Let’s be honest: most of us work to collect a paycheck to support ourselves.
With an astounding 85% of employees considering themselves disengaged at work, there’s no better time to look at the best employee engagement tools available for help.
With the right employee engagement tools at your disposal, you can strengthen team chemistry, forge new paths for career development, and empower everyone on your team.
But before we delve into our list, let’s look at the reasoning we’ve used to make this list.
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Try it free for 14 daysCriteria for selecting employee engagement tools
Employee engagement is a broad category. In this list, you’ll see everything from basic survey tools to full-fledged people operations systems.
Fortunately, we’ve highlighted some key features to look for.
Key features to look for
When it comes to employee engagement software, it’s essential to focus on which features you need for your team. Here are a few popular features you’ll see throughout our list:
- Communication features. Think chat, comments, video calling, and other standard communication features. Do you need a tool with these features, or are you already using communication and project management tools to fulfill that need?
- Surveys. Are you trying to gather anonymous feedback from your team? Many of the tools we’ve chosen boast (or are entirely centered around) the concept of surveys.
- Compensation and goals. Are you looking for an employee engagement platform to set better goals, create paths to advancement, or gauge competitor compensation? We’ll highlight many options in this department.
Of course, these are just a few core features of employee engagement tools — and they’re not always cheap. So, consider your budget and needs. Can you get good use out of free tools with basic features, or are you looking for a full-service human resources solution?
If you’re unsure how to answer those questions, let’s jump in and see some of the best employee engagement software options that might make your decision easier.
Top 11 employee engagement tools
1. WorkTango
WorkTango is a three-pronged approach to employee engagement. Choose between product features around Recognition & Rewards, Employee Surveys & Insights, or Goals & Feedback based on the best fit for your organization.
Features
- Recognition and rewards. Utilize high-fives, reward points, and social shout-outs to employees when they do a good job. This recognition helps improve company culture and employee retention by showing employees their work is valued.
- Employee surveys and insights. Master employee listening with detailed surveys, dashboards, and analytics. Then, turn the data into tangible action items for leaders.
- Goals and feedback. Perfect retention with professional development opportunities. Set OKRs, plan 1:1s and Check-ins, or take a high-level approach with summarized career objectives you can customize anytime.
Pricing
WorkTango’s pricing is confusing. It’s not as straightforward as per-user per-month models. They have three payment models that have their own minimum annual contract agreements:
- Employee Surveys & Insights – Minimum of $8,000
- Recognition & Rewards – Minimum of $8,000
- Full Employee Experience Platform – Minimum of $10,000
2. Culture Amp
Culture Amp is one of the best employee engagement platforms available.
As the name suggests, it’s a full-service people operations platform that maximizes engagement through culture-building tools and employee performance insights. You’ll see data from best-in-class companies and professionals to help create benchmarks and find areas of improvement.
Features
- People science. Discover the best survey questions, average engagement scores, and a slew of other data from top-performing companies. You’ll also have access to a world-class team of Culture Amp experts with PhDs in machine learning, psychology, and more.
- Employee engagement. Set the tone from the start with onboarding, pulse surveys, and industry-leading benchmarks. You can also see retention insights, learn from other companies in your situation, and create action plans to keep employees engaged.
- Performance management. Schedule 1:1s, utilize surveys, and track progress toward your goals with enterprise-grade performance management tools.
- Partner ecosystem. Integrate with a wide array of apps like Slack, Gusto, BambooHR, Deel, and more.
Pricing
Culture Amp offers multiple service tiers and add-ons, but you must contact them for a custom quote.
3. Workleap Officevibe
Formerly known as Officevibe, Workleap Officevibe is our employee engagement tool of choice here at Hubstaff. This simple yet intuitive HR tool is the latest addition to the Workleap sweet. It’s excellent for managing team engagement, recognition, and retention. It’s a top choice for small to mid-sized teams like Hubstaff.
Features
- Surveys. Work from pre-made templates or create your own anonymous surveys about anything from remote and hybrid work to what snacks you want to add in the break room.
- Goals and OKRs. Set goals and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to help employees with career development, performance improvement, and other use cases.
- 1:1s. Collaborate on talking points and invite your team to one-on-ones right from Officevibe. Integrate with Google Calendar, Slack, and other apps to make scheduling a breeze.
Pricing
- Free – $0
- Essential – $5 per user/month
- Pro – $8 per user/month
4. Lattice
Like Culture Amp and other tools on this list, Lattice falls into the enterprise-grade employee engagement software category. If you don’t believe us, look no further than their upcoming HRIS (human resources information system).
Features
- Performance. Schedule performance reviews and one-on-ones. You can also use the Feedback or Praise features to give private and public employee feedback as needed.
- Goals and OKRs. Create individual employee goals or align the entire team on OKRs to maximize productivity.
- Compensation. Make educated salary predictions with free benchmarking data. You can also utilize cycle management features to maximize payroll and ensure better cash flow.
- Career development. Create individual development plans and career tracks to ensure employees have a clear path forward. The competency matrices feature helps you create better job descriptions, too.
Pricing
- Engagement – $4 per user/month
- Grow – $4 per user/month
- Compensation – $6 per user/month
- Performance management + OKRs – $11 per user/month
5. 15Five
15Five seamlessly blends a human touch with detailed analytics to take a data-driven approach to employee satisfaction and performance management. With four different employee engagement platforms, it makes more sense for mid-sized or larger companies looking for an employee engagement suite.
Features
- Performance management. A simple, four-step approach to modernized performance reviews. Create performance review cycles and collect reviews and ratings. Then, you can use 15Five’s “calibrations” algorithm to create a universal score for each team member for better reporting.
- Employee engagement. Create engagement surveys, manage engagement scores, and identify the key components to increased engagement. 15Five also provides access to in-house advising and coaching to help you manage employees better.
- Transform. 15Five’s training and coaching platform helps you create the future leaders of your workplace. Learn best practices in a virtual classroom, practice with expert trainers and coaches, and then put new-found skills into practice.
- Dashboard. Track employee performance from a centralized dashboard for a high-level overview of employee engagement.
Pricing
- Engage – $4 per user/month
- Perform – $10 per user/month
- Total Platform – $16 per user/month
6. Workday (Peakon Employee Voice)
Workday’s employee listening platform empowers teams by increasing engagement, reducing churn, and fostering chemistry across every team in your organization.
Features
- Employee engagement and retention. Utilize personalized surveys, pre-made conversation starters, and personalized dashboards. AI-driven insights help you maximize your team’s engagement and retention.
- Leadership development. Maximize data-driven tools custom-tailored to each member of your team. Using machine learning, Workday creates personalized learning content, identifies problem areas, and provides expert advice to help you train tomorrow’s leaders.
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Identify opportunities to improve DEI with Workday’s efforts to measure feelings of belonging, inclusiveness, and non-discrimination.
Pricing
Contact Workday for pricing details.
7. Motivosity
Unlike other tools on this list thus far, Motivosity is an employee engagement tool that helps to strengthen company culture through employee rewards and recognition.
Features
- Announcements and highlights. Share company highlights from team building events to performance milestones. Employees can react and comment to incentivize engagement.
- Recognition and rewards. A little bribery never hurt, right? With the Recognition & Rewards add-on, you can attach payment info to incentivize a peer-to-peer reward system. Users can redeem rewards they actually want, like gift cards or cash.
- Personal profiles. Incentivize a culture of sharing what goes on outside of work with individual profiles. Learn about your employees’ families, hobbies, interests, and more with user-led options.
- Add-ons. Motivosity offers $2 per user/month add-ons for culture building, manager development, employee insights, and more.
Pricing
Motivosity costs $2 per user/month for its core functionality and an additional $2 per user/month for each add-on:
- Rewards & Recognition
- Manager Development
- Employee Insights
8. TINYpulse
WebMD’s TINYpulse is an employee engagement suite that drives organizational change and employee benefits. It offers streamlined tools to gather employee feedback, analyze this data, and get recommendations for your next steps alongside validation metrics.
Features
- Feedback. Create surveys, see engagement scores, and compare data with industry benchmarks.
- Expert analysis. TINYpulse offers over 300+ science-backed questions and templates developed by experts to help you get to the bottom of employee engagement issues.
- Recognition. Utilize the Cheers for Peers feature to help employees shout one another out for their performance.
- Coaching. TINYpulse’s coaching tool helps you maximize 1-on-1s. In fact, they claim this tool can help you triple employee engagement scores.
Pricing
Contact TINYpulse for a custom quote.
9. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a classic survey tool utilized everywhere, from college campuses to the workplace. However, people often overlook it as a robust employee engagement tool.
Features
- Surveys. Simple yet intuitive custom surveys. If you’re on a budget, they’re great for gauging employee engagement across your entire organization. Branching and logic features help you link surveys together for more in-depth journeys.
- Forms. SurveyMonkey helps you create custom forms, or you can start with pre-made templates for job interviews, charitable donations, contest entries, and more. It’s great for team-building.
- Genius. Not sure what questions to ask? Use this SurveyMonkey genius to leverage AI-powered surveys, forms, and more.
- Integrations. SurveyMonkey is more than a survey tool thanks to integrations with 175+ apps like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, and more.
Pricing
- Team Advantage – $25 per user/month
- Team Premier – $75 per user/month
- Enterprise – Contact sales for a custom quote
10. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a slept-on enterprise-grade human resources and people operations management tool. It’s great for large teams hoping to increase employee engagement, productivity, and retention.
Features
- Surveys. Create custom surveys or work from preexisting templates to gauge employee engagement, team chemistry, and more.
- Customer frontlines. Optimize conversion rates, utilize AI-powered agent coaching, and get location-based insights to optimize employee engagement everywhere you have offices. Great for enterprise-grade teams.
- People lifecycle. Qualtrics’ employee lifecycle feature helps you plot employee engagement at every point, from onboarding through exit interviews. Use your findings to increase retention and improve employee engagement.
- People analytics. Utilize AI-based analytics to gauge human emotion and interactions. You can also discover experience gaps to anticipate issues that lead to high turnover rates.
Pricing
Qualtrics has three pricing tiers for Customer Frontiers, People Teams, and Strategy & Research. Once you decide what’s right for your team, you’ll need to contact them for a custom quote.
11. Bonusly
Bonusly is an employee recognition and feedback system designed to foster better employee engagement for organizations of any size. Help employees enjoy where they work and see the ROI in the form of better retention and outputs.
Features
- Peer-to-peer recognition. Bonusly’s 360-degree feedback feature is fun for everyone — especially when they’re getting paid. Give each member of your team points that hold real financial value, and see how they reward one another for a job well done.
- Automated milestones. Bonusly keeps track of birthdays, anniversaries, and more with ease. Teammates can then send rewards to their teammates to celebrate.
- Incentive programs. Set up referral bonuses for filling positions, winning new customers, or reaching sales goals. Choose between automated rewards, claimable rewards, or custom rewards.
Pricing
- Core – $3 per user/month
- Pro – $5 per user/month
- Built for You – Contact Bonusly for a custom quote.
Measuring the impact of engagement tools
Even after thoroughly reading this list, you still might feel that employee engagement tools are not worth the time, energy, and cost. But, you’d be sadly mistaken.
Tracking and analyzing engagement metrics
When measuring the effectiveness of employee engagement tools, look for tools that can give you a tangible overview of performance. That means having a realistic looking for realistic ways to measure things like:
- Productivity
- Engagement
- Burnout
- Hours worked
- PTO
Fortunately, there are workforce management tools designed to help meet employee engagement and employee retention needs.
Conclusion
With these people operations, surveys, and engagement tools in mind, we hope you have the ideas you need to start seriously considering employee engagement. Start free trials, watch videos, and explore the ins and outs of these tools. Then, identify your must-have features and make the purchase decision that’s right for your team.
Want to do a little more research first? Here are some practical, remote-friendly pieces to get you started:
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