Employee Engagement Tools for Your Business in 2024

It is no secret that employee engagement is significant for companies to thrive and flourish in the modern workplace. But how can you ensure engagement? What do you need to do to engage your employees? These questions might be hovering in your mind. In the tech-driven modern workplace, using technology to build employee engagement tools is a rather smart move.

These tools help you reach your engagement goals, automate processes, and keep everything organized. There are several tools out there for you to choose from. Let us delve into a detailed understanding of the tools and their features.

What is an Employee Engagement Tool?

Before we expand our discussion around employee engagement tools, let us understand what they are.

Employee engagement tools are software platforms or applications designed and adopted by companies to enhance employee satisfaction and engagement.

These tools are crafted in a way that aids in creating a positive and productive work environment. They contribute towards overall well-being and engagement levels by facilitating ease in communication, recognition, feedback, and other aspects.

Let us go through some features of these tools that will shed more clarity into your understanding.

Features of Employee Engagement Tools

Employee Communications

Effective communication among employees is crucial in an organization. It facilitates conveying information, aligning teams with company goals, and fostering a transparent and collaborative workforce. As a result, employees are well-informed, connected, and engaged.

• Internal Communication Channels,
• Collaboration,
• Announcements and Updates,
• Mobile Accessibility,
• Multimedia Content, and
• Integration with Other Tools.

Employee Recognition

Recognizing employees for their efforts and accomplishments fosters a positive work culture, enhances motivation, and boosts morale. It results in higher productivity levels.

• Peer-to-peer recognition,
• On-spot recognition,
• Social feed,
• Nominations,
• Rewards redemption,
• Reward Management.

Employee Wellness

Prioritizing employee well-being through wellness programs promotes a healthy lifestyle, offers work-life balance, reduces stress, and enhances job satisfaction. This lowers absenteeism.

• Contests and challenges,
• Tracking and reporting,
• Leaderboards,
• Sync with Wearable devices,
• Health and fitness guides,
• Personalized goals.

Employee Feedback

A regular feedback culture helps a workplace attain continuous improvement, empowers employees, and enables organizations to voice their concerns. This makes employees feel that their opinions are accepted.

• Survey question templates,
• Anonymous feedback,
• Actionable insights,
• eNPS score,
• Benchmarking,
• Track engagement,
• Negative feedback management,
• 360-degree feedback,
• Heatmaps.

Employee Advocacy

Encouraging employees to advocate for the company enhances brand reputation and strengthens employee engagement. This leads to an increase in customer trust and positively impacts the organization's internal and external perceptions.

• Social media integrations,
• Tracking and measuring engagement,
• Content Booster,
• Publishing Studio,
• Content Analytics,
• Content sources,
• Brand communications,
• Social selling.

Employee Engagement Tools for Communication

These communication tools make communication and collaboration easier and hassle-free among employees.

1. Slack

Source: Slack

Slack is undoubtedly one of the most sought-after engagement platforms. Meeting the basic requirements of communication and collaboration among employees, it has etched a mark by making things hassle-free.
With Slack, you can connect with your coworkers in real-time, which aids you in collaborating frequently and getting things done faster.

Salient Features:

• Seamless integrations with software
• Organized channels for specific teams, projects, and initiatives
• Provision of In-app calling to make team collaborations faster, without the need to schedule a separate meeting
• Use of custom stickers, gifs, and emoji reactions for messages
• Intuitive mobile app to boost engagement even when employees travel for work

2. Google Meet

Google Meet is an ideal meeting tool, especially for those who use Google for work. It is easier to access and reduces the task of extra software installation. Also, employees can jump onto any meeting link from their browser. Google Meet makes it simple for employees to stay connected across the globe. And this is a great way to enhance employee engagement.

Salient Features:

• Seamless integration with and Gmail and Google Calendar, making scheduling meetings easier
• Real-time and private chat, video conferencing, and voice calls
• Screensharing and recording capabilities
• Completely free to other users, which makes it easy to connect to a wider network

3. Zoom

Zoom, a comprehensive meeting and video conferencing platform, has connected and engaged employees worldwide. It allows individuals and large companies to host team meetings and live webinars. It offers different plans to cater to every business size. As a result, you can find a perfect plan that befits your organization.

Salient Features:

• Reliable and secure video conferencing
• Integration with Google, Microsoft, and several other common workplace platforms
• Supports live events and webinars, which are easy to host.
• Offers a range of unique features such as Zoom Rooms, Whiteboard, and an enterprise phone system

Employee Engagement Tools for Recognition

These recognition tools make recognition user-friendly. Employees and managers get the liberty to recognize the efforts and accomplishments of their peers.

4. Vantage Circle

Vantage Circle, a SaaS-based employee engagement platform, enhances its capabilities with the help of AI and varied features. Its primary focus on rewards and recognition programs enhances the efforts to increase productivity and overall performance.

Salient Features:

• on-spot peer-to-peer monetary and non-monetary recognition
• Custom Awards and badges, Team Awards, and panel Awards
• Automated birthday and anniversary wishes with points awarded.
• Gift Cards, Merchandise, and Experiences
• Discounts, exclusive offers for employees
• Wellness programs to maintain the well-being of employees.

5. Kudos

As an employee engagement platform, Kudos takes pride in building positive cultures and prioritizing open communication. Recognition is the primary aspect of engagement, so Kudos offers a smooth peer-to-peer recognition feature. In addition, Kudos is a step ahead in providing actionable insights into employee performance and workplace culture.

Salient Features:

• Creates a peer-to-peer community allowing employees to celebrate each others’ achievements within the platform.
• Gamification through points, badges, and rewards ranging from merchandise, events, charities, gift cards, and custom rewards.
• Nomination-based awards.
• Seamless integration with other HR reporting tools and software

6. Bonusly

Bonusly is a leading employee recognition and rewards platform that elevates workplace culture through peer-to-peer acknowledgment. It primarily caters to organizations that cultivate a positive work atmosphere and enhance employee engagement.

By infusing fun and inclusivity into recognition, Bonusly aids teams in fostering an appreciative culture, boosting engagement, and retaining top talent. In addition, it tracks the performance of your rewards and incentive programs.

Salient Features:

• Peer-to-peer recognition enables employees to appreciate coworkers for their contributions.
• Operates on a point-based system that allows employees to collect rewards based on their points.
• Rewards range from gift cards, charitable donations, and company swags.
• Automated milestones take off the burden off managers' shoulders, and the important dates are not missed.
• Incentive programs that help in appreciating for reaching a milestone.

7. Achievers

Source: Achievers

Achievers is a leading employee engagement solution specializing in engaging employees through recognition. The recognized personal and professional victories are paired with an outstanding rewards marketplace. This facilitates driving retention, productivity, customer satisfaction, and other critical business outcomes.

Salient Features:

• The flexibility of recognizing from different platforms like smartphones or desktops, remote or in-office
• Points-based recognition that can be redeemed for rewards.
• Rewards range from merchandise and experiences to gift cards from over 2,500 brands.

8. Xoxoday

Since its inception in 2012, Xoxoday has empowered employees to recognize their peers and managers. It aims at making recognition candid, personal, meaningful, and social. These recognitions are assisted with rewards from a range of brands to choose from.

Salient Features:

• Personalized recognition, messaging, and awards.
• Peer-to-peer recognition to celebrate small and big achievements
• Encouraging participation and engagement through leaderboards and gamification.
• An expansive global catalog of 20,000+ reward choices provides flexibility for the employees.

9. Reward Gateway

Reward Gateway platform is crucial in boosting engagement through employee rewards and recognition. It is an employee engagement solution. The platform is designed to celebrate daily achievements and team successes. It also gives insight into the performance level that drives the organization closer to its goals.

Salient Features:

• Personalized and branded e-cards
• Celebrating your employees becomes easy with automated reward and recognition features.
• On-the-spot manager rewards and customized service awards.
• Mobile accessibility keeps employees connected so that they never miss an alert.

Employee Engagement Tools for Wellness

These wellness tools are designed to prioritize employees' wellness needs and create a healthier and thriving workforce.

10. Vantage Fit

VantageFit is a corporate wellness platform that prioritizes and addresses employee wellness needs. It aims to create a happier and healthier workforce by offering comprehensive solutions. Employees can get involved in various multi-activity and theme-based health challenges to suit their needs.

Salient Features:

• The platform connects with various fitness trackers, devices, and wearables to monitor challenge progress.
• Employees earn points by participating in wellness challenges, which can be redeemed for various gift cards, merchandise, and experiences.
• Provision of contests, social feeds, and leaderboards to foster friendly competition.
• It has a step counter, calorie tracker, activity tracker, health risk assessment, and contest creation.
• Participants earn non-monetary badges, which they can display on their profiles.
• Real-time analytics helps gauge program traction.

11. Wellable

Source: Wellable

The all-in-one wellness platform, Wellable is a solution to help your employees stay healthy. Through wellness challenges and health monitoring activities, Wellable aims to drive a culture of wellness and enhance employee productivity. With an employer-friendly approach, it offers customizable programs that allow you to seamlessly integrate your unique requirements with the culture of your workforce.

Salient Features:

• Direct integration with the leading wellness apps and wearable devices
• Provision of sending emails, push notifications, text messages, or flyers for valuable articles or health reminders.
• It offers automated activity tracking, holistic wellness challenges, on- demand classes, unlimited health coaching, lifestyle spending accounts, etc.
• The digital wellness experience is assisted by on-site and virtual services, such as group fitness, educational seminars, health fairs, and other live events.

12. Virgin Pulse

Source: Virgin Pulse

Virgin Pulse, a digital health and wellbeing platform, aims to inspire, empower, and engage businesses and their employees to bring small changes in daily routines. And these changes are directed at welcoming a positive and healthy lifestyle change. Members are motivated to cultivate healthy habits through goal-setting, participating in health and wellness challenges, and winning rewards.

Salient Features:

• Tailored solutions for health conditions through tips and coaching journeys.
• Provision for users to create their personalized health and wellness journeys.
• Offers a wealth of educational materials on topics related to well-being like parenting, stress reduction, grief and loss, healthy sleep, diabetes, alcohol consumption, and productivity.

13. Incentfit

Source: Incentfit

IncentFit is a flexible wellness benefits solution platform aimed at building a healthier workforce. Boosting your employees' health and well-being couldn’t be any fun or easier through challenges. You can choose from a range of challenges based on your goals. These challenges will boost engagement levels.

Salient Features:

• Customizable challenges that align with your team's unique goals.
• Employee participation is made easy by syncing with health-tracking apps
• Team leaderboards & incentives help boost motivation & increase engagement.

14. Wellsteps

Wellsteps is an employee wellness platform that curates effective wellness solutions for employees. It supports companies in cultivating a healthy culture and empowers employees to adopt and sustain healthy behaviors. The journey towards better health is ensured with its varied programs.

Salient Features:

• Behavior change campaigns
• Provision of employee health evaluation

Employee Engagement Tools for Feedback

These feedback tools allow employers to collect real-time feedback from employees and act on it.

15. Vantage Pulse

A powerful employee pulse survey and feedback tool, Vantage Pulse allows you to collect, measure, and act on real-time employee feedback. You can design surveys that employees find easy to use and unveil analyzed insights that are simple to work on.

These surveys are created while maintaining anonymity. Vantage Pulse helps you analyze trends, predict behaviors, and uncover reasons for absenteeism patterns, employee turnover, skill gaps, workforce productivity, etc. This understanding is resourceful for you to take measures for boosting employee engagement and retention.

Salient Features:

• A holistic view of your organizational "pulse" using an industry- standard metrics suite like eNPS, engagement score, and user participation score.
• Analyzed insights offer a comprehensive overview of your employees' experiences.
• Effortless management of survey structure and configurations.
• From scores to follow-ups, everything is anonymous.
• Pick from the comprehensive library of 25+ pre-built survey templates
• Customize the survey according to the desired length, short or long.
• Filter, download, and analyze the survey reports
• The platform supports CSV and Excel formats.

16. 15five

15five is a platform of action aimed at measuring and delivering higher performance, retention, and engagement through managers. 15five helps keep the lines of communication open between managers, direct reports, and peers. The tool provides engagement insights to see where your company is flourishing and where there are opportunities.

Salient Features:

• It helps managers understand their team and subordinates through pulse surveys, check-ins, 1-1 meetings, and feedback.
• A centralized location to house and manage goals for employees and company-wide OKRs
• Facilitates real-time feedback between employees, peers, and management
• Managers and their direct reports can access and build performance reviews, role expectations, goals, and individual career paths.

17. TINYpulse

TINYpulse helps managers retain the top performers through real-time pulse surveys and employee feedback. The simple and intuitive UI makes the platform accessible to anyone in the organization. It helps managers measure diversity and inclusion, the culture and values of the organization, and management effectiveness.

Salient Features:

• The science-backed key driver analysis (KDA) report helps discover the foundation for an employee engagement strategy.
• 300+ science-backed questions and pre-built templates, like an eNPS survey, or choose your custom questions.
• Prioritizes anonymous communication, which helps gather honest feedback.

18. Empuls

Source: Empuls

A holistic employee engagement solution platform, Empuls takes the lead in enhancing company culture. It comes with employee listening tools that help you gather frequent feedback and detailed insights. This will allow you to take effective action. The surveys are designed in collaboration with experts at SHRM that promise reliability and anonymity.

Salient Features:

• Gauge employee sentiment with eNPS and Pulse surveys
• recommended action plans to work on areas of improvement and fix issues causing disengagement.
• Integration with everyday collaboration, HRIS/HRMS/HCM, and single sign- on tools.

19. Officevibe

Source: Officevibe

A comprehensive employee engagement tool, Officevibe provides real-time insights into your employees' engagement and productivity levels. You can attain these insights through surveys and anonymous feedback. It allows you to gauge engagement score, which helps you find and work on areas for improvement with the assistance of powerful analytics

Salient Features:

• Engaging, colorful, science-backed Pulse Surveys
• Offers tools to improve manager and employee relationships, such as one- on-one meeting templates
• Track employee goals and engagement with action plans and defined OKRs

20. Culture Amp

Culture Amp is an employee engagement platform that allows companies to engage their employees through proper surveys and feedback. The surveys are mainly science-backed, providing actionable insights from engagement to DEI to well-being.

Salient Features:

• Ready-to-use template library and powerful analytics based on survey responses
• Ability to build a data-informed employee engagement strategy based on survey analytics
• It helps the administration communicate effectively among the employees through engagement and performance management modules.

Employee Engagement Tools for Advocacy

These advocacy tools allow employees to advocate for their company through social media channels and enhance the brand's reputation.

21. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an employee advocacy platform that allows users to schedule and post content to the proper channels and track them effectively. Hootsuite provides a solution to communicate with people on social media platforms. The social media engagement solutions offered by Hootsuite help you connect with the audience and grow your brand.

Salient Features:

• It offers several graphical reports that may be customized and chosen from Hootsuite’s report template.
• It enables employees to connect to the community and increase internal awareness by sharing news across teams.
• Hootsuite Analytics will show you industry benchmarks to see how you’re doing compared to your peers.

22. Everyonesocial

EveryoneSocial is a social selling and employee advocacy software designed for marketing, sales, and HR. The platform curates organizational news and content at one central location. This allows employees to share relevant content with their social media networks. It increases viral reach, bringing more traffic and new business to the company.

23. Bambu by Sprout Social
    

Bambu is an employee advocacy platform developed by Sprout Social. The platform allows organizations and employees to share curated content across all social media platforms. Through this, the brand's reach is amplified across the corporate world.

24. Sociabble
    

Sociabble caters to an organization's internal communication, employee engagement analytics, employee advocacy, and social selling needs. It helps the company's employee advocacy marketing and brand advocacy, allowing them to increase their social media influence. It is integrated with Scoop It and Feedly to enable seamless content curation.

Benefits of Employee Engagement Tools

1. Ensures the Emotional Well-being of the Organization

The engagement tools ease your process of ensuring sound mental and emotional health in the organization. As a result, they showcase agility in delivering better and faster results. These tools allow you to keep a check on your employees regularly.

Addressing the holistic well-being of your employees through wellness program initiatives will help you promote a work-life balance. This, in turn, reduces stress and boosts job satisfaction levels.

2. Employees’ Efforts are Recognized Instantly

Delay is the deadliest form of denial
C. Northcote Parkinson

Employee Engagement tools like the reward and recognition
platform allow you to recognize and reward employees' efforts immediately. You need not delay appreciation cause delaying it would mean denying it.

Instant recognition is the best way to keep your employees encouraged and engaged. They will find a purpose to contribute on a larger scale. It will foster an open culture where experimentation is prioritized and stagnancy is avoided. This, in turn, will act as a reinforcement to broaden their creative levels and work on themselves.

3. Keeps Track of the Personal and Professional Growth of Every Employee

Employee engagement tools play a significant role in tracking each employee's personal and professional growth. These tools cover several features, such as learning & development platforms for broadening skills, performance management systems for goal setting and subsequent reviews, and feedback systems for improving and adapting.

In addition, employee surveys, career path planning tools, and mentoring facilitate gaining a holistic understanding of individual aspirations. Integrating data analytics further allows organizations to gather insights into engagement levels and develop trends.

These insights will give organizations enough information to create opportunities for employees to boost their careers and increase their job satisfaction.

4. Employee Productivity and Business Performance

These tools have the potential to streamline workflows, enhance communication across the team, and offer resources to employees to excel in their respective roles.

When these tools meet the requirements of employees, they are bound to get engaged. This engagement will be reflected in their dedication and motivation levels towards their work. As a result, there will not only be a rise in employee productivity, but business performance will also witness a boost.

5. Competitive Edge over Others

Investing in employee engagement tools will create a positive workplace for employees, giving you a competitive gain over others. You will stand out as a workspace that prioritizes and keeps employees engaged.

This will help you create a thriving workplace that attracts and retains talent.
When engaged employees are a part of your organization, there will only be room for innovation and growth both for the employees and the organization.

Choosing the Right Employee Engagement Tool

Out of the many employee engagement tools available at your disposal, it can be challenging to choose the right one. Irrespective of the challenges, you must opt for the right tool that aligns with your organizational goals and serves its true purpose.

Given the right tool's significance, you must be vigilant of the factors that will help you choose the appropriate tool. Let us take you through some factors that will ease your process of choosing the right tool.

1. Assess the Pain Points and Current Needs

Identify the pain points of your organization related to employee engagement. These could range from communication gaps, low morale, and lack of motivation to lack of recognition. Understanding these issues will also give you an idea about the pressing needs of your employees. Assessing these will help you choose the right tool to address their needs.

2. Make it User-friendly

The most common factor determining the success of employee engagement tools is how user-friendly they are. While trying to choose a tool, ensure how user-friendly the tool is for employees as well as for administrators. The tool's easy interface will allow everyone to utilize it fully.

3. Scalability and Flexibility

Opt for a tool that can measure or scale your organization’s growth. Along with scaling the growth, flexibility is another factor you must consider. A tool flexible enough to adapt to changing needs can accommodate the increasing number of users and expand its functions.

4. Integration with Existing Sstems

You must ensure that your tools seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, like communication platforms, project management tools, or HR software. The integration will allow employees a smooth workflow without interruptions or missing information.

5. Options for Customization

You need to opt for tools that offer customization options. Customization will allow you to tailor the tools to your organization’s unique culture, values, and processes. Apart from this, there will be a touch of personalization to create a relevant employee experience.

6. Feedback and Analytics Capabilities:

You should look for tools offering feedback and analytics features. Feedback helps you gather insights and data on employee engagement. And this data will help you make informed decisions by simultaneously improving employee experience.

Given the factors that need consideration before opting for the right tool, plenty of tools or platforms meet only some requirements. And there are only a few that cover all factors. Among the limited options, Vantage Circle stands out as an employee engagement tool that aligns well with the criteria for selecting the right tool.

Conclusion

By now, you must have thoroughly understood employee engagement tools, their features, and their benefits. The different categories of tools listed above serve distinct purposes.

Assessing all your requirements, you must opt for a tool that aligns with your organizational goals. Choosing the best tool will fetch you the best results.

FAQs

How do employee engagement tools work?

These tools basically use surveys, feedback loops, and data analytics to collect information on employee motivation, satisfaction, and overall engagement. The collected data is further analyzed to give insights and recommendations for improvement.

How can employee engagement tools benefit organizations?<s/trong>

This article is written by Riha Jaishi, a Content Writer at Vantage Circle. Apart from being an active and keen writer, she is generally found reading books and articles, feasting her eyes on food videos, and binging on her favorite shows and discussing them. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com