Comparison of Employee Engagement Software & Tools

Employee Engagement Software Definition: What are Employee Engagement Tools?

In essence, employee engagement software are programs through which HR personnel, supervisors, and other parties can regularly survey employees. Accordingly, they are often referred to as employee survey software. More specifically, they capture how employees feel about their company, their department, their career, and their role.

The goal of such surveys is to obtain work-, status-, and comfort-specific information directly from employees. This can then serve as the basis for implementing measures to accurately enhance employee engagement and ultimately employee experience. This is primarily achieved by promoting satisfaction and motivation.

Employee engagement tools not only provide a toolbox for creating and deploying appropriate surveys, but they usually also come with specific analytics applications that help analyze data and track results over the long term.

Why should companies use employee engagement tools?

In times of an ever-increasing shortage of skilled workers for more and more industries, it is all the more crucial to ensure effective employee retention. Ideally, this means offering not just impersonal standard values, such as adequate pay, a large office, top-tier technical equipment, and/or the prospect of more responsibility. These days, the best experts can truly get such benefits anywhere (or at least they should).

Therefore, companies would be well-advised to proactively engage with their employees and provide them with an exceptional, individual employee experience beyond outdated company statutes.

In this context, it is particularly important to identify personal challenges and needs and resolve them comprehensively. Furthermore - or in doing so - the key is to pinpoint and eliminate the most common reasons for employee turnover. Nowadays, material factors rarely play a role in this. Today, it is more a lack of freedom at work, lack of appreciation, disregard for employee input, breaking of promises, and weak competencies at the management level that can have a very detrimental impact.

Corresponding negative effects are shown or can already have an impact in nuances. Indeed, it is not infrequently the case that a continuously missing "thank you" from their superiors serves as a trigger for top performers to at least think about a company change. If such and similar signals remain unnoticed, they may accumulate and lead to turnover sooner or later.

Hence, it's essential to know what employees need, what they want, what they don't want, and to generally involve them in the business flow. Relevant insights can be interpreted or can be directly elicited through employee engagement software. The latter is not only the more precise method. By surveying employees about their work-related concerns and then acting in accordance with the responses, companies directly consider employee input, immediately show appreciation, and keep promises.

If such feedback and follow-up or result culture becomes established, it significantly contributes to employees feeling more comfortable, being more satisfied with their employer, and thinking less about alternatives. This can even lead to increased motivation and ultimately higher productivity. Also, insights from employee surveys can indicate in which areas new skilled workers should possibly be hired to eliminate certain deficiencies.

Therefore, the use of an employee engagement tool can be economically highly relevant for companies on several levels!

How does an Employee Engagement Platform Work?

An employee engagement software not only assists those responsible in measuring employee engagement, but it can also become a valuable tool for tracking, communicating, maintaining and reporting on this throughout the company. The following components are usually particularly important. These essentially determine the function of employee engagement software.

• Employee survey/feedback: Collecting employee feedback via surveys is one of the cornerstones of employee engagement software. There are usually three types of surveys: annual surveys, pulse surveys (at any time), and milestone surveys (at a particular event). Customizable or pre-made templates for designing such surveys are usually included. Those responsible can also benefit from sample questions on certain areas. These questions are usually written by HR professionals and/or psychologists to ensure professional competence.

• Survey settings: With extensive settings, those responsible can precisely adapt various components of surveys - including individual questions, distribution frequencies, target group size, and anonymity.

• Employee segmentation: Employee engagement survey software allows for the segmentation of employees according to factors significant in the respective feedback context. These include their location, their demographic prerequisites, and their position. Surveys can be distributed according to the employee segments and results can be filtered accordingly.

• Deployment of surveys: Companies or HR managers can send out feedback requests directly via an employee engagement software. There's no need to write an extra email or use a messenger.

• Survey analysis: Employee engagement software provides those responsible with specific analytics. They can use these to evaluate survey data and convert them into insights for improving engagement and the employee experience.

• Gamification features: Gamification offers entertaining competitions or mini-games, such as quiz formats and milestones to reach, in addition to regular work tasks. They create a competitive situation in which employees can be further motivated to work more intensively towards achieving their team's overarching goals.

• Wellness evaluations: HR personnel or other responsible parties have the opportunity to examine and promote the health and well-being of their employees using pre-made wellness evaluations.

• Setting goals and challenges: Employee engagement software allows those responsible to set professional and personal goals with customizable due dates and milestones within the system. These specifications can be directly shared with the relevant individuals who can then work towards achieving them. Such achievements can in turn be tracked and measured using the employee engagement software.

• Peer recognition: Using employee engagement software, those responsible can send recognitions in the form of digital badges, awards, or messages. It is also sometimes possible for employees to recognize their superiors. Recognition is displayed in real time in a live activity feed on the platform. They motivate to work towards further positive reviews.

• Social feedback portal: Such a portal allows team members of all ranks to communicate with each other. Users can ask questions, share problems, and make suggestions - both personally and anonymously. Management can access these messages to give relevant feedback or accept comments for process adjustments.

• Performance Benchmarking: Using employee engagement software, survey results can be compared with industry benchmarks to identify key areas for improvement.

• Reporting and dashboards: Survey results can be evaluated and visualized in real time using manager dashboards and automated reporting tools.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Employee Engagement Software?

The core goal of every employee survey platform is to simplify the actual process of employee engagement and, in doing so, improve employee satisfaction. Specific benefits for companies, supervisors, and employees can arise from this.

• Reducing turnover: When companies respond to their employees' feedback, they create a positive working environment that helps retain top talent.

• Make smarter decisions: A centralized platform for employee engagement delivers a high level of transparency. It collects many data points that can be used to make informed decisions about HR management and beyond.

• Prioritize goals: Thanks to the direct, honest feedback from employees, those in charge know where to focus their efforts for the greatest benefit.

• Evaluate initiatives: Those in charge can directly learn whether their efforts to boost engagement and the employee experience are successful through an employee survey software. They just need to collect specific feedback.

• Creating a positive corporate culture: Through surveys, those responsible immediately understand what is needed to promote employee engagement and improve the employee experience. By considering relevant factors, they promote a positive corporate culture.

• Give employees a voice: Employee survey software gives employees the opportunity to express their concerns and give real-time feedback. In doing so, they can improve their working conditions and ideally deliver better performance.

• Boost appreciation and respect: When those responsible facilitate feedback and actually react to it, employees feel listened to. This significantly boosts employee satisfaction and work morale, both essential factors for increased productivity and lower turnover.

• Stay connected remotely: If there is the possibility to give feedback on important processes in the company based on a central software, even employees who work at different locations feel like part of the bigger picture.

• Increased productivity: This point has already been addressed, but due to its high relevance, it needs to be highlighted once again. Team members who feel appreciated work at a different level. They engage more strongly in their tasks, for the team, and ultimately for the company. They deliver more and provide faster and better results.

• Identification of pain points in the team: With quick surveys, managers can uncover bottlenecks in projects and other issues. Suitable solutions can then be determined very precisely.

• Improve leadership style: Managers can evaluate (or have evaluated) their working methods via employee engagement software. They receive real-time feedback from their team members on their leadership style and skills. The necessary changes can then be made precisely. Corresponding surveys and an appropriate response to these are extremely helpful for employee retention.

• Time savings: Last but not least, of course, employee engagement software also reduces the time required to collect and understand feedback on important topics. It streamlines corresponding workflows, which traditionally take place on paper or via spreadsheets and tables, considerably.

Unfortunately, the use of employee engagement tools - as with virtually any software - also has certain disadvantages or rather potential difficulties. The following application challenges are typical.

• Employee engagement software is not omnipotent: Users of employee survey solutions often want to measure too much and then end up with only vaguely significant results. If feedback requests are too complex, for example, they will neither help determine nor enhance engagement effectively. In such cases, the willingness to give high-quality feedback will be significantly lower. In general, those responsible need to have or acquire the ability to properly align and interpret such surveys. Despite all technical aids that employee engagement software can offer today (including analytics, action suggestions, and automation), the human factor is still decisive. Those in charge must determine what, when, and how to ask, what frequency regular feedback should have, and what measures should finally be taken. If there is a lack of appropriate know-how, even the best solution for increasing employee engagement can never fully unfold its potential.

How to choose the best Employee Engagement Software?

For most companies, the budget is the decisive factor when choosing an employee engagement software vendor. The available money should be invested as sensibly as possible. It is necessary to select a solution that can really be used as desired by all participants and that leads to the most helpful results.

Faced with a market offering a vast selection of programs with different functionality, this is actually a considerable challenge. Those interested should know precisely what they can or must expect from their future employee survey software. Taking the following points as a basis for their considerations can simplify relevant research.

• The suitability of the functions: Particularly important is to see whether the targeted solution offers exactly the types of surveys and comprehensive support for their creation and distribution that are needed in the business. How customizable are the surveys? Are there options for filtering the results or using multiple-choice questions? Can users reply anonymously? Does the solution offer a particularly important feature for the company that the competition doesn't have?

• Ease of use: If an employee engagement software does not have good usability, or if the application processes do not match the competencies of the users, the program will probably not be fully utilized. Those interested should focus on intuitive usability - both for HR personnel and other superiors and for employees. It should not require more than a few clicks to create a survey, send it off, and start with data collection and evaluation.

• Training, technical support, and other support resources: To effectively use an employee engagement tool, users should at least get a crash course in its application. Furthermore, there can always be problems with the use of software that only experts at the provider company can solve. Therefore, during their research, those interested should be well informed about possible training, further strategic support, and support options. The better you understand an employee engagement solution and the processes around it, the more effectively you can use it.

• Software delivery: Strategically, those interested should also be clear about how long it will take to set up their new engagement software and to benefit from it. Employee Engagement Software as a Service can generally be used particularly quickly. Moreover, it is important to gauge how many resources and labor are needed to apply it and whether they are available at all.

• Compatibility with the existing software infrastructure: If the employee engagement software cannot be seamlessly integrated into the current communication and HR system landscape, this can lead to inefficient processes. Consequently, those responsible should ensure that the focused product is fully compatible with the programs already used for employee engagement.

Employee Engagement Software Costs: How Expensive are Employee Engagement Software Solutions?

Different solutions for promoting employee engagement offer different pricing options, based on a variety of factors. Some simple offerings of employee engagement software can be used freely or entirely for free. Alternatively, many providers offer trial versions of their premium packages with limited functionality. Fees apply for upgrading the service or for long-term use.

Prices primarily depend on how many users can use the employee engagement software and, of course, its range of functions. Relatively simple survey tools with basic analytics can be purchased relatively cheaply, whereas comprehensive suites that perhaps also contain specific HR features and/or use AI quickly require larger investments.

On average, prices range between one and approximately 15 euros per person per month. Billing is usually done either annually or monthly. For larger organizations, some providers offer tailor-made solutions that meet their specific requirements. These programs are, of course, particularly costly.