams and costs $3.5 per user per month.
- Pro: Designed for larger teams, this plan costs $5 per user per month.
- Business: Available for companies with over 500 users, this plan has custom pricing. Contact Officevibe’s Sales team to get a quote.
Best For
Officevibe can be used by companies of all sizes.
Why we love it
:
Leapsome is highly flexible; you can choose to build on their best-practice surveys and questionnaires developed by psychologists or customize everything — from questions to timelines and anonymity settings.
- Leapsome is quite feature-rich; the platform packs modules for employee onboarding, learning management, engagement, performance management, goals tracking and much more.
- The majority of users find Leapsome’s UI to be friendly and easy to navigate.
- There are lots of third party integrations options to choose from, including Slack, which many users appreciate.
- The platform has transparent pricing, and you only pay for the modules you need.
- There is currently no way to post or upload an image or file into your feedback.
- Since Leapsome can do so many things, you may need some time to get used to it. The implementation process can also take some time.
- There currently isn’t a mobile app that users can download and access Leapsome quickly on-the-go.
- Free 14-day trials are available but you need to book a demo with the sales team first to sign up for one; you can’t do so on your own.
Leapsome
Review:
With customizable, easy-to-set-up employee engagement surveys, Leapsome allows you to measure the pulse of your company culture and make strategic decisions based on real-time insights. The platform also features Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies that analyze written responses to open-ended questions, helping you quickly uncover sentiment, identify common themes, and undertake data-driven actions to tackle the biggest challenges.
Leapsome
Customers:
Mercedes Benz, Spotify, Trivago, Eventim, Babbel, Plus Dental
Leapsome is used by many well-known companies, including Spotify, +Babbel, Unity, PayFit, Learnerbly, Modus Create, Spryker, DCMN, and more.
Leapsome
Pricing:
Leapsome’s pricing depends on the number of your employees, the modules you want to use, and the length of your contract. Its modular pricing starts from $7 per user per month when billed annually. To get a detailed quote, contact Leapsome’s sales team. You can also test out Leapsome free of charge for a full 14 days - no credit card required.
Leapsome’s pricing starts at $8 per user per month. You pay for the module(s) you want to use, which are:
- Perform: It includes features such as Performance Reviews, 360° Reviews, Skill Framework, Automations, Analytics, Feedback & Praise, and 1:1s & Team Meetings.
- Align: It includes features such as Goals & OKRs, Activity Feed, Goal Tree, Goal Analytics, OKR Check-ins, Feedback & Praise, and 1:1s & Team Meetings.
- Engage: It includes features such as Pulse & Engagement, Best Practice Library, Onboarding Surveys, Conversations, Benchmarks, Feedback & Praise, and 1:1s & Team Meetings.
- Learn: It includes features such as Onboarding Paths, Learning Paths, Content Library, Quizzes, Learning Analytics, Feedback & Praise, and 1:1s & Team Meetings.
- Reward: It includes features such as Compensation, Promotion, Proposal Approval, Set Rules, Track Progress, Feedback & Praise, and 1:1s & Team Meetings.
Best For
Leapsome can be used by companies of all sizes across different verticals.
Why we love it
:
Reward Gateway is an employee engagement platform that combines employee recognition and reward, surveys, communication, discounts (instant vouchers and cashback offers), wellbeing and analytics in a single solution.
- Remarkably good customer support due to their 24/7 help desk team and multiple communication channels
- Varied rewards including products from Amazon, customizable ecards, and experiences
- You can purchase modules separately if you prefer it
- No free trial
- The “Reward Gateway for Small Business” version is only available for companies in the UK and Australia
Reward Gateway
Review:
Companies looking to boost their employee retention should take a look at Reward Gateway’s engagement solution (we also have them featured on our rewards page). Their product offers employee communications, peer to peer recognition, automated awards and so much more.
Reward Gateway
Customers:
Ikea, McDonald's, Unilever, Heineken
Samsung, Orbis, KPMG, Five Star Bank, ABC Medical, American Express, Unilever, IBM, McDonald's
Reward Gateway
Pricing:
Reward Gateway does not publicly share price. You will have to get in touch with a salesperson.
However, if you are a UK customer, they offer small business pricing for companies with under 100 employees. It costs £6 per employee.
- You can choose to purchase solutions separately, like only the employee recognition and surveys modules, for instance, or go for the full employee engagement platform.
- If you happen to be in the United Kingdom or Australia, they also offer a “Reward Gateway for Small Business” version which is £6 per employee per month, with no lock-in contract.
- The price is not revealed publicly, which means you would get a custom quote depending on your business size and needs.
Best For
Reward Gateway is best for any company looking to boost their engagement efforts.
Why we love it
:
With over 30 science-backed and customizable survey templates, detailed analytics, and more, Culture Amp helps over 6,000 companies keep their employees engaged. Behind their all-in-one employee experience is platform is a team of data experts focused on all things engagement.
- People science team
- Tons of engagement surveys
- Their people science plus offering is not available for very small companies
- Enterprise clients might find that they lack some of the integrations and customizations a bigger team needs.
Culture Amp
Review:
Culture Amp is an all-in-one employee experience platform, that runs the gamut from engagement to performance management to employee development and skills coaching. With over 6,000 customers that include some big names across many industries, it's a tried-and-true solution for any company looking to boost engagement efforts.
Culture Amp
Customers:
Canva, SoulCycle, Etsy, Oracle, Bombas, Intercom, McDonald's
Culture Amp
Pricing:
Culture Amp has three different plans. Each one features all of the engagement and performance management features that CultureAmp is known for. The plans differ in coaching and education features.
The plans are as follows:
- Self-starter: Designed for 25-200 employees. Includes all Engagement and Performance features. Limited HRIS integrations. Group coaching and education. Coaching and education features include survey design review, project working sessions, and demographic mapping under education.
- Standard: Designed for 200-1000 employees. Includes all the features from Self-starter. All HRIS integrations. Adds one-on-one Coaching features, including feedback strategy review, project planning, and results & report sharing follow up. Group Education features.
- Enterprise: Designed for 1000+ employees. Includes all Standard features. One-on-one Coaching and Education features, including meetings with Success coach, action guidance, management training, and People Scientist insights.
You may also purchase the employee engagement or performance management modules individually. While you must contact a representative for exact pricing, as these will vary depending on the modules subscribed, most companies pay between $3 to $9/per person per month.
Culture Amp has three different plans. Each one features all of the engagement and performance management features that CultureAmp is known for. The plans differ in coaching and education features.
The plans are as follows:
- Self-starter: Designed for 25-200 employees. Includes all Engagement and Performance features. Limited HRIS integrations. Group coaching and education. Coaching and education features include survey design review, project working sessions, and demographic mapping under education.
- Standard: Designed for 200-1000 employees. Includes all the features from Self-starter. All HRIS integrations. Adds one-on-one Coaching features, including feedback strategy review, project planning, and results & report sharing follow up. Group Education features.
- Enterprise: Designed for 1000+ employees. Includes all Standard features. One-on-one Coaching and Education features, including meetings with Success coach, action guidance, management training, and People Scientist insights.
You may also purchase the employee engagement or performance management modules individually. While you must contact a representative for exact pricing, as these will vary depending on the modules subscribed, most companies pay between $3 to $9/per person per month.
Best For
Why we love it
:
Bonusly helps bring visibility around small wins in multiple ways. You can create surveys to communicate with employees, integrate it with your communication tools to boost recognition, or evaluate recognition trends with detail reports.
- Intuitive user interface.
- Available in German, English, French, and Spanish.
- Supports Android and iOS.
- Discounts for nonprofit and education organizations.
- 14-day, full-featured free trial.
- The starter plan is for small businesses that cap out at 50 users.
- Analytics and reporting features are relatively underdeveloped.
- The reward catalog lacks in-person experience and physical goods, and options and focuses on gift cards, cash, or donations.
- Unused bonus funds don’t roll over: users use it or lose it.
Bonusly
Review:
Bonusly’s goal is to increase employee engagement and retention through authentic interactions and positive reinforcement. Through its social media-style interface, Bonusly allows employees to shout out their colleagues for great work on a company-wide scale. Bonusly has also recently added an employee feedback feature, allowing companies to gain real-time, actionable insights into employee satisfaction levels through pre-made and custom surveys.
Bonusly
Customers:
Hulu, InVision, SurveyMonkey, Headspace, and more
The software has over 3,100 companies from 100+ countries. Some of them are ZipRecruiter, TOAST, SurveyMonkey, and Chobani.
Bonusly
Pricing:
The pricing details of Bonusly are as follows:
- Core: This plan costs $2.70 per user per month when billed annually.
- Pro: This plan costs $4.50 per user per month when billed annually.
- Custom: This plan is designed for large organizations and has custom pricing.
Note: Free trials and demos are available
If billed annually, users can expect to pay:
- Core plan starts at $2.70 per user per month
- Pro plan costs $4.50 per user per month
- Custom plan has custom pricing.
Best For
Bonusly serves companies in different verticals. As for company size, Bonusly has been used by companies between 50-5,000 employees.
Why we love it
:
Synergita helps company’s dig deep to understand their employees’ performance and company culture. The platform’s natural language processing (NLP) feature allows you to uncover sentiment, while HiPo Score helps you identify top performers.
- Synergita’s platform is affordable and scalable. On top of that, you get to choose between their modules for employee engagement, performance management, and OKR tracking, or combine them as needed.
- The majority of users find Synergita’s UI to be user-friendly and fairly easy to navigate.
- With the help of natural language processing (NLP), the platform can analyze the tone of your employees’ responses and assign team a sentiment score, which is valuable data you can use to improve the experience of your employees.
- Several users noted that the reporting module lacks customizations, and speed/performance issues can be experienced with it, particularly when working with larger reports.
- A few users have also reported that the customer support team is slow to respond and resolve issues.
- The platform currently doesn’t offer a mobile app for on-the-go access.
Synergita
Review:
Synergita is a cloud-based solution for employee engagement, recognition, performance management as well as goal setting, and tracking. To achieve all of the above, the platform packs a comprehensive set of features including engagement surveys, AI-powered sentiment analysis, measure culture score, performance reviews, 1:1 meetings, e-communication, peer recognition, HiPo rating, and employee development planning.
Synergita
Customers:
Secova, Global Edge, Indegene, American Micro
Secova, Global Edge, Indegene, American Micro
Synergita
Pricing:
Synergita has three modules, Engage, Perform, and OKR. When billed annually, those modules are priced as follows:
- Synergita Engage: Synergita’s Engage plan costs $2 per employee per month and includes basic talent information, continuous feedback, rewards & recognition, e-communication, culture score, and employee as well as feedback reports.
- Synergita Perform: For $4 per employee per month, Synergita’s Perform packs lots of features including advanced talent information, smart goals & achievements tracking, metrics import for goals, performance reviews/appraisals, normalization, custom workflows & feedback templates, people & performance reports, 9-box report, strength & weakness report, and reminders as well as notifications.
- Synergita Perform Plus: For $7 per employee per month, Synergita Perform Plus packs everything in Synergita Perform, along with 360-degree feedback, promotion cycle, career aspirations, appraisal letter distribution, skill repository & mapping, HiPo score, employee headcount trends, and employee performance trends.
- Synergita OKR: Synergita’s OKR plan costs $4 per employee per month and includes basic talent information, personal OKR, company/dept OKR, and OKR reports.
Note: Synergita’s modules can be combined together. You can take advantage of the price calculator on their website to find out how much your subscription is going to cost based on the modules you need.
Synergita has three modules, Engage, Perform, and OKR. When billed annually, those modules are priced as follows:
- Synergita Engage: Synergita's Engage plan costs $2 per employee per month and includes basic talent information, continuous feedback, rewards & recognition, e-communication, culture score, and employee as well as feedback reports.
- Synergita Perform: For $4 per employee per month, Synergita's Perform packs lots of features including advanced talent information, smart goals & achievements tracking, metrics import for goals, performance reviews/appraisals, normalization, custom workflows & feedback templates, people & performance reports, 9-box report, strength & weakness report, and reminders as well as notifications.
- Synergita Perform Plus: For $7 per employee per month, Synergita Perform Plus packs everything in Synergita Perform, along with 360-degree feedback, promotion cycle, career aspirations, appraisal letter distribution, skill repository & mapping, HiPo score, employee headcount trends, and employee performance trends.
- Synergita OKR: Synergita's OKR plan costs $4 per employee per month and includes basic talent information, personal OKR, company/dept OKR, and OKR reports.
Note: Synergita's modules can be combined together. You can take advantage of the price calculator on their website to find out how much your subscription is going to cost based on the modules you need.
Best For
Synergita can be used by companies big and small, across different industries.
Why we love it
:
With an adoption rate of over 90%, Assembly is a rewards and recognition platform that also allows you to customize and send out all sorts of engagement forms and receive actionable feedback.
- Explore the platform for free, no need for a credit card or demo
- Great set of features for the price point
- Make your own rewards and even set up a points system with automated incentives
- You have the option to go with a month-to-month plan or a long-term contract. For the latter, you can reach out to their team for a custom deal if it’s a larger team. However, keep in mind that the minimum agreement is 12 months.
- Coins and points do expire, so sometimes they’ll expire by the end of the month before you can use them, although you get more the next period.
- SSO is only included with some plans. For others, it can be purchased as an add-on.
Assembly
Review:
Assembly started out as an employee rewards product and rapidly grew into a comprehensive platform that facilitates employee engagement, project management, and performance management.
Thanks to customizable forms and workflows, companies can use Assembly to send pulse surveys, conduct routine standups and 1:1s, track progress, automate employee recognition, and much more.
To put it in numbers, Assembly sees around 90% of employees use it on a monthly basis which is evidence that companies are successfully using it to build stronger cultures with more engaged employees.
Assembly
Customers:
Cocacola, Quest Nutrition, Nesco Resource, HelloTech, Amazon
Coca Cola, Goodside Health, StubHub, Amazon, Keck School of Medicine, Quest Nutrition
Assembly
Pricing:
Assembly has four plans that are priced as follows:
- Starter: Limited to 10 members, the Starter plan is free of charge and is designed for small teams that are interested in employee recognition.
- Lite: For $2.80 per member per month, billed annually, the Lite plan is designed for teams that want to maximize their employee engagement. This plan is limited to 50 members.
- Standard: For $4.50 per member per month, billed annually, the Standard plan packs all the necessary features for businesses to amplify cross-functional engagement, without any limits on the number of members on board.
- Premium: Designed for large organizations that need a custom and unique program, the Premium plan can accommodate unlimited members. Contact Assembly’s Sales team for a price quote.
Assembly offers a free version for up to 10 employees. Paying customers are charged $2.80 - $4.50 per employee per month depending on the features you're looking for and if you choose an annual vs monthly plan.
Best For
Assembly can be used by companies of all sizes across different verticals.
Why we love it
:
Empuls is one of the few employee engagement platforms that let you create your own social intranet to keep them abreast of the latest company updates, industry news, and seek feedback via interactive polls and quizzes. Your team can also celebrate milestones using built-in rewards, gift cards, and exclusive employee discounts.
- Empuls features a modern UI that’s easy to navigate. They also offer plenty of self-help articles to help you get started.
- The platform is quite comprehensive, with tools covering employee communication, engagement surveys, recognition, rewards, and analytics.
- Employees are able to participate in surveys on the go with the help of Empuls’ mobile app available on both iOS and Android devices.
- Their affordable and tiered pricing ensures different size companies can try out the tool and scale up or down as needed. They also offer a 30-day free trial that anyone can sign up for.
- A few users find the options for rewards rather limited. Several of them are specifically wishing for the inclusion of more Amazon gift cards viable in their countries.
- Employees cannot share their points with each other at this time.
- Once you assign a sub-domain, you cannot change it later.
- Several users have experienced performance speed issues with Empuls’ mobile app.
Empuls
Review:
Empuls helps you create your own social intranet, a place where your employees can communicate with one another, send private messages to individuals or groups, create channels for specific teams or projects, and share files and documents securely. The platform also gives you the capability to create and deploy a variety of surveys covering every stage of their journey so get the insights you need to drive engagement, performance, and create a better workplace culture overall.
Empuls
Customers:
Empuls has over 1000 global customers, including Prodevans, Bahwan Cybertek, Magzter, FCA India Automobiles Private Limited, KPIT, Quixy, and more.
Empuls has over 1000 global customers, including Prodevans, Bahwan Cybertek, Magzter, FCA India Automobiles Private Limited, KPIT, Quixy, and more.
Empuls
Pricing:
Empuls offers three pricing plans. Here are the prices if you choose to pay annually:
- Starter: This plan costs $20/year per employee. It offers features, including rewards and recognition, employee surveys and feedback, social intranet, and reports and analytics.
- Proficient: This plan costs $50/year per employee. It offers features, including white labeling, polls & quizzes, customer support, and everything that is in the Starter plan.
- Enterprise: This is a custom plan that offers everything from Proficient plan, plus custom HRMS integration, multi-region deployment, multi-currency payoffs, and dedicated customer success manager.
Empuls offers three pricing plans. Here are the prices if you choose to pay annually:
- Starter: This plan costs $20/year per employee. It offers features, including rewards and recognition, employee surveys and feedback, social intranet, and reports and analytics.
- Proficient: This plan costs $50/year per employee. It offers features, including white labeling, polls & quizzes, customer support, and everything that is in the Starter plan.
- Enterprise: This is a custom plan that offers everything from Proficient plan, plus custom HRMS integration, multi-region deployment, multi-currency payoffs, and dedicated customer success manager.
Best For
While Empuls offers several competitive features for every business, it’s most suitable for small to medium-sized businesses who want to build a people-first environment.
Why we love it
:
What makes Quantum Workplace stand out is their hands-on customer service. Once you buy their software, you don’t just get a one-off implementation service that most vendors provide but instead an ongoing support team that helps you make the most of your investment.
- Easy to use, the user interface is intuitive, you can find what you’re looking for and still see the most important items pinned on top.
- The option to personalize surveys, make them from the best practices templates, or build entirely from scratch.
- The ability to share and review recognition with your teammates in a social newsfeed format. What’s great is that you have the option to make it as detailed and scheduled or as succinct and impromptu as you please.
- An ever-present customer service team. Many users have complimented on their responsiveness.
- Easy to use, the user interface is intuitive, you can find what you’re looking for and still see the most important items pinned on top.
- The option to personalize surveys, make them from the best practices templates, or build entirely from scratch.
- The ability to share and review recognition with your teammates in a social newsfeed format. What’s great is that you have the option to make it as detailed and scheduled or as succinct and impromptu as you please.
- An ever-present customer service team. Many users have complimented on their responsiveness.
- Many users have expressed their issues with canceling, rescheduling, and the inability to schedule 1-on-1s on a short notice.
- Some users have found the goals feature to be a little confusing to understand because of its extensivity.
- This is a rather unprecedented one, but we found many users wishing for more vibrant colors for the platform.
- Many users have expressed their issues with canceling, rescheduling, and the inability to schedule 1-on-1s on short notice.
- Some users have found the goals feature to be a little confusing to understand because of its extensivity.
- This is a rather unprecedented one, but we found many users wishing for more vibrant colors for the platform.
Quantum Workplace
Review:
Quantum Workplace’s employee engagement software is easy to navigate and is highly flexible in terms of customizations. It has three types of engagement tools: Engagement surveys, pulse surveys, and lifecycle surveys.
While the first type of survey is more in-depth and conducted after a long period of time (usually annually), pulse surveys allow teams to quickly survey employees on any topics and get real-time feedback. On the other hand, lifecycle surveys are fully automated and take place during key moments like hiring, onboarding, and retirement.
All the tools are built with research-backed survey design and provide you with multiple ways to slice your data.
Quantum Workplace
Customers:
Quantum Workplace is used by over 10,000 companies, including Dentsply Sirona, Panera Bread, Fossil Group, DSW, BKD, and Getty Images.
Quantum Workplace is used by over 10,000 companies, including Dentsply Sirona, Panera Bread, Fossil Group, DSW, BKD, and Getty Images.
Quantum Workplace
Pricing:
Pricing is not disclosed upfront but you can get it after booking a demo.
Pricing is not disclosed upfront but you can get it after booking a demo.
Best For
Quantum Workplace is best suited for mid-sized and large enterprises who have greater needs for engagement.
Why we love it
:
Not only is Peakon a great employee engagement solution, it has a ton of analytical functionality that makes it great for people planning too.
- Workday Peakon keeps feedback anonymous, which allows employees to give their opinion without fear of reprisal.
- Surveys are easy to navigate, and employees can answer as many questions as they like from the survey—and skip over any that they don’t want to answer.
- Based on responses, Workday Peakon offers suggestions on what you can do to improve employee experience.
- Peakon doesn't come with the ability to create custom reports. It does, however, offer a variety of pre-built reports that you can use.
- A few users shared that it can be hard to navigate Peakon and find employee profiles at times.
- The platform’s pricing isn’t transparent and there aren’t free trials at this time.
Peakon
Review:
Peakon is a data driven solution focused on allowing organizations to make better people decisions. Their people analytics software includes real time management training modules that are suggested based on employee data. While based in Denmark, their largest market is the US. Peakon powered data is being used in their customers’ annual reports alongside more traditional financial metrics. Peakon was recently acquired by Workday.
Peakon
Customers:
- Duke University
- Lush Cosmetics
- Aldo
- Verizon
Peakon has a large customer base from multiple countries. Some of its noteworthy customers are Netflix, Airbus, and AstraZeneca.
Peakon
Pricing:
Peakon has three different plans:
Essential is the basic plan. It offers the baseline engagement features, a mobile app, an d 24-hour online support.
Business is the next plan. It provides everything from Essential, but adds personalized benchmarking, custom insights, action plans, and HRIS integrations. You'd also have a dedicated Customer Success consultant.
Premier is the top level plan. You'll receive everything previously mentioned, plus micro-learning sessions, attrition prediction, hierarchy mapping, business impact metrics, and unlimited custom dashboards. You all have extended Customer Success support and change management training.
You must contact a Peakon representative for cost details.
Workday Peakon has custom pricing so the best way forward would be to request a demo.
Best For
Peakon will be best used by large and enterprise sized organizations who can make use of the nitty gritty people planning features.
Why we love it
:
For employee engagement: TINYpulse saves you time by providing crystal-clear, actionable insights about your team’s engagement. It allows you to distribute surveys and use the data to identify trends and take appropriate action on them.
- TINYpulse helps you save time by offering a standard set of questions, so you don’t have to worry about what and how to ask.
- Survey results can be visible to everyone, confidential, or completely anonymous, empowering employees to give honest feedback.
- TINYpulse Engage helps large organizations to create an environment where employees feel heard.
- The Cheers to Peers solution helps in cross-department recognition.
- The user interface can be a little difficult to get used to for new users and admins.
- If employees do not interact with the tool, you cannot get much out of it. There should be some type of incentive structure to motivate employees to use it.
- You might find some of the existing questions irrelevant to your team or goals.
- The price of the software isn't available on their site, and they don't offer free trials.
TinyPulse
Review:
TINYpulse Engage lets you send out standardized surveys at the perfect time. While it has a library of over 300 pre-built templates and science-backed questions, you still have the option to choose a different question from the library or write your own.
Surveys are available in five types: Scale 1-5, Boolean, Open Text, Multiple Choice, and Multi-select. You can schedule, pause and remove these surveys at any time. You can make these surveys completely anonymous so your employees feel more comfortable responding honestly. You can even send private messages to respondents to clear any doubts you might have about their feedback.
TinyPulse
Customers:
TINYpulse’s customer list includes Microsoft, First Financial Credit Union, One Click, Wheelhouse DMG, and more.
TINYpulse’s customer list includes Microsoft, First Financial Credit Union, One Click, Wheelhouse DMG, and more.
TinyPulse
Pricing:
- Cross-department engagement: You can share your survey results with other team leaders to help them build an improved workflow culture.
- Anonymous feedback: This empowers employees and everyone in the system to share their feedback without hesitation.
- Employee recognition: Acknowledging your employees' efforts from time to time will make them feel appreciated, which helps increase their loyalty and retention.
- Quick decision-making: It offers useful data filters to simplify the process of finding the best work and recognizing it.
- Real-time data: You will receive real-time feedback to start damage control before it starts controlling you.
The pricing of TinyPulse isn’t publically shared, and is customized to each company’s needs.
Best For
TINYpulse is suitable for mid-sized and large businesses to boost their retention rate and relationship building among teams.
Why we love it
:
15Five provides administrators with access to assessments that collect employee feedback on topics including working from home, and diversity & inclusion. The questions are science-backed and confidential, allowing employees to be candid when giving their feedback.
- 15Five helps HR leaders run their performance programs from start to finish and make talent decisions based on a 360-degree view of each employee.
- With the help of visual dashboards, HR leaders can access colorful and easy-to-comprehend insights that will make their talent decisions easier.
- The platform is fairly easy to use, comes with a mobile app, has transparent pricing, as well as a 14-day free trial so users can try before they buy.
- Some users reported experiencing difficulty creating new objectives or connecting existing objectives to parent objectives in the objectives section.
- When you create an engagement survey using 15Five's template, you can only choose from a selection of pre-made categories rather than creating your own.
- The out of the box integration options are quite limited, and a Zapier integration used to be available but is now sunsetted. As an alternative, 15Five does have a public API for users to plug-in custom tools but that requires a bit more work.
15five
Review:
15Five’s Engage tool helps HR leaders start meaningful conversations and get actionable feedback from their team members. The tool lets you have an engagement score and measure the response rate. It also lets you view response breakdowns, heatmaps, people involved, and more.
As an administrator, you get access to existing science-backed assessments and an intuitive dashboard that lets you perform weekly check-ins and 1-1 conversations to stay connected with your team. You can also use the High Five feature – a small, quick gesture of appreciation – to drive connectivity and gratitude within your teams.
15five
Customers:
15Five’s customer base includes Hubspot, Spotify, American Red Cross, Clearbit, Pendo and more.
15Five’s customer base includes Hubspot, Spotify, American Red Cross, Clearbit, Pendo and more.
15five
Pricing:
- Engage: $4 per user per month. Its features include Core engagement surveys, Topic-based assessments, Custom topic-based assessments, Filterable heatmap & analytics, Enterprise-grade security, an Action plan dashboard, and more.
- Perform: $8 per user per month. Its features include Performance reviews, 360º feedback, Talent Matrix, Data insights, Career Paths & Plans, and more.
- Focus: $8 per user per month. Its features include Goal setting with OKRs, OKR chart view, Data insights, Jira & Salesforce Integration, and more.
- Total Platform: $14 per user per month. Its features include everything in other plans, plus DPAs and security questionnaires.
- Engage: $4 per user per month. Its features include Core engagement surveys, Topic-based assessments, Custom topic-based assessments, Filterable heatmap & analytics, Enterprise-grade security, an Action plan dashboard, and more.
- Perform: $8 per user per month. Its features include Performance reviews, 360º feedback, Talent Matrix, Data insights, Career Paths & Plans, and more.
- Focus: $8 per user per month. Its features include Goal setting with OKRs, OKR chart view, Data insights, Jira & Salesforce Integration, and more.
- Total Platform: $14 per user per month. Its features include everything in other plans, plus DPAs and security questionnaires.
Best For
15Five is more suitable for growing companies and enterprises wanting to ensure that they're getting feedback from all corners of the organization.
What is Employee Engagement Software and What Are the Benefits?
Employee engagement software is a solution that enables businesses to collect data on the health of company culture through employee surveys that gather feedback on employees. This differs from performance management software as its focus is on tracking individual, group, division, and company goals. However, several vendors have a combined engagement and performance management solution.
Here are some other benefits of an employee engagement program:
Employee Experience: An employee engagement app allows your human resources team to engage employees by understanding what they care about and then incorporating that feedback directly into the culture of the company. Employees are heard, and their key concerns are addressed, leading to less employee turnover and higher productivity. This starts with employee onboarding (and even the hiring process) and goes through the entire employee lifecycle.
Real-Time Feedback: Unlike an annual employee engagement survey, most engagement platforms now gather continuous data on what’s happening in the company. Often, the mechanism for collecting this information is through pulse surveys that ask only 1-2 questions and therefore have very high response rates. They also offer real-time feedback on issues that are important to the company or a given team.
Strategy: Most employee engagement programs now have a playbook built in that offers a de-facto employee engagement strategy for HR teams who aren’t large enough to figure out exactly what they want to accomplish. This comes in the form of best practices around how often and how much to ask, what questions to ask, and what teams and even professional services to help you figure out how to interpret the data you collect.
Talent Management: An employee engagement platform means you have a more holistic view of what’s going on with your company across the entire employee lifecycle. The People Operations team and functional leaders now have a new weapon to understand and diagnose cultural issues before they spread to the rest of the company.
Employee Performance: In addition to engagement, many of the best employee engagement solutions will offer a performance aspect that can be used in evaluating how employees' efforts are contributing to the greater efforts of the organization and how they stack up relative to their peers. Sometimes the data collected is anonymous and used mostly to evaluate teams or offices. Other times it's tied to an individual and can be used for performance reviews.
Actionable Insights: One problem with annual employee engagement surveys is that the data can take a long time to collect and analyze. A lot of what is uncovered generally relates to the employee experience but lacks actionable next steps. The best employee engagement tools will allow your human resources team to collect actionable, real-time data.
3 Most Common Pitfalls Of Employee Engagement Software
Employee engagement system implemented = no more culture issues: The most successful companies pair a good employee engagement platform with values that are meaningfully aligned with company culture. Without a solid identity and company culture foundation, even the best employee engagement software will be ineffective. The right solution can also help kickstart your efforts, but it won't fully solve your culture and management issues. “The software doesn’t replace the human connection.” - Tracy Marie, Founder of Hire Incentive.
Employee engagement system implemented = no more disengaged workers: Disengaged employees are not going to turn into superstars overnight. But, by taking in employee feedback, using those insights to change the culture, and building an overall engagement strategy, HR teams can increase employee morale while decreasing turnover. It can be a long process, but one worth starting today.
Employee engagement system implemented = done in the blink of an eye: Once you start to move forward with an employee engagement platform, be weary, as a big pitfall that HR teams fall into when getting these solutions set up is in the implementation. Like many HR tools, employee engagement systems can take time to integrate with the rest of your HRTech stack. It’s also essential to develop a strategy for rolling this out so that employees and managers see this as a value add, not just another chore. The communication plan needs to be locked down well before rolling out the tech to individuals.
Pro Tip: You are ahead of the game if you've used a cross-functional buying committee to purchase this solution. You can leverage the committee members to evangelize your new solution to the different groups of employees at your organization.
When you start 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 of modules in these tools and shouldn’t give their employees a chance to either. You can get a lot of value from something as simple as employee recognition - and slowly allow the rest of the modules to become part of your people processes.
The Business Case Behind Employee Engagement Platforms
Employee engagement software allows companies to have a better understanding of the health of their organization. These solutions give People and HR teams more insights into what is working and what needs to be fixed. Within the broader world of HR Software, it's a very important thing to get right.
As a result, employers can reap benefits by increasing the productivity of their workforce and by studying losses caused by employee attrition. Plus, we all got into HR In the first place to help people have a better experience at work, right?
We’ve designed this calculator to help you think through the basic ROI from using one of the best employee engagement solutions. We highly suggest you use the video to the right to understand best how to use this spreadsheet!
We also have a page on our site dedicated to HR Tech ROI calculations if you want to check it out.
calculator video. Title: How to calculate the ROI from Employee Engagement Software
Download ROI Calculator
Click Here to Download5 Questions To Ask On Demos with Employee Engagement Vendors
When you get on a demo with one of these vendors, you’ll want to understand 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 manifests their beliefs in what the most critical aspects of culture are.
Do you have these features that we need?
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 look at).
People matter and we encourage you to touch base with whoever 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 customer success manager made or broke their experience.
Is your product AI-driven software?
AI is now a part of these software platforms through sentiment analysis which can give high-level overviews into how a given team 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 thinks about using AI to improve their product over time.
What are the best practices for internal communications around rolling out new employee engagement software?
Definitely ask for the best practices for internal communications around rolling out 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.
Do your survey tools have integrations with other platforms like Slack, Outlook, and Gmail, or is there a mobile app that employees have to download?
Understand how the HR team can see employee feedback. Is it mobile-friendly, are reports sent automatically to the team, and how long after a survey is sent out are you able to see the 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.
Employee Engagement Software FAQs
What are some use cases of employee engagement software?
Some use cases of employee engagement software include gaining insights into company culture, reacting to issues with actionable insights, and managing the talent lifecycle.
When should you use employee engagement software?
There’s no specific point - Christina Moran, Vice President of MarshBerry shared. “Some organizations get by with doing employee engagement surveys using free survey tools and rolling all the information up manually. Like with any software purchasing decision, the software should make your life better, easier, and higher-performing in the realm it’s being added to. It should be an enhancement, a value-add, not just an accepted cost.”
And I agree with her. There are no satisfying answers for this question. But the following can be helpful for you in terms of detecting “the signs” to consider onboarding employee engagement software to your business: when your employees are disengaged, when your output declines, when your culture isn’t strong, and when you have long time-to-hire waits.
What is the best employee engagement software?
The best employee engagement software solutions are:
- Kazoo: Scalable employee engagement platform
- Reward Gateway: Customizable employee engagement platform
- Leapsome: Employee engagement and performance management
- Motivosity: Employee engagement and recognition platform
- eloomi: Employee engagement and LMS
- ClearCompany: Robust HR software
- Reflektive: Used by Fortune 500 companies.
- Peakon: Comes with several analytics tools
- Glint: In-depth engagement analytics
- CultureIQ: Tech combined with services
- Waggl: Varied survey options
- TinyPulse: Great for companies of all sizes
- 15five: Affordable plans for SMBs
- Workvivo: Employee social network
- Emplify: Software and services provider
- CultureAmp: Full-featured solution
- Quantum Workplace: For performance-based cultures
Final Advice on Employee Engagement Software + Our Best Pro Tip
We wrote a bit about cross-functional buying committees in the past and think they are relevant for employee engagement platforms.
A cross-functional buying committee is a group of five to ten people who care about a given topic, in this case, culture. They brainstorm and then figure out the best way to tackle the issue: to execute some initiative, in this case, buy employee engagement software. Then, there are usually one to two leaders in the group who do all the work of executing the initiative. They usually have KPIs related to the initiative's results - and of course, in this case, they will be the people in charge of talent management.
There are some huge benefits to having this committee. First off, getting a budget for your initiative is so much easier. You now have leaders from marketing, sales, and engineering 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 must be brought into the initiative across all different functions. Having the person from your engineering team on the committee tell their team why they need to use a solution can resonate more than someone from outside the organization doing the same.
Final Advice
The best employee engagement software is a game changer for organizations looking to supercharge their workplace experience and decrease employee turnover. There are no silver bullets regarding disengaged employees or having perfect insights into what’s going on with your business. Our expert Tracie has shared “Thinking adopting employee engagement software will solve all of the concerns is a deadly mistake. The software does not replace the human connection.” However, this is a great place to start.
If your company needs a better way to start gathering employee feedback or is simply looking for ways to improve culture, then our suggestion is to start by getting demos with 2-3 of the top employee engagement software companies to figure out the details around how this would work within your organization. Good luck!
Top Employee Engagement Solutions
- WorkTango:Engagement, recognition, and performance managementGreat for companies that want engagement and performance
- Motivosity:Employee recognition plus engagement and developmentRecognition plus employee engagement and development
Stay on top of what really matters in HR and People Tech. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up on the latest news, trends, and culture.
We put in the effort to make this guide awesome
39
Hours Researched
.svg)
6
Experts Consulted
.svg)
28
Vendors Reviewed
Featured in
Looking for HR Tech Advice? Join our community
Ask questions, share knowledge, find new job opportunities, network and more in our closed HR Tech Buyers Community
Join 20,000 HR Tech Nerds who get our weekly insights
