Best Employee Engagement Software & Tools

Modern employees today are looking beyond just a 9-to-5 job. They are more passionate about their work than ever and want to find true meaning in what they do. 

Following this trend, employee engagement has quickly become a popular metric to gauge work satisfaction, employee productivity, and, eventually, business growth. 

However, statistics reveal a different story. According to a study, disengaged American employees cost organizations around $450-550 billion each year.

So how do you ensure your employees are engaged at work, and low productivity is never a reason for worry? 

The answer lies in adopting employee engagement software to monitor the pulse of your employees regularly. You can leverage automation techniques to create employee engagement surveys, forms, questionnaires, and take a deep dive into what makes your employees happy or unhappy at the workplace.

Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to get super-productive teams or an HR professional striving to retain your valuable employees, this blog is for you. We will explore the 20 best employee engagement software in 2021 and compare their features.

What is Employee Engagement Software?

Employee engagement software are tools that help organizations to increase employee engagement. Such tools help companies to collect employee data and understand overall employee satisfaction in the organization. 

Most of these tools come with the option to collect employee feedback via surveys or questionnaires. 

By analyzing the survey responses, you get to know your employees’ sentiments in detail: Are they satisfied with the workplace challenges? Is there any pressure at work? Are they able to balance their personal-professional life? And more.

The data collected via these surveys proves to be a crucial component of increasing workplace satisfaction, productivity and helps in aligning the business and employee goals.

In the next section, let us understand the features of employee engagement platforms in detail.

Bonus Read: Employee Engagement Survey Questions

Features of Employee Engagement Software

Employee engagement platforms comes with interesting features like customizable templates, advanced analytics, feedback forums, and so on.

• Customizable Survey Templates

Most of the top employee engagement tools come with customized employee survey templates like:

1. Employee Engagement Survey template
2. Employee Satisfaction Survey Template
3. Employee Exit Survey Template
4. Employee Motivation Survey Template
5. Employee NPS Template

Most of the tools help you choose your desired template and edit the employee survey questions based on your business needs. Also, you can customize the survey by adding your own logo, colors, font, and more.

• Versatile Survey Sharing Options

Employee survey software is designed to be shared on multiple platforms to expand its reach and response. You can easily share your employee engagement surveys via email, social media, link, website embedding, and more.

• Advanced Feedback Analysis

Best employee engagement software has an option to analyze survey responses via advanced AI analytics. It helps you identify the exact pain points of your employees like what factors are stopping them from exploring their full potential, pay and perk issues, and so on.

• Employee Segmentation

With an eNPS (employee net promoter score survey), you can easily segment them into promoter employees, passive employees, and detractor employees. Hence, you can have a focused strategy while dealing with different types of employees.

• Recognition Platform

Many of these employee engagement solutions come with an option to recognize your peers in the industry. This boosts the confidence of your employees and builds rapport amongst the employees. You can send them ‘cheers’, write a review for their good work, give them points, and more.

• Feedback Forums

Here, you can create an internal feedback loop for easy communication between teams, managers, and employees. This ensures that everyone is well updated about what happens in the workplace.

The next section gives you a clear understanding of the benefits of employee engagement software.

Benefits of Employee Engagement Software

With an employee engagement tool, you can easily increase employee productivity by knowing their pulse in depth.

• Enhance Employee Engagement and Productivity

Employee engagement software gives clear metrics on what is bringing down employee productivity. By measuring and tracking them over a period of time, you can devise effective strategies to increase employee engagement and productivity.

For example, most of the employees look forward to appreciation when they put hard efforts into completing tasks. Bonusly report shows that 84% of the highly engaged workers were very well recognized in their work. Employee engagement platform helps you keep track of this major metric of ‘employee appreciation’ to serve your workforce better.

• Improve Employee Retention

According to Benefits News, the cost associated with losing an employee is equal to 33% of their annual salary. There are more chances of disengaged employees leaving your organization in the near future. By monitoring the reasons for their disengagement, you can devise effective strategies to retain them.

• Make Your Employees Feel Valued and Cared For

When you ask your employees to share their views, they feel valued and cared for. They may have a lot of concerns which they would have not shared with anyone. Surveys give them the right platform to voice their needs and concerns.

• Supports Growth & Development 

Employee engagement software gives an opportunity to engage with other creative minds and unlock growth and development opportunities. Research has shown that employees who found opportunities are Fifteen times more engaged than those who miss them. 

A democratic place to share views give suggestions, and share accomplishments is the pound of connecting with like-minded people. For example, if an employee is struggling with something in his role, providing him a place to chat about it with his co-workers can help him find new ways to make things perfect and improve his performance. 

In the end, increasing employee engagement will not only help the workers in their growth and development but also the company.

20 Best Employee Engagement Software 

Employee engagement software comes in different forms like survey software, collaboration tools, employee recognition software, and more. Certain tools are a mix of collaboration, communication, and recognition.

Employee Feedback Software

An employee Feedback software helps you collect regular feedback from your employees. You can either make use of pre-existing survey templates or create a survey from scratch. While selecting these tools, look out for features like customization, maximum survey sharing options, strong analytics, and more.

1. ProProfs Survey Maker

ProProfs Survey Maker is one of the best employee engagement software available in the market. You can create an employee survey by using the 100 000+ customizable survey templates. With logos, scores, polls, quizzes, and so on, you can create a completely personalized experience for your employees.

When it comes to analyzing your survey responses, ProProfs Survey Maker comes with AI-powered analytics. You not just get to know who took your survey, you also get a detailed report on how they responded to your questions.

Key features of ProProfs Survey Maker are:

• Create unlimited surveys using a forever-free plan. 
• Advanced survey reporting features help you access survey reports in the form of bar or pie charts.
• Choose from twenty versatile question types like multiple choice questions, level scale, NPS scale questions, rating scale, and so on.
• Share your survey via email, social media, website, popup, link, or even offline.

Pricing:

Starts from $19 per month.

2. Qualaroo

Qualaroo is another sought-after employee engagement software. As compared to normal surveys, it is ten times more effective in feedback collection. 

Then, Qualaroo’s AI-powered sentimental analysis understands the motives behind an employee’s response. This happens by tracking certain keywords that show if your employees are happy, angry, or sad. In this way, you can make effective workplace changes that your employees love.

Key features of Qualaroo are:

• Advanced Qualaroo nudge feature to collect advanced feedback from your website visitors or employees.
• Integrate with 3rd party tools like google analytics, intercom, slack, salesforce, and more.
• AI-powered sentiment analysis to understand employee sentiments better.
• Use multiple platforms like mobile, apps, websites, and other digital platforms to share your surveys.

Pricing:

There are 3 pricing options for Qualaroo

• Forever free plan
• Essentials plan starting at $0.0008/page view/month
• Premium plan starting at $0.0016/page view/month

Bonus Read: Best Online Survey Tools for 2021 | Top Survey Software Compared

3. Culture Amp

Culture Amp is an all-in-one employee engagement solution to run culture surveys, create performance reviews, analyze employee morale, and more. The best part is that you can collect dynamic feedback from your employees and suggest performance improvement measures then and there. You need not wait to send out an annual survey to start the feedback collection process.

In addition, you can even access your industry-specific blogs, news, webinars, etc. Using the crucial information, you can make smarter decisions while managing a team.

Key features of Culture Amp are:

• Advanced analytics feature to see the most important drivers for employee engagement.
• Easily create dedicated team surveys to ask more specific and in-depth questions to your employees.
• Create 180 degrees or 360-degree feedback mechanisms for individuals, teams, as well as managers.
• Send out pulse and employee engagement surveys on a regular basis.

Pricing:

• Self-starter plan for 25-200 employees available at custom pricing
• Standard plan for 25-1000 employees available at custom pricing
• Enterprise plan for 1000+ employees available at custom pricing

4. TINYpulse

TINYpulse is a popular employee pulse survey creation tool. Using this platform, you can send one question per week to your employees to know their sentiments. In this way, you won’t be overwhelming your employees with a number of questions and you can see high response rates.

Also, TINYpulse also acts as an employee recognition platform. Not just managers, even employees can motivate each other with positive feedback.

Key features of TINYpulse are:

• Option for employees to send ‘cheers’ to each other and show appreciation.
• Use highly advanced and results-driven survey templates to gather feedback from your employees.
• Use advanced analytics to see the employee engagement trends.
• Easily give suggestions for employees who have not received any recognition.

Pricing:

Pricing available on direct contact.

5. Officevibe

Officevibe is another easy-to-use employee engagement tool that gives you complete insights on employee engagement. Not just that, you can even find strategies to bridge the engagement gap.

With the option to send out weekly pulse surveys, you can collect anonymous and actionable feedback from your employees. Often, you may have to deal with team challenges, work delays, conflicts between team members, and more. That’s where Officevibe comes to your rescue by giving real-time suggestions to manage your team.

Key features of Officevibe are:

• Use a custom polling option to collect your team’s opinions on various projects.
• With the collaboration feature 1-on-1, schedule and hold discussions with your team.
• Send weekly surveys to understand the needs and challenges of your employees.
• Easily integrate with common tools like Slack, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Google, and more.

Pricing:

• Free essentials plan
• Premium plan starts at $4/user/month

6. Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is another employee engagement system that helps you create eNPS, employee satisfaction, and employee engagement surveys. Not just that, you can use the power of multiple channels like email, website, SMS, to collect feedback. Moreover, don’t worry if you are low on internet connectivity. You have the option to create offline surveys.

Also, the attractive and intuitive user interface increases the probability of your employees responding to your survey.

Key features of Zonka Feedback are:

• Create multilingual surveys to reach out to maximum employees
• Design custom employee satisfaction and eNPS surveys for different employee touchpoints.
• Use real-time reporting features to get a detailed analysis of employee responses.
• Collect feedback via multiple channels like SMS, email, website, mobile, and more.

Pricing:

• Essential plan starts at $24/month, billed yearly
• Professional plan starts at $79/month, billed yearly
• Growth plan starts at $169/month, billed yearly
• Enterprise plan starts at $429/month, billed yearly

Employee Collaboration Tools

If you have large remote teams to manage, employee collaboration tools are a must in your kitty. Starting from goal setting to advanced analytics, you can easily track employee productivity at every stage. Also, you have a clear picture of employee burnouts and can take steps to make their work less stressful.

Bonus Read: Best NPS Survey Software for 2023 | 20 Top NPS Tools Compared

7. Lattice Performance Management

Lattice performance management is a popular people management platform. With an intuitive and user-friendly design, Lattice performance management is relatively easy to use. Starting with goal-setting to advanced analytics,you continuously keep track of your employee performance. 

Also, there is an interesting feature to quickly write down agenda items before a peer discussion. In this way, you are aligned to your goals and do not miss out on important feedback.

Key features of Lattice performance management are:

• Comprehensive performance and review dashboard for employees.
• Create an ongoing dynamic feedback loop to regularly keep track of customer opinions.
• Easily integrate with communication and calendar tools like slack, outlook, Gmail, google calendar, and more.
• Get continuous feedback from your employees with eNPS and pulse surveys.

Pricing:

• Performance plan starts at $9/user/month
• Performance and Engagement plan starts at $12/user/month
• Enterprise plan with custom pricing.

8. Fond

Fond is an employee engagement software that provides a comprehensive rewards and recognition system. The indepth employee analytics helps you track performance, perks, redemption history, and more. This all-in-one solution provides a single platform for managers and employees to have a 1-0n-1 interaction followed by proactive feedback.

Amazon gift cards are an attractive feature of Fond. It lets you cheer up your peers by giving them cards that can be used to buy stuff on Amazon.

Key features of Fond are:

• Employees can easily use the employee rewards program to send points to each other.
• Reward your employees with attractive gift cards, company-branded swag, charitable donations, and so on.
• Option to like and add public comments for your employees to boost their morale.
• Easily integrate with tools like Workday, Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Slack, and more.

Pricing:

• Custom pricing

9. Fortay

Fortay is another employee engagement company aimed at increasing employee engagement and building a healthy workplace. A productive work culture starts with hiring the right talents. Hence, Fortay helps in spotting the right candidates, resulting in enhanced recruitment quality.

 After hiring, you can track your employee engagement levels through feedback surveys. In addition, you can access previous workplace engagement results to see changes in your work culture.

Key features of Fortay are:

• Use company culture benchmarks to identify the right candidates for your company.
• Option to send quarterly surveys to understand employee engagement.
• Collect anonymous ongoing feedback using real-time polls.
• Easily integrate with popular 3rd party tools like Slack.

Pricing:

• Grow right plan for 20-200 people available at custom pricing
• Scale right plan for 201-1000 people available at custom pricing
• Enterprise plan at custom pricing

10. Gtmhub

Gtmhub is a popular objective and key results (OKR) platform. The dashboard provides a holistic view of the employee, manager, and company tasks at a single place. This makes it easy for all the stakeholders to make proactive workplace decisions.

You can literally connect all your departments on the dashboard and see work progress from the top level. Moreover, there is also an option for 1-on-1 interaction between managers and subordinates. Managers can give dynamic feedback and ensure continuous learning & growth at the workplace. 

Key features of Gtmhub are:

• Create a collaborative OKR platform by involving all the stakeholders like managers, employers, team leads, and more.
• Integrate with JIRA to track and analyze sprints, releases, employees’ concerns, and more.
• With Gtmhub, you can integrate with popular 3rd party automation tools like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, trello, and so on.
• Option to use a kanban board and manage your tasks on a single platform.

Pricing:

• Start plan begins at $2/month
• Scale plan starts at $6/month
• Summit plan starts at $15/month
• Enterprise plan available at custom pricing

11. Lessonly

Lessonly is another employee engagement platform cum training software. With an easy-to-use user-interface, Lessonly is a convenient platform to create courses for your employees. With training, your employees are more engaged, productive and equipped to handle greater challenges at the workplace. Also, employees see opportunities for career development. You can see a reduced attrition rate in your company in the long run.

Key features of Lessonly are:

• Create focussed training sessions to keep your employees engaged at the workplace.
• One central platform to give and receive feedback from your peers.
• Create smart skill development programs for upgrading employees’ skills.

Pricing:

Team and enterprise plan available at custom pricing

12. Limeade

If you want to see the benefits of employee engagement, inclusion and wellness under a single roof, Limeade could be worth trying out. With a flexible and customizable interface, your employees can choose to track activities that fit their needs.

The best part is a real-time dashboard to track employee wellness. Every minute aspect of wellness can be tracked like good habits, mood changes, motivation levels, and more. In this way, employees can encourage and support each other, thereby enhancing team productivity.

Key features of Limeade are:

• Use Limeade engagement features to deliver relevant information to target employees.
• Easily identify stressed-out employees and take corrective actions.
• Send out regular surveys to understand the pulse of your employees.
• With Limeade inclusion metric, create meaningful experiences for the target employee groups.

Pricing:

Custom pricing

13. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a comprehensive employee management tool with features like CRM, communications, tasks, project management, all combined into one. The best part is that the Bitrix24 platform comes with engaging features like awarding badges to employees. This boosts employee engagement and brings about a recognition based workplace.

This versatile and affordable tool is available in both cloud and in-premise versions. If you are a freelancer or a small business, you can easily make use of the cost-effective free plan.

Key features of Bitrix24 are:

• Integrate chat, videoconferencing, documents, and more to be updated with employee workload.
• Use Gantt charts and Kanban boards to visualize your project progress.
• Easily integrate with popular 3rd party tools like MailChimp, Zoom, WhatsApp, and so on.

Pricing:

• Cloud Plans

• Basic free plan
• Start+ plan at $19/month
• CRM+ plan at $55/month
• Project+ plan at $55/month
• Standard plan at $79/month
• Professional plan at $159/monthOn-premise Plans

• Bitrix24.CRM plan at $1490/month
• Business plan at $2990/month
• Enterprise plan at $24990/month

14. Range

Range is a comprehensive tool to build workplace culture and enhance employee engagement. It offers wide features like check-ins, culture building, chrome synchronization, 3rd party app integrations, and more.

Range can be customized and used by any team, be it marketing, sales, or product teams. Using this platform, your team members can easily plan their day and track each other’s progress on a real-time dashboard. In this way, productivity increases and you get a more engaged workplace.

Key features of Range are:

• Employees can make use of the check-in feature to enhance productivity and showcase their work.
• Automatically communicate across teams and be updated with all the team tasks.
• Easily interact with your team members with engaging emojis.
• Integrate with top SaaS tools like Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, and more.

Pricing:

• Basic free plan for 3 teams
• Standard plan for $8/team member
• Premium plan with custom pricing

15. Engagedly

Engagedly is a popular employee engagement software for tracking different aspects of employee performance. You can set your OKRs (objectives and key results metrics), create employee surveys, give social recognitions, and more

When it comes to employee reviews, you can opt for 1-on-1 quarterly reviews, project specific reviews, or collect feedback based on important industry topics. Moreover, a single dashboard gives you information about employee engagement, goal progress, team challenges, etc. This is handy to spot issues early on and tackle workplace issues before they blow out of proportion.

Key features of Engagedly are:

• Collect on-going real-time feedback with a comprehensive 360-degree multi-rater.
• Boost employee engagement with gamification, rewards, points, badges, social praise, and so on.
• Make use of mentoring programs to enhance the skills of your employees.
• Use comprehensive analytics for future succession planning in your organization.

Pricing:

Pricing can be obtained by contacting the vendor.

16. Connecteam

Connecteam is a reliable employee feedback software with the ability to manage employee tasks, training, forms, and communication in one place.This tool is a good fit if you have a large number of remote teams to handle. Your team can stay connected 24* 7 by integrating the tool to popular message apps like Facebook messenger, sling, viber, and more.

In addition to collaboration, you can also collect regular feedback from your employees and make workplace changes. If you are just starting out as a business owner, you can make use of the affordable free plan.

Key features of Connecteam are:

• With an employee clock feature, track the productivity of your employees.
• Create simple and automated forms to collect actionable feedback from your employees.
• Manage all your employee communication in one place with announcements, newsletters, suggestion boxes, live polls, and so on.
• Easily train your employees with versatile training materials like pdf, images, youtube videos, and more.

Pricing:

• Free plan
• Basic plan at $29/month
• Advanced plan at $59/month
• Expert plan at $119/month
• Enterprise plan at custom pricing

Employee Recognition Software

An employee recognition software focuses on recognizing the good work done by employees. It can take the form of a simple appreciation message or sending gift vouchers for peers. This warm peer gesture makes your employees feel special and they work harder.

17. Kudos

Kudos is an online employee engagement tool that helps you with employee recognition. Here, your employees can recognize the good work done by their peers. It could take the form of gifts, comments, sharing of appreciation images, and more.

Kudos is an affordable tool for small and medium businesses. The basic plan starts at a cost-effective rate of just $3/month.

Key features of Kudos are:

• Employees can easily collect real-time feedback from their boss or peers using the Kudos platform.
• Better engage your employees with the social hub to share newsletters, photos, events, birthdays, and more.
• Simple and customizable rewards with digital gift cards, third party rewards, and so on.
• Easily integrate with popular tools like Microsoft teams, Skype, Slack, Microsoft Outlook, and many more.

Pricing:

• Kudos Basic: $3 per user per month + set up fee
• Kudos Plus: $5 per user per month + set up fee
• Kudos Enterprise: Custom pricing

18. Vantage Circle

Vantage Circle is an employee engagement, on-spot recognition, and rewards platform. This comprehensive tool also comes with reliable employee wellness and benefits features. The benefits also include amazing shopping goodies and vouchers. 

Also, there is a fitness app that comes with this tool. It sends reminders and notifications for maintaining healthy habits like good food, exercising, meditation, and more.

Key features of Vantage Circle are:

• Vantage Pulse feature helps you send pulse surveys and measure the level of employee engagement in your organization.
• Provide corporate perks and discounts to your employees using the Vantage Perks feature.
• Vantage Fit focuses on employee wellness programs and makes sure that your employees maintain a healthy work-life balance.
• Instantly recognize your valuable employees and provide peer-to-peer appreciation using the Vantage Rewards feature.

Pricing:

Custom quotes

19. SalesScreen

SalesScreen is another employee management tool with holistic features like employee rewards, real-time employee competitions, celebration of employee milestones, etc. For example, when your employees complete a project task or submit a proposal, you can celebrate their achievement virtually on an App or web. This technique acts as a morale booster and greater employee performance.

Not just that, this power-packed tool comes with an integration to CRM tools. Using this feature, you can understand how employee performance translates to successful customer relationships.

Key features of SalesScreen are:

• Innovative ways to celebrate employee milestones with Youtube videos and TV recordings.
• Build rapport between employees by conducting engaging competitions on the Salesforce platform.
• Access customizable dashboards to view employee metrics on a real-time basis.
• Easily integrate with third-party tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Outreach, and so on.

Pricing:

Custom quotation

Employee Communication Tool

An employee communication tool promotes workers’ interaction with the company. Be it any company news, employees get the updates via newsletters, emails, etc.

20. ContactMonkey

ContactMonkey is another versatile employee engagement platform with interesting email templates, employee surveys, employee behaviour tracking, and more. This tool helps you with enhancing your organization’s internal communication using Outlook and Gmail.

In addition, you can access a real-time dashboard to understand the performance of your email campaigns. Not just that, there are attractive newsletter templates to reach out to your employees with company news.

Key features of ContactMonkey are:

• Collect real-time employee feedback with embedded pulse surveys, eNPS surveys, and more.
• Create beautiful newsletters for regular employee communication.
• Easily integrate with popular tools like Outlook and Gmail.
• Analyze employee response to emails using metrics like link clicks and email open rate.

Pricing:

• Essential plan will be given on request
• Plus plan will be given on request
• Enterprise plan will be given on request

Now that you have understood the 20 best employee engagement software in 2021, let’s take a look at a detailed comparison table to pick the best that fits your bill.

Other Tools to Boost Employee Engagement in a Workspace

Aside from intuitive CRM, collaboration, or task management tools, there are various tools a remote team can benefit from. For example, business phone systems for seamless communication with all team members, employee engagement video, or webinar series to enjoy happy weekends with lots of laughter. 

For remote teams, productivity is the most important thing they need to scale and grow. That’s why interactive software and tools are essential to be used daily. Such tools let your employees engage with their teams and help them reduce burnout and workspace stress. 

So, if you want to get the best from your team, equip them with the right set of tools.

How to Choose the Best Employee Engagement Software

With various employee engagement software available in the market, it can be confusing to select the best fit for your organization. You need to keep a lot of factors in mind like cost, real-time feedback collection capabilities, integration options, and more.

• Cost-Effectiveness

Ensure that the employee engagement software comes with a generous free trial. With this, you can easily get to know the features that are required for your business. Also, if you are a small business, go for a tool that has all the essential features in a basic free plan.

• Real-Time Employee Feedback Collection

Real-time dynamic feedback collection is necessary for understanding employee sentiments over a period of time. This can be achieved with recurring employee surveys, unobtrusive feedback collection via website surveys, short forms, questionnaires, and more. 

Make sure that your employee engagement tools give you a holistic option to create surveys, forms, questionnaires, and more.

• Employee Reward and Recognition System

Reward and recognition systems boost the confidence of your employees and make them work harder to achieve organizational goals. Hence, make sure that the employee engagement platform that you select comes with engaging options for employee appreciation like giving them cheers, points, gift vouchers, and so on.

• Versatile Integration Options

When you integrate your employee engagement software with popular communication tools like Gmail, Outlook, Zoom, and so on, it becomes easy for your employees to communicate with each other. A hassle-free communication ensures quick resolution of issues and results in greater employee satisfaction.

• Advanced Analytics Feature

Advanced analytics feature helps you to understand the sentiments of your employees in detail: Are they happy with the pay and perks? Do they have enough time to take a vacation? And so on.

Many of the top employee engagement tools come with advanced filters and reports that help you to easily track your engaged and disengaged employees.

• Comprehensive Communication Dashboard

Go for an employee engagement software that has a detailed communication dashboard which can help all employees easily interact with their managers or peers. This avoids the long email trail thereby reducing the communication effort and increasing employee productivity.

Leverage Employee Potential with Employee Engagement Software

Engaged employees enhance the overall productivity of an organization with their hard work and commitment. But, disengaged employees lower organizational growth and they have every chance of leaving your company. Hence, with employee engagement software, you can track your employee engagement over a period of time and take corrective measures to retain your best employees.

There are several employee engagement software available in the market. While choosing the best fit for your organization, choose one with a holistic employee survey creation option, advanced analytics feature, all-in-one communication tool, and a robust employee recognition and rewards program.

Want to create an employee engagement survey? Try ProProfs Survey Maker to access customized employee survey templates to understand employee engagement on a real-time basis.