The Best Employee Engagement Software List
>Here’s a shortlist of the best employee engagement solutions:
- Trakstar
Best employee engagement software for analyzing survey results by sub-groups
- ClearCompany
Best to build culture and increase morale, teamwork, recognition, and productivity
- Workvivo
Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from
- Motivosity
Best EX software for affordability & scalability
- Leapsome
Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development
- Kudos
Best for strengthening team culture
- SurveySparrow
Best for omnidirectional feedback
- Connecteam
Best for managing and communicating with non-desk employees
- Cooleaf
Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities
- WorkTango
Best for creating a work culture
Research shows that only 1 in 3 employees feel engaged at work, a somewhat alarming statistic.
Ensuring continued employee engagement is about instilling purpose, open communication, employee recognition, gathering and enacting feedback, and crafting a great employee experience overall.
Here's our pick of the best tools to help you with this.
Employee Engagement Software Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best employee satisfaction platforms? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Engagement software ought to be...engaging! I’m looking for employee engagement tools that are visually appealing and fun to use. Bonus points if they employ gamification tactics or borrow ideas from social media.
- Usability: Will both employees and managers find the system easy to use? And will the features encourage them to engage on a regular basis?
- Integrations: Does the software connect easily with other employee management tools? Are there pre-built integrations to major HR systems?
- Value for $: Does the pricing make sense for engaging employees in both small and large teams? Is the pricing structure easy to understand?
Employee Engagement Software Key Features
There are various types of software in this category. These include survey tools to help you collect feedback and messaging software to improve internal communication—plus options such as 1:1 feedback tools. Here are the main features you should look for:
- Daily Engagement with Employees: dashboards, gamification, and activity feeds where team members can interact to boost engagement throughout the employee lifecycle
- Goal Setting & Tracking: tools that define goals and expectations, then reward engaged employees for achieving them
- Performance Evaluation: monitors performance from onboarding onwards, according to give Key Performance Indicators
- Employee Training Tools: ensures that everyone knows how to make the best use of the software
- Survey & Feedback Options: gather real-time feedback from employees to monitor progress, identify problem areas and improve retention
- Employee Recognition: identifies and rewards employees who are achieving excellence in their work
- Collaborative Spaces: team-building communities that foster common interests among members
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Employee Engagement Tools
Here are some brief overviews for each of the employee engagement solutions on my list, showing what each does best (with screenshots to highlight some of the functionalities).
Trakstar
Best employee engagement software for analyzing survey results by sub-groups
Trakstar is an HR performance software that helps businesses track, measure, and improve employee engagement. The software provides various tools to help managers identify engaged employees, understand the factors contributing to employee engagement, and take action to improve engagement levels. Trakstar also offers a suite of HR analytics tools to help businesses understand the impact of employee engagement on key business outcomes such as productivity, retention, and profitability.
Its reporting features allow you to segment your engagement survey results in various ways. Data can be filtered by department, location, or any other custom criteria you may want to analyze. Results can be filtered by period, allowing you to track how responses have changed over time. Moreover, Trakstar provides several built-in reports, including satisfaction scores, response rates, and detailed responses to open-ended questions. Its real-time dashboard provides a bird's eye view of the survey process, allowing you to see how many employees have completed the survey, what percentage of employees have provided positive or negative responses, and which questions are causing the most difficulty.
Trakstar integrates with 25+ popular software systems including ADP Workforce Now, BambooHR, Google Workspace, Namely, Office365, Okta, OneLogin, Salesforce, Slack, UKG Pro, and Zoom.
Trakstar offers customized pricing details and a free demo upon request.
ClearCompany
Best to build culture and increase morale, teamwork, recognition, and productivity
ClearCompany is the easiest way to bring all of your employee engagement processes into a single, automated solution. Their easy-to-use software allows you to quickly set up surveys, create and approve employee goals, celebrate employee successes and personal milestones, and send shoutouts of recognition to individuals and teams.
Team leaders can ensure employees and managers are consistently aligned on key priorities, goals, and drivers of success while being engaged and recognized for their contributions.
ClearCompany is best for companies based in the U.S. and Canada.
ClearCompany integrates with tools for assessment tests, background checks, calendars, job postings, payroll and benefits, and SSO.
ClearCompany offers customized pricing upon request.
Workvivo
Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from
Workvivo is an employee experience app designed to foster engagement and emotional connection between employees and your company culture, no matter where they're located. Their platform functions as a modern intranet, communications hub, and employee engagement tool, blended into a single social network experience.
Their system incorporates a familiar social media-like feel that maximizes engagement. Users can also personalize their activity feed to see more content from colleagues or departments that they’re interested in the most. Leadership members are also enabled to communicate across the platform through multimedia messages, and have access to other engagement tools such as surveys and engagement analytics to keep tabs on team morale. Additional tools like public shout-outs and peer-driven award nominations also give employees a voice and help them develop a deeper connection to your company culture, goals, and values.
Workvivo integrates with many commonly used HR tools, including payroll software, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Workvivo offers customized pricing details upon request, and you can request a free demo through their website.
Motivosity
Best EX software for affordability & scalability
Motivosity was the brainchild of Scott Johnson, founder and CEO of Workfront. The platform was developed to provide tools for fostering connection, recognition, leadership, and accountability within the workplace. To accomplish this, they offer everything from award systems, leaderboards, workforce surveys, and eNPS scoring.
Motivosity is a super affordable employee engagement solution that, with their basic plan, provides personality profiles, interest groups, visual org charts, peer-to-peer shoutouts, highlights and company news, and HRIS integration.
Motivosity costs from $2 to $5/user/month and offers a free demo.
Leapsome
Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development
Leapsome is the all-in-one tool that helps organizations maximize their employee engagement and is trusted by companies like Spotify, Northvolt, and Babbel. Leapsome enables a continuous cycle of engagement, feedback and personalized learning that powers the growth of your people and business.
Leapsome comes with features such as employee engagement surveys that enable you to identify engagement drivers and measure your employees‘ satisfaction over time. Whether through custom questions or Leapsome's expert templates, the tool helps you turn company sentiment into action. These surveys are fully customizable from questions, frequency, participants; segmentation by department, performance, and more.
With Leapsome you can share and request peer feedback to anyone, at any time and control settings such as public, private or mentor visibility. This feature makes it easier to tie your actions to the company values or competencies. Leapsome’s learning module lets you assemble the conducive learning paths to assist your employees’ professional development and help them further their career.
Leapsome's performance and 360° reviews are fully customizable and easy to set up, and help you establish a company culture that thrives on continuous feedback. Whether you anonymous to non-anonymous feedback, prefer to use expert templates, skill frameworks, development paths, automations, powerful analytics, Leapsome comes packed with all those features.
Leapsome integrates with HRIS tools, SSO, and many popular communication and collaboration tools.
Leapsome costs from $8/user/month.
Kudos
Best for strengthening team culture
Kudos is an employee engagement software that enables employees to interact and build a culture of feedback.
The Kudos platform enables employees to give and receive virtual 'kudos' from their colleagues for a job well done. In addition, employees can also use the platform to submit recognition requests, which are then reviewed and approved by managers. Compliments can be given anonymously if desired, and there's a database of pre-written compliments in case you don't want to write your own.
It is also a robust communications platform that can be used for everything from announcements and company-wide updates to one-on-one conversations. Users can send private messages and give public praise with @mentions, and managers can give team-wide shoutouts and spotlights. The platform includes an activity feed highlighting all the kudos given and received and customizable leaderboards that show who is leading the 'praise' pack.
Kudos’ culture and people analytics feature allows you to collect data about your employees and use that data to improve employee engagement and team morale.
The software integrates with popular productivity platforms like Slack, Google Suite, and Microsoft Office 365, so you can easily use it alongside the tools you already use daily.
Kudos pricing is available upon request, and you can request a demo through the website.
SurveySparrow
Best for omnidirectional feedback
SurveySparrow allows you to conduct omnidirectional assessments of your employees using 360-degree feedback software. Assessment status can be tracked with filters according to status and type, like self-assessed, partially evaluated, or evaluation complete.
The survey reports give detailed real-time insights into strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and hidden talents. Using 360 feedback tools, you can conduct appraisals backed by performance reviews to build a better-equipped team.
Pricing starts from $79/month and a 14-day free trial is available (no credit card required)
Connecteam
Best for managing and communicating with non-desk employees
Thanks to ConnecTeam, you can engage every member of your team and help them share their thoughts and ideas. The software helps you communicate through pre-scheduled updates, social engagement tools, and automated follow-up capabilities
ConnecTeam includes advanced features such as pre-scheduled updates, social network engagement tools, and automated follow-up capabilities. You can also use pulse surveys, live polls, and suggestion boxes to ensure every employee’s voice is heard.
Pricing starts from $39/month for up to 50 users. A 14-day free trial is also available (no credit card info required).
Cooleaf
Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities
Cooleaf helps companies empower and celebrate their employees by supporting a powerful engagement strategy. Whether your team is remote, hybrid, or fully in-person, you need a way to build team connections. To help you get set up, Cooleaf’s engagement experts will partner with you to create meaningful experiences, from step challenges to virtual recipe swaps.
From employee onboarding to ongoing engagement, Cooleaf provides a strategy to help your people feel heard, valued, and understood. You can use their platform to foster DEI, improve learning and development, and promote health and wellness, all while recognizing and rewarding team wins. By participating in your virtual team community, your people will earn reward points that they can redeem for charitable donations, gift cards, team swag, and more through their customizable global rewards catalog.
Cooleaf also empowers companies to capture employee sentiment through pulse surveys, and measure their employee experience through powerful dashboards and analytics. Employees will also appreciate how easy it is to recognize their co-workers achievements thanks to their popular integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Cooleaf also integrates with many other platforms including popular HRIS providers, single sign-on platforms, and learning & development systems.
Cooleaf offers customized pricing upon request. You can also request a free demo through their website.
WorkTango
Best for creating a work culture
WorkTango revolutionizes how the world's most forward-thinking companies engage and inspire their people. Their Employee Experience Platform enables meaningful recognition and rewards, offers actionable insights through employee surveys, and supports alignment through goal setting and feedback. It’s designed for the modern workplace where priorities are clear, achievements are celebrated, and employees have a voice.
Their platform includes authentic employee listening tools to help organizations analyze employee feedback sentiment, as well as research-backed and statistically validated assessments that can be customized to your business needs. Their confidential surveys are easy-to-implement and include topics that cover the entire employee lifecycle. On top of that, their system also uses predictive analytics to suggest actions that will make the biggest impact on your employee engagement program at large.
WorkTango integrates with many HRIS and HCM programs including ADP Workforce Now, BambooHR, and Workday, and with popular productivity tools like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Slack. Their platform also includes an API for additional custom integrations, as well as multiple single sign-on (SSO) integrations too.
WorkTango offers customized pricing upon request. You can also request a free demo through their website.
Need Expert Help Selecting The Right Employee Engagement Software?
People Managing People has joined forces with the software comparison platform Crozdesk.com to assist you in finding the best tool for your needs. Crozdesk’s Employee Engagement Software advisors can create a personalized shortlist of software solutions with unbiased recommendations to help you identify the solutions that best suit your business's needs. Through our partnership you get free access to their bespoke software selection advice, removing both time and hassle from the research process.
It only takes a minute to submit your requirements and they will give you a quick call at no cost or commitment. Based on your needs you’ll receive customized software shortlists listing the best-fitting solutions from their team of software advisors (via phone or email). They can even connect you with your selected vendor choices along with community negotiated discounts. To get started, please complete the form below:
Best Employee Engagement Software Summary
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Trakstar Best employee engagement software for analyzing survey results by sub-groups | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
2 | ClearCompany Best to build culture and increase morale, teamwork, recognition, and productivity | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
3 | Workvivo Best engagement app for emotionally connecting your people to your company, wherever they work from | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
4 | Motivosity Best EX software for affordability & scalability | Free demo available | From $2 to $5/user/month depending on product chosen | Visit Website |
5 | Leapsome Best for closing the loop between employee engagement, performance management and personal development | 14-day free trial | From $8/user/month | Visit Website |
6 | Kudos Best for strengthening team culture | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
7 | SurveySparrow Best for omnidirectional feedback | 14-day free trial | From $79/subject for 2 users | Visit Website |
8 | Connecteam Best for managing and communicating with non-desk employees | 14-day free trial | From $35/month | Visit Website |
9 | Cooleaf Best all-in-one engagement platform for virtual team recognition activities | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
10 | WorkTango Best for creating a work culture | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
Other Employee Engagement Software Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Jenz
Best employee engagement app for intuitive, mobile-friendly employee communication and engagement
- PerformYard
Best HR software for supporting employee engagement through continuous feedback and regular check-ins
- Medallia
Best for CX and EX solutions combined
- ActivTrak
Best for intelligent insights into how your team works
- Qualtrics Employee Experience
Best for real-time employee engagement insights
- Nailted
Best employee engagement platform for remote and distributed tech teams.
- Pingboard
Best for visualization and rich profiles
- Trivie
Best employee engagement gamification for ongoing learning and training goals
- Waggl
Best for easy employee feedback
- Assembly
Best for making employees feel appreciated, connected to their work, and aligned with company values
What Are Employee Engagement Programs?
A company’s workforce is its biggest asset, but usually, it’s the biggest expense, too. If team members are not happy and committed, their performance will suffer. This leads to poor productivity, soaring absence rates, and high staff turnover—biting big chunks out of profits.
Employee engagement programs aim to resolve these issues by improving relationships. They allow employees to voice their concerns, contribute ideas, and be rewarded for their achievements. This results in a happier, more engaged workforce and greater business success.
Related Read: 10 Best HR Case Management Software To Manage Issues & Risks [2023]
What Is Employee Engagement Software?
Employee engagement software helps organizations get the best from their workforce. It provides a range of features that encourage feedback, survey sentiment, and recognize achievements. The aim is to produce a happy and productive team that works harmoniously for mutual benefit.
Related Read: 4 Fun Ways To Showcase Your Personality Through Employee Recognition
Is There Free Employee Engagement Software?
There are many free employee engagement software tools on the market. These open-source options are helpful for small teams or organizations on a tight budget. Although they have the place, they typically cannot match the full range of features offered with paid alternatives. Here are a few free employee engagement tools you can check out:
- Hi5 - free for up to 10 users
- Teamphoria - free for up to 5 employees
- Officevibes - free with feature limitations
What Do You Think About Employee Engagement Software?
So is employee engagement software an essential business tool or just another distraction for busy team members? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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