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Picking employee engagement software as an HR leader can be tough. Here’s a list of the 10 best employee engagement tools for your company in 2022.
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People-first companies aren’t afraid to invest in their employees. You know your employees are the key to long-term business success, and you show it by building out your company in a way that helps them flourish.
But when you’re a human resource (HR) leader exploring new tools for employee engagement, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options. What’s the difference between all these tools? Which one will best meet your needs? What do they even do?
Sorting through all these options takes a lot of time and mental energy.
In this roundup, we’ll share what we believe are the ten best employee engagement tools for HR teams in 2022. You’ll get a glimpse at what each tool does best, how to use it, and how much it costs.
We’ve done the legwork so that you can focus on supporting your team. Let’s get started!
Purpose: Emotional daily check-ins, track and prevent team burnout, improve employee wellbeing, and encourage team building.
Channels: Slack integration and web dashboard.
Kona is a well-being and burnout platform for people-first teams. The Slack integration sends a daily emotional question to every team member — “how are you feeling?”
This daily interaction helps teammates bond, improves teamwide vulnerability and trust, provides managers with context as to how their direct reports approach work, and gives organizations a bird’s-eye view into their employee's level of burnout.
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Purpose: Weekly check-ins to prevent burnout in technical teams and improve wellbeing.
Channels: Slack integration and web dashboard.
Yerbo is a mental well-being tool focused on preventing burnout in engineering teams. It leverages automated surveys—sent to your team via Slack—to help generate insights into burnout risk and reasons for burnout
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Purpose: Foster happiness and appreciation through giving peers virtual tacos.
Channels: Slack or Microsoft Teams integration.
HeyTaco exists to help remote teams have more fun, celebrate wins, and recognize good work through the giving (and receiving) of virtual tacos.
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Purpose: Empowering asynchronous work for remote teams.
Channels: Web-based, with Slack, Teams, and email notifications optional.
Range is a platform meant to help remote teams feel connected. It includes features that enable async standups, track progress on goals (and related activity), and facilitates team meetings.
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Purpose: Make routine communications more efficient for remote teams.
Channels: Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Standuply helps remote teams work in a more agile manner. It enables automated team standups, post-sprint retros, team surveys, and 360-degree reviews.
It’s worth noting that Standuply’s primary focus is on helping teams work more efficiently, not on employee engagement. Features like surveys and reviews can capture some engagement-related information — like how employees are feeling — but their primary purpose is to help you understand what your team is working on, not whether they’re engaged.
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Purpose: Boost employee engagement and improve culture through peer-to-peer recognition and values reinforcement.
Channels: Web, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Kudos is an engagement and culture platform. It uses a social element to help companies create environments where meaningful recognition is the norm.
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Purpose: Improve employee engagement and retention through real-time recognition and rewards.
Channels: Slack, Teams, and web.
Bonusly is a recognition and rewards solution. Through enabling and incentivizing real-time, public recognition—tied to real-world rewards—Bonusly aims to help companies create engaging workplace experiences.
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Purpose: Create powerful employee experiences through an all-in-one employee experience platform.
Channels: Slack, Teams, and web.
Kazoo bills itself as the largest employee experience platform on the market. It includes a lot of features, from managing OKRs to recognition and rewards to check-ins to surveys. While many companies may already have tools that handle some of these functions, Kazoo offers all of this functionality in one convenient platform.
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Purpose: Create and scale a healthy company culture through pulse surveys, recognition, and 1-on-1 meetings.
Channels: Slack, Teams, and web.
Officevibe is a people-first employee experience platform meant to help leaders create healthy workplace cultures as they scale. It includes several different aspects, from weekly pulse surveys to engagement surveys. Their newest major feature is a recognition platform that enables team members to recognize great work and give shoutouts.
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Purpose: Gather employee feedback to improve engagement, performance, and employee development.
Channels: Slack, Teams, and web.
Culture Amp’s experience platform has three main segments: employee engagement, performance management, and employee development. It’s another all-in-solution solution, offering functionality to help keep your employees engaged and growing throughout their entire journey with you.
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Investing in employee engagement software makes sense on several different levels:
Your employees are your greatest asset, and employee engagement software enables you to keep them engaged and growing as you scale.
We’ve looked at the 10 best employee engagement solutions. Here are a few tips on how you can decide which tool is right for you:
Before you start engaging with vendors, it’s a good idea to audit your existing tool stack’s capabilities.
It’s common for different teams within an organization to use different tools, so it’s a good idea to check in with leaders at various levels to create a clear picture.
Auditing your tool stack will help you identify your core employee engagement needs. An all-in-one solution can be tempting because it seems to cover all the bases, but if your employees are already happy with their current tools it may just be money wasted.
As you identify needs and opportunities, note down which are must-haves and which are nice-to-haves.
You’re ready to talk to vendors once you have clarity on your needs. It’s usually a good idea to reach out to several vendors with similar offerings. Get a demo to understand how the product works in detail and to ensure you have time to ask questions.
As you work through your vendor list, don’t just focus on the software’s capabilities. You should also be assessing the overall experience with the vendor. Are they responsive? Do they have adequate support resources available? Do they have a FAQ or documentation for getting started? Are they well-reviewed on sites like G2 and Capterra?
Your goal during this stage should be to form a full picture of each vendor’s pros and cons. From there, you’ll need to narrow your list down until you’re ready to make a purchase.
You’re never done investing in employee engagement. Software and tools are a vital piece of the puzzle, but they aren’t a silver bullet. An employee engagement tool is only useful if it’s implemented well and adopted across your organization.
The real key to sustained employee engagement is embedding the right tools into a healthy company culture. As you prioritize listening to your employees and responding to their feedback, you’ll be rewarded with higher retention rates, a more productive workforce, and happier humans.
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Lawrence uses his decade of customer experience leadership to create content for B2B SaaS companies that love their customers. He writes on a broad range of topics, all with the aim of helping human-centered companies attract the right customers and empower them to be successful.
