Employee engagement can mean so many things for different organizations. For some it is having fun activities at work, for others it is a comprehensive benefits package, for some others it is a strategy deeply intertwined with business outcomes. However, whatever employee engagement means to you, it is impossible to derive its ROI if not implemented properly. And for that, you need the right employee engagement platform and tools to identify the right places your business needs to invest in for maximum impact.
While there are many employee engagement platforms available in the market, companies must carefully choose one that aligns with their business goals and allows them to use modern technology to their advantage. It is not important that you choose the most feature-rich employee engagement software, but it is important that you choose the employee engagement platform that actually streamlines your HR processes and gives you the insights you need to make a difference.
To simplify your search, we have compiled a list of the most popular and effective online employee engagement platforms capable of bringing robust organizational changes for the better.
But let’s start with a quick recap of what an employee engagement software is.
What is an employee engagement platform?
An employee engagement platform is a cloud-based software that enables businesses to communicate with employees more proactively, using different strategies. These include streamlined communication, monthly/quarterly/annual/pulse surveys, feedback sessions, performance reviews and more. The online employee engagement platform helps the HR department run all the functions on one dashboard, keeping their data optimized.
Features of employee engagement tools
Employee engagement strategies tend to vary from organization to organization based on the industry they are in, their employee demographics, and the overall objective of the efforts. But a good employee engagement tool must have the following features (on the basis of which we have also included a list of the best employee engagement tools below):
- AI/ML capabilities – The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) is becoming prevalent in HR tech. AI/ML solutions that come with advanced sentiment analysis, mood analysis, and natural language processing (NLP) make it easier for organizations to identify and address red flag issues. AI-powered predictive analytics can help organizations improve employee retention.
- Conversational chatbots – Using AI-driven responsive employee engagement platforms with a chatbot feature can significantly improve employee engagement by communicating with employees in a conversational way. Interactive chatbots can be used to gather real-time feedback and help in streamlining employee engagement initiatives.
- Automated surveys – The employee engagement platform should come with the ability to run automated surveys and feedback campaigns at consistent intervals to gauge work environment satisfaction levels, analyze sentiment of employees, and offer insights from the response.
- Employee lifecycle survey capability – A good engagement tool helps the HR department keep up with how an employee progresses through their lifecycle, from onboarding to offboarding. A powerful tool should be able to gather employee feedback at each step of the employee journey and also share insights for HR departments to derive actionables from.
- Language support – For enterprises spread across the globe, having a multilingual employee engagement platform is paramount.
- Intuitive dashboard – Automated and intuitive dashboards that analyze real-time insights, pulse of the organization about important employee issues and engagement drivers, and provide actionable insights are a must have feature in your employee engagement management platform. This will empower your HR teams to take data-backed decisions and become the one-stop-shop for all things employee engagement.
- Scalability – As the organization grows and the need to hire more arises, it is vital to have an employee engagement strategy platform that can support a large database, varied programs and campaigns, while running all its functions seamlessly.
- System integrations – If your organization is making use of multiple systems and tools to store employee data or run functions like communication, payroll, leaves, performance, your engagement tool should seamlessly integrate with the existing stack to make it simpler to keep information up-to-date.
- Security compliances – Whether it is employee information or employee responses on a survey, a lot of this information falls under compliances. This is why it’s important that your engagement tool offers complete security and encryption of information shared over the platform.
- Employee engagement platform price and customization – Another aspect we encourage looking into is the pricing of the features you use. This is important in order to maintain HR budgets even as the organization grows, without having to compromise on the strategies being run. Try to pick an employee engagement software that is customizable, so you only have to pay for what you need.
Top 23 employee engagement software platforms in 2023
1. Leena AI
Let’s start our list with a robust employee engagement platform that is revolutionizing HR departments across industries. Often referred to as “the Siri for employees”, Leena AI is an AI-powered virtual assistant embedded with an intelligent employee engagement software. Leena AI offers the best-in-class HR service delivery and employee engagement tools to take employee experience to the next level.
Being feature-rich and intuitive, Leena AI is a one-stop solution that accommodates every employee engagement need, making it one of the top employee engagement platforms.
Leena AI advanced conversational analytics, combined with its survey prowess, empowers HR leaders to
- Identify unhappy employees
- Take timely actions on employee feedback
- Reduce attrition and improve employee happiness
- Take data-driven measures to improve employee engagement
- Be the pioneers in category-defining organizational culture
HR teams today face various challenges such as increasing attrition, low employee motivation, unpleasant organizational culture, low employee satisfaction, poor response rates to annual surveys, in addition to being understaffed and not having the right technology or data to take proactive actions.
Leena AI’s intelligent employee engagement platform helps HR teams gauge engagement across the employee lifecycle through a range of surveys mapped to organizational requirements. The intelligent sentiment analysis and NLP feature goes beyond mere survey answers and deciphers employee emotions. Features like topic analysis, individual theme score, attrition prediction, action planning, intelligent dashboards, multilingual support, conversational chatbot, make Leena AI easily the most accessible employee engagement platform.
Leena AI also comes with a category-defining employee relationship management software that acts as a single source of truth for HR teams by unifying all employee touchpoints and interactions. This software helps HR teams build long-term and personalized relationships with employees. The ERM software guarantees that all important employee interactions turn into preferable actions and conclusions.
Leena AI, with its advanced AI capabilities, easy integrations, multi-tiered security, and real-time analytics, is the next big thing in employee experience. Recognized by Gartner, G2, and Everest Group, time and again, Leena AI is trusted by 3M+ employees across the globe, including Coca Cola, AbInbev, Nestle, Puma, Airbnb, Sony, BCG, among others.
Highlights of Leena AI
- AI virtual assistant built to deliver exceptional employee experience
- Pre-built and customizable employee engagement, pulse, onboarding, and exit surveys
- A system to build, manage, and improve employee relationships
- Real-time analytics to monitor employee engagement
- Sentiment analysis and NLP to understand employee mood
- Pre-built and customizable HR workflows for efficiency
- Comprehensive employee onboarding tools (preboarding, onboarding, offboarding)
- HR service delivery tools for FAQ automation, case management, document management, knowledge management and more
See Leena AI in Action!
Schedule a demo today2. Lattice
Serving nearly 4000 customers worldwide, Lattice drives real-time action and measures employee satisfaction with a continuous and real-time understanding of employee engagement. Its features include 360 performance review cycles and engagement surveys to keep track of critical metrics and goals and gather real-time feedback. Lattice integrates employee performance metrics with employee engagement data by enabling collaborative action plans.
Features like pulse surveys and reports based on employee feedback help HR teams optimize employee experiences for peak performance and unparalleled engagement.
Highlights of Lattice:
- Performance management tools for 1:1 reviews, updates, and feedback
- Continuous employee development with integrated learning
- Automated employee surveys
- Real-time insights and analytics
3. Better Works
Better Works creates a healthy culture of engagement, productivity, and continuous learning and development through planned and frequent check-ins for goal setting, growth-oriented coaching, one-on-one and group dialogues, discussions on career paths, and holistic performance reviews.
Better Works’ modern performance management features offer powerful analytics and actionable insights on both business and employee performance and allow employees to review manager and peer feedback in a single dashboard.
Highlights of Better Works:
- Offers a centralized and intuitive solution for comprehensive feedback analysis
- Highlights employee progress with comments, scores, color codes, and emoticons
- Social gestures for employees to keep each other motivated
- Integrations with Salesforce, JIRA, and other platforms
4. CultureAmp
One of the leading employee experience platforms, Culture Amp provides continuous listening, feedback, and development tools throughout the employee lifecycle.
With features like 3rd party integrations, dashboard analytics, android native application, and employee self-service, this virtual employee engagement platform helps companies take solution-based action to improve employee engagement, retention, and performance.
Culture Amp maximizes individual and organizational performance through real-time insights, allowing the leadership to make accurate decisions and prioritize resources.
Highlights of CultureAmp:
- Powerful engagement, onboarding, exit, and pulse survey tools
- Automated performance reviews and feedback cycles
- Smart goal-tracking on one dashboard
- Personalized training and development solutions for employees
5. Microsoft Viva
Microsoft Viva is the employee experience platform within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. The platform supports peer connection, generates actionable insight, drives motivation and purpose, and boosts growth, empowering people and teams to be their best.
This employee engagement platform provides companies with spaces for conversations, company news, and shared interests. Its trusted cloud security and privacy regulations comply with industry and regional requirements, helping avoid any privacy breach or malware attack on the company’s system.
Microsoft Viva allows employees to create, track and close OKRs with Viva Goals, plan roles, automation and training modules for different projects, and more.
Highlights of Microsoft Viva:
- Create spaces for conversations, company news, and shared interests
- Collaborative goal-setting and OKR management
- Automated employee feedback cycle
- Role-based employee engagement tools for sales, marketing and customer service departments
6. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an employee engagement platform that acts as a single system of record for all experience data, also called X-data. This employee engagement platform enables companies to manage the four core experiences of business – customer, product, employee, and brand experience – all on one platform.
When it comes to employees, Qualtrics has five distinct solutions to enhance employee engagement, foster employee development, and provide a smooth technology experience for candidates. The notable features include onboarding and pulse surveys, exit diagnostics, action planning, etc.
Highlights of Qualtrics:
- Automated tools for employee onboarding, employee engagement, and pulse surveys
- AI-driven analytics and IO psychology-based decision tools
- Automated feedback-to-action loops
- Automated and personalized multi-rater feedback
- Identification of DEI gaps
7. Amara
Amara is an AI chatbot platform designed to accommodate hybrid employees. It interacts with the workforce and identifies critical touchpoints in their employee lifecycle.
The platform can proactively find highly disengaged employees or at risk of attrition. It predicts, engages, and nurtures employee experience, eliminating unwanted escalations and roadblocks to business growth due to employee turnover. It also provides customizable touchpoints, multiple communication channels, and unlimited employee surveys.
Amara’s conversational AI helps you better understand your employees, their needs, and preferences. It can also be referred to as a continuous listening platform that your employees can reach out to whenever they require it.
Highlights of Amara:
- Conversational bot to initiate engagement at all key lifecycle stages
- Sentiment analysis and psychological interpretation for personalized interactions
- Predictive analytics to identify trends and provide actionables for better engagement
- Pre-built and customizable templates for one-time surveys
- Custom reports and cohorts
8. Engagedly
Engagedly is an employee performance management software with a three-pillar success model, linking the people and strategy. It helps employees execute better performance through performance reviews, OKR and goal alignment, talent analytics and mobility, and CXO insights.
The platform is mobile-enabled and keeps employees updated through push notifications. Moreover, you can connect and collaborate with your team on the go.
Engagedly seamlessly integrates with the company’s existing performance management software. It allows you to import employee data from the existing HRIS, log in with a single sign-on, receive updates, add information, and more. Apart from that, Engagedly also offers a mentoring program, gamification, and employee surveys.
Highlights of Engagedly:
- Collaborative OKR and goal-setting
- Real-time feedback collection through automated surveys
- Gamify recognition and rewards programs
- Remote work collaboration with seamless communication
9. Gallup
Gallup Access is a digital employee engagement platform that gives employees a voice through a streamlined survey platform. Gallup’s Q12 survey includes over 50 diverse industries.
Gallup surveys ask the right questions to help you take the required steps to drive desired outcomes. For instance, the life evaluation surveys examine, discover, and quantify employee well-being.
Gallup’s analysis also reveals the effectiveness of your DEI initiatives by collecting employee feedback. The software connects your DEI data with other company inputs to understand the complexities of different workplaces, making it one of the most well known employee engagement management platforms.
Highlights of Gallup:
- Automated employee engagement surveys
- Database of organizational structures and roles
- Employee sentiment data from surveys of 500 world-class organizations
- Enhanced performance analytics – engagement, safety, diversity, equity and inclusion
- Diagnosis of employee needs through feedback cycles
10. Infeedo
Infeedo is a predictive people analytic framework that eliminates the need for annual employee surveys through automated feedback collection. The platform is equipped with an AI-powered interactive chatbot, Amber, that is designed to collect employee feedback without human intervention.
The platform automatically analyzes data and creates actionable reports for all the stakeholders. The intuitive dashboard gives you more in-depth insights into your employee engagement, identifying areas that need improvements.
Highlights of Infeedo:
- Automated employee engagement and pulse surveys
- Automated employee support with comprehensive helpdesk
- Custom modules built for healthcare, financial, and software companies
11. Peakon
Workday Peakon is a popular employee engagement platform helping companies to listen and understand their employees and support them to be their best version. Peakon analyzes employee surveys and communications using natural language processing to identify the key drivers that help improve engagement.
With accurate analytics, the reports help you identify trends and risks by department, location, age, and other demographics. This way, you can take practical actions to keep them engaged, avoid high attrition costs, and maintain workflow.
Peakon also facilitates the creation of the next generation of leadership with real-time insights, action plans, data-driven tools, and personalized training. The platform automatically recommends the most effective growth path for each employee with personalized actions and learnings aligned with their priorities.
Highlights of Peakon:
- Automated employee feedback cycle (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly)
- Automated emails and reminders to employees for participation
- Real-time analysis of comments to gauge overall sentiment of employees
- Automated recommendations to highlight areas of improvement across teams and departments
- Easy benchmarking of engagement metrics between teams or industry standards
12. Glint
Glint is a people-driven employee engagement platform that focuses on employee sentiment. It provides real-time reports through customizable surveys covering the whole employee lifecycle – their engagement, policy effectiveness, workplace culture, diversity, and inclusion.
Highlights of Glint:
- Automated pulse surveys for employee feedback
- Customizable onboarding and exit surveys
- Interactive dashboard visualization on organizational health, engagement heat maps, and more
- Alerts and notifications around undesirable KPI deviations using machine learning
- Real-time analytics and insights
- Integrations with third-party human resource management systems
- Native mobile applications to remotely manage survey results and comparison
13. Superbeings AI
Superbeings is an easy-to-use OKR tool for employee engagement and continuous performance management in one platform. The platform allows customizations and can be integrated with your existing tools.
Superbeings AI lets you optimize individual strengths by providing data on unique interests, enablers, and communication styles to assign meaningful goals and drive personalized conversations for everyone in your workforce.
Highlights of Superbeings AI:
- Automated employee engagement and pulse surveys
- Enable frequent 1:1 and team meetings
- Send performance snapshots and annual reviews
- Collaborative goals and OKR setting
- Detailed, customizable, and real-time reports
- Deep integrations with project management and communication tools
14. 15Five
15Five is a robust and easy-to-use employee engagement platform that improves manager effectiveness, drives high performance and engagement, and increases employee retention. With this platform, you have 30 templates and 120 questions to select from so that you can design surveys that reflect your goals.
This HR software has a content library with books, guides, videos, and more to help employees thrive. Its four impressive HR products – engage, perform, focus and transform, allow users to run assessments at scale and monitor performance with in-depth analytics.
When it comes to performance reviews, 15Five takes a multifaceted approach, providing real-time insights and enhancing managerial skills through a blended learning solution.
Highlights of 15Five:
- Automated employee engagement surveys
- Automated manager to team check-ins for better collaboration
- Employee recognition and performance analysis
- Manage and track objectives on one dashboard
- In-depth analytics to identify trends through feedback response
15. Leapsome
Leapsome is a flexible employee engagement survey platform that helps companies to build employee engagement strategies using surveys. The questionnaires are developed by psychologists and industry experts to generate the best results. Users can also change the question timeline, update anonymity settings, and customize the software according to their needs.
The software’s analytics features natural language processing and machine learning technologies that dig deep into the written responses of open-ended questions, quickly deciphering sentiment, and identifying common themes.
Highlights of Leapsome:
- Automated employee onboarding and engagement surveys
- Align teams with collaborative goal and OKR setting
- Ability to set up rewards and recognition program
- Deep integrations with HRIS and communication tools like Slack, Teams, etc
16. Office Vibe
Office Vibe is an employee experience platform that provides employees with a safe space to share their honest opinions. The platform offers a continuous collection of engagement metrics and feedback for every team and department in the company. Through its structured meeting agendas and templates, it is easy to record the important aspects and keep the conversations on track.
Office Vibe’s tools are simple and intuitive, making everyday workplace challenges much easier to deal with. The software also analyzes how the recognition program is working and provides real-time insights.
Highlights of Office Vibe:
- Automated pulse surveys for employee feedback
- Ability to share messages through anonymous feedback
- Easy goal setting and OKRs for HR department
- One-on-one meetings platform
- Leadership and management tools like conversation hubs
17. Tiny Pulse
Tiny Pulse is an employee engagement survey platform that provides companies with the tools, surveys, and data they need to build a robust employee engagement strategy. The software facilitates productive and consistent 1-on-1 conversations and SMART goal setting to improve workflow and manager-employee rapport.
True to its name, Tiny Pulse allows users to send a quick, one-question pulse survey to their employees each week on whatever platform they are working on, maximizing participation.
The platform seamlessly integrates with HRIS, Slack, MS teams, and email so your employees can give feedback through their familiar digital spaces. Moreover, Tiny Pulse’s Cheers-for-Peers program gives workers a voice to recognize each other daily.
Highlights of Tiny Pulse:
- Pre-installed and customizable employee engagement surveys
- Ability to run pulse surveys to gauge workplace satisfaction and happiness
- Private messaging feature to open anonymous dialog with employees
- A cheers feed to encourage colleagues
- Native mobile application to manage engagement on the go
18. Bonusly
Are you looking for a fun but productive way to recognize employee efforts? Bonusly is a one-stop platform for running an employee rewards program. With Bonusly, companies can integrate the system with existing communication tools and create surveys to gather employee feedback, ultimately improving employee recognition and examining recognition trends with detailed and accurate reports.
With hashtags, memes, and GIFs, Bonusly has a whole social media feel. It also has a powerful people-based analytics feature to help you make informed and confident decisions regarding workplace culture, professional development, performance management, and employee retention.
Highlights of Bonusly:
- Run reward and incentive programs like referrals, spot bonuses, wellness initiatives, and more
- Peer to peer employee recognition program
- Detailed insights, analytics, and reporting on recognition trends
- Seamless integration with HRIS/ HRMS and SSO software
- Automated surveys to gather real-time employee feedback
19. Nectar
Next up on our list is Nectar, a 360 recognition and rewards platform that you can customize according to your organization’s core values. It has an extensive rewards catalog for users, from company-branded swag and Amazon products to gift cards and custom rewards. Companies can also integrate Nectar with other tools like Slack and Teams.
The best feature is its pay-per-user plan, where you can use the platform without any long-term contract. Nectar also lets you create wellness challenges and provides instant rewards for participation. Moreover, this engagement tool ships on-demand swags as soon as an employee orders it, making remote workers feel like a part of the family.
Highlights of Nectar:
- Create a culture of sharing, collaboration, and recognition
- Establish a common ground between teams with forums
- Promote company values through HR processes
- Recognize your employees with company-specific rewards, on-demand swag, and gift cards
- Automate engagement for moments that matter
- Peer-to-peer and manager-to-peer employee recognition
- Powerful analytics and insights
20. Empuls
Empuls is a DIY, user-friendly solution that helps improve and maintain employee productivity and build a positive employee experience. This virtual employee engagement platform helps organizations improve workplace culture through peer recognition, eliminating information silos, providing a voice to every employee, and ultimately building an environment of appreciation and engagement across the organization.
Highlights of Empuls:
- Access controls and permissions for regulated platform usage
- 360 degree employee feedback cycle automation
- Pulse and eNPS surveys
- Activity dashboard with alerts and notifications
- Content management platform for knowledge sharing
- Ability to set up employee rewards program
- Peer to peer recognition and negative feedback management
21. Vantage Circle
Vantage Circle is a one-stop employee engagement platform combining four AI and SaaS-based solutions that helps boost productivity and improve business outcomes by engaging the workforce in a meaningful way. It has features like on-spot recognition, social recognition feed, an employee rewards system, and engagement scores.
Particularly fitting for diverse companies, Vantage Circle offers real-time admin and manager dashboards to simplify tracking employee trends, behaviors, and other engagement KPIs.
Apart from that, features like peer-to-peer recognition, cross-channel integrations, and multi-device accessibility accommodates remote and hybrid employees seamlessly without compromising workflow.
Highlights of Vantage Circle:
- Automated and customizable employee surveys
- Content library for knowledge sharing and management
- Social feedback portal
- Peer recognition and rewards program
- Real-time engagement analytics dashboard
22. Quantum Workplace
Next up on our list is Quantum Workplace – a holistic employee experience platform providing a whole suite of engagement and performance solutions, helping HRs to boost retention, productivity, and company profits.
Highlights of Quantum Workplace:
- Comprehensive and automated employee surveys
- Goal setting and tracking tools
- Peer to peer employee recognition
- Real-time employee feedback cycle
- Intelligent people and business analytics
- Automated talent reviews for performance monitoring
23. Achievers
Achievers is a cloud-based employee engagement solution that enables businesses to engage employees with flexibility and agility. It helps build a healthy and motivated workplace culture through high-frequency and high-impact recognition with a points-based reward system.
The tool allows integrations with HRIS, such as ADP, Oracle, and Ceridian, and also has an integrated action-driving feedback suite to provide accurate engagement reports.
Highlights of Achievers:
- Interactive quizzes and surveys to gather employee feedback
- Unlock real-time engagement and performance insights using data science
- Encourages easy collaboration with an independent platform to connect
- Create a high-impact recognition program
Every employee engagement platform comes with its own set of features, strengths, and USP. While it is important to choose the best employee engagement platform, it is equally important to understand the features and their usage. If you already have a learning and development platform, you don’t need an employee engagement platform with L&D capabilities. While it’s important that all the systems work in synergy and easily integrate with each other, it’s important to know your organizational challenges and then map your requirements to the features of an efficient employee engagement software.
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Connect nowBenefits of employee engagement software
If you’re wondering why it may be worthwhile to evaluate all the best employee engagement platforms, it is because you need to ensure that the tool you choose has all the features you need to stay on top.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits a good tool should offer:
- Streamlines engagement activities – Instead of having to run polls, surveys, onboarding, etc., on separate platforms, leading to data loss and inconsistency, an engagement platform becomes a one-stop-shop for it all.
- Simplifies and uncovers employee insights – Since employee engagement platforms bring all the activities and programs onto one dashboard, it becomes much simpler for the HR department and stakeholders to find insights like demographics, inclusivity, employee satisfaction rate, and more.
- Helps derive clear actionable – From the insights uncovered, the engagement platform charts out a clear set of actionable for the organization. It highlights where they need to improve processes for better employee engagement, removing the guesswork from their continual improvements.
- Improve efficiency and effectiveness with automation – Good employee engagement platforms can automate HR processes like onboarding, off-boarding, employee training, surveys, and more. This reduces the manual hours an HR needs to run the activities, boosting their productivity.
- Boosts employee engagement and retention rate – With continual employee engagement activities and optimization of their experiences based on collective data offered by the platform, organizations can notice a boost in their employee engagement and retention rates as they start to understand expectations better.
Frequently Asked Questions
What tools do I need for my employee engagement program?
To streamline your employee engagement program, you will need tools that enable easy communication between team members, offers simplified case management and FAQ resolution, automates key processes at notable lifecycle stages like onboarding, appraisals, learning and development and gives you the ability to measure how the employees respond to all the efforts. Employee engagement platforms like Leena AI come with advanced features to enable it all with automation and AI to process data in real-time.
What software tools can I use to engage my remote employees?
Remote employee engagement is easier said than done. To engage remote employees you will need to pay attention to how they start their journey with the organization. In this case you will need tools that help you automate their onboarding, documentation, introduction, training and development programs. A comprehensive software like Leena AI can help with added features like pulse surveys to engage remote employees more proactively and in-depth insights on how they feel working for your organization.
What makes a great employee engagement software?
A good employee engagement software is one that comes with features that enable encouraging interaction between the organization and the employees. This includes the ability to run pulse surveys, conduct feedback sessions, automate scheduling meetings between employees and managers, employees and stakeholders or interactive sessions between the same team members. An engagement platform leverages employee data to drive engagement at scale throughout their lifecycle.
