What is an employee engagement platform?

An employee engagement platform is the bridge that unites all employees in one place, allowing them to participate, get recognized, and stay connected.  

Key features of employee engagement platforms

The primary goal of an employee engagement solution is to foster a vibrant work culture that keeps employees motivated, productive, and acknowledged. 

Here’s a closer look at the features that make it happen. 

• Feedback and survey tools. These aid employees in regularly sharing their opinions, suggestions, and concerns about their work experience. Employers can use this to gather insights on employee satisfaction, understand areas for improvement and make necessary changes. 
• Recognition and rewards system. This feature allows employees to get recognized and rewarded for their work. These rewards could be points that can be exchanged for gifts or simply a public communication within the organization. The system can also be programmed to congratulate employees on a new milestone, achievement, or anniversary. 
• Communication tools. Most employee engagement platforms integrate chat, video conferencing, email, and social networking features into their system to make communication seamless and in real-time. With this, teams can have virtual meetings, share files securely, and create group or private chats. 
• Well-being programs. This feature promotes a healthy mental and physical lifestyle among employees, contributing to their overall well-being and job satisfaction. This can include wellness challenges and virtual fitness and meditation classes. 
• Performance tracking and management. This feature helps employers gather data on various aspects of employee engagement and analyze the results to identify trends and potential areas of concern.  

Related → 9 Proven Ways to Improve Company Culture. 

The 11 best employee engagement platforms right now

1 Workvivo — The Overall Best Employee Engagement Platform 

Workvivo is the number-one leading employee engagement platform that simplifies internal communication and drives engagement. Built for the digital-first workplace, Workvivo empowers employees to be heard, feel recognized, and feel included no matter where they work from.

The platform unifies internal communications, engagement, intranet, and measurement features into one modern employee app that captures the heartbeat of the organization and brings its culture to life.

Thanks to its simple design, employees can easily use Workvivo to stay informed, engaged, and connected. As a result, company leaders gain better oversight and a direct, unfiltered channel to reach and engage with people and truly feel the company’s pulse and energy.

Key Features 

• Familiar social experience. Workvivo has a familiar social feel that is purpose-built for the workforce. This makes the platform intuitive and easy to use, leading to high industry-leading adoption rates.
• Unified internal communication. Workvivo fosters community and encourages employees to share and engage with each other. This simplifies communication, breaks down barriers, and helps employees feel better connected, informed, and included within their organization. 
• Employee Recognition. Workvivo’s Shoutout feature allows for peer-to-peer and top-down recognition, dramatically improving employee engagement and their sense of belonging. 
• Spaces. This feature enables employees to interact and collaborate on common interests. Once you join a Space, any content published in that Space appears in your feed, and you get to interact with its members irrespective of your department, location, or skill set. 

Pricing:  

This is not fixed and will depend on how many licenses you require and your organization’s specific needs. You can see pricing plans and request a quote here.

Related → How to Communicate at Every Stage of the Employee Journey [+Free Template]. 

2 Officevibe — Best for Team Management and Employee Feedback

Officevibe offers tools designed to improve employee engagement levels and gather feedback in real-time. It’s also trusted by 8,000 businesses worldwide, including WeTransfer, Trivago, OneSignal, and Dyson. 

The platform operates a two-way transparency system where all meeting notes, agendas, and action items are accessible to managers and team members to review their performance and follow up on progress.  

For instance, the benchmarking feature lets managers evaluate employees’ performance across times, teams, and departments. 

Pros

• Pulse surveys. These open-ended questions help provide insights into employee sentiments in the workplace. These feedbacks are anonymous, so employees feel safe sharing their opinions. Other types of surveys include onboarding surveys, custom employee surveys, and DEIB surveys.  
• One-on-One meeting tools. These are templates that help you quickly set the stage for a conversation between managers and employees—for example, talking points or meeting agendas. 
• Easy integration. Officevibe integrates with common tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Google Workspace, and a growing list of HRIS tools, including BambooHR, Breathe, HR Cloud, AlexisHR, and many more. 

Cons

• Limited pulse survey customization capabilities. Officevibe pulls surveys from a bank of 122 questions, restricting managers from customizing the questions to fit their organization’s specific needs. 
• No advanced features with the lower pricing plans. 
• Poor reporting capabilities. Some users have mentioned wanting more in-depth reporting and analysis capabilities. 

Pricing: 

• Offers a free trial with access to basic features. 
• Premium plans start at $5 per month. 

Related → 50 Real Life Pulse Survey Questions. 

 3 Trakstar — Best for Employee Performance Management

Trakstar is a purpose-built performance management platform that helps organizations align goals and survey employee engagement levels with increasing performance, employee retention, and accountability. 

The platform offers a suite of tools that helps managers understand areas where certain employees are excelling and failing so they can take necessary actions. 

In addition, Trakstar features beautifully-designed reports that include employee response rates, engagement scores, comments, and trends that make it easy to tie employee engagement to performance. 

Pros

• Real-time 360-degree feedback. This allows peers, subordinates, and managers to provide comprehensive feedback, eliminating bias. 
• Reporting and analytics. Trakstar’s analytics lets you view real-time dashboards and segment groups and time periods based on your needs. 
• Multiple third-party integrations. Trakstar integrates with popular tools like Google Workspace, Okta, Shopify, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, BambooHR, SFTP, Namely, Ramco, etc. 

Cons 

• Poor user interface and onboarding process. Getting into Trakstar’s system can confuse new users, and the training videos offer little to no help. 
• Reports are not detailed enough — and in some instances, the data aren’t usable. 
• You cannot attach large files to emails — this is a big issue for HR professionals who send out many files daily. 

Pricing: 

• Request for quote. 

Related → Employee Engagement Strategy Explained

 4 Empuls — Best for Holistic Employee Engagement 

Empuls is a social interaction solution that enhances all aspects of employee engagements, from communication and collaboration to recognition and rewards. 

Its AI-powered engagement bot actively interacts with employees to encourage participation and also aids HR managers automate redundant tasks. Empuls stands as an all-rounder serving everyone in the workplace, including employees, people leaders, human resources, and business leaders — all with the aim of creating a “people-first” culture. 

Empuls is also one of the few platforms allowing you to create your social intranet, a place where your employees can communicate with everyone and access crucial news, events, updates, and events. 

Pros

• Goal-based recognition. You can reward employees who meet and exceed company goals with gift cards or points that don’t expire. 
• Real-time actionable insights. This feature lets you assess employees’ sentiments using eNPS and Pulse Surveys— in collaboration with SHRM experts. You also get detailed insights into cross-linkages between engagement, performance, and culture. 
• Easy access. Employees can participate in conversations and survey across their mobile and desktop devices. 
• Responsive customer support. Empuls resolves 9 out of 10 support tickets within 24 hours. 

Cons 

• Poor performance issues on the mobile app. 
• Sudden removal of employee rewards, e.g., gift cards and points. 
• Complex setup process and incompatibility issues with other HR software. 
• The onboarding process can be challenging due to poor user interface. 

Pricing:

Empuls offers four distinctive plans and is calculated based on your organization’s number of active users. 

• Reward and recognize. $3 per employee/month billed annually. 
• Surveys. $3 per employee/month billed annually. 
• Social intranet. $1 per employee/month billed annually. 
• Perks and benefits. $2 per employee/month billed annually. 

Related → Should You Use an Internal Website or Social Intranet?

5 WorkTango — Best for Employee Voice and People Analytics

WorkTango is an engagement platform that combines employee recognition, rewards, surveys, insights, goals, and feedback into a single system. 

With 1,000+ global teams, WorkTango’s platform utilizes peer-to-peer, bottom-up, and top-down recognition that earns employees redeemable points and tokens based on their contribution to the company. These points can be exchanged for tickets, gift cards, and charitable donations.  

WorkTango also protects your data using NIST and SOC 2— and complies with all data protection laws, ensuring that all communication on the platform remains encrypted. 

Pros 

• Accurate insights on employee lifecycle. Customizable survey templates for onboarding, off-boarding, DE&I, engagement, and development. 
• Action planning. It takes on from the survey and gives you actionable insights that help you develop strategies that help you address identified areas of concern.  
• Transparent goal-setting. Use OKR, SMART, FAST, or other goal methodologies to create goals and add measurable results. You can also view goals by status and favorites to get the complete picture. 

Cons

• Reports could be more intuitive and customizable. 
• Rewards points need to be more extensive, and the redeeming process can be challenging. 
• Lack of customization in the goal-setting feature. 
• The mobile app is excessively prone to bugs. 

Pricing: 

• Request a demo. 

 6 Motivosity — Best for Peer-to-Peer Employee Recognition and Rewards 

Motivosity is a platform designed to encourage employee-to-employee connection, appreciation, interaction, and recognition in an organization. The platform uses features such as leaderboards, eNPS scoring, and award systems to make this work. 

Motivosity breaks down its approach to employee engagement into four distinctive pillars: 

• Community & connection. A tight-knit community that encourages connections in and away from the workplace. 
• Manager development. Helping managers create the proper habit so they’re adding to the employee experience. 
• Recognition & rewards. Making it easy to say ‘thank you’ to fellow employees. 
• Employee insights. It helps visualize important people metrics executive leaders want to see. 

Pros 

• Social intranet. This company-wide feature lets employees interact with each other through a social media-like network. Here they can share, like, react and respond to posts. 
• Peer recognition. This lets employees appreciate and reward each other for their performance at work.  Also, managers and team members can celebrate day-to-day ‘wins’ in real time. 
• Reward system.  With this, employees can give or receive monetary rewards that can be redeemed for gift cards, tickets, or converted to cash. 
• Customizable engagement surveys. This feature helps you gauge the overall sentiment among employees in the organization. 

Cons 

• You can’t edit your social posts once you publish. 
• Users can’t customize the platform to fit their specific organization needs. 
• Some users complained that integration with Slack could be unstable, disrupting their communication system. 
• Mobile version is feature-rich as the desktop version. 

Pricing: 

Motivosity has four plans based on its features. 

• Community & connection: $2 per employee/month. 
• Recognition and rewards: $2 per employee/month.
• Manager development: $2 per employee/month.
• Employee insights: $2 per employee/month.

7 PerformYard — Best for Employee Engagement Tracking

PerformYard is a platform that offers a suite of tools designed to simplify and enhance the processes of conducting reviews, giving feedback, and setting goals. 

The platform offers features such as project-based reviews, employee appraisals, continuous feedback, rankings, performance trends, satisfaction factor analysis, and collaborative goal-setting to keep employees motivated and engaged. 

PerformYard also makes it easy to customize the platform to fit your needs, including semi-annual reviews, 360 peer reviews, competency reviews, quarterly conversations, and goal check-ins. 

Pros

• Goal setting and tracking. Managers and employees can easily set, track, and align individual goals with team and organizational objectives. 
• Tools for continuous feedback. This helps managers and peers to give real-time, meaningful feedback, insights, and opinions. 
• Integration with a host of HRIS tools. Gusto, BambooHR, ADP, UKG, Workday, Paylocity, and SFTP. 

Cons 

• The interface could be more user-friendly and intuitive, as many users complain of having to go through multiple steps just to locate a function they need. 
• The pre-set questions on the platform can be repetitive, especially for organizations with multiple employees. 
• Many processes on the platform need to be automated, requiring users to do a lot of manual digging around to find important information. 

Pricing:

• Employee engagement: $1-3 per employee/month. 
• Performance management. $5-10 per employee/month. 

Related → How To Design an Effective Employee Survey + Template To Use. 

8 Culture Amp — Best for Building Workplace Culture

Culture Amp is an all-in-one platform that delivers insightful analytics and actions for improving employee engagement, performance, and retention. 

One of the core functions of Culture Amp is its host of features dedicated to helping employees, teams, and companies create a culture of clear accountability and transparency. 

The platform is also highly customizable and boasts impressive features to align and empower your workforce. 

For instance, the benchmarking feature helps you build a better work culture by allowing you to compare your results with others in your industry, region, or more. With this, you can evaluate your team’s performance and know where to improve. 

Pros 

• Survey Flexibility. Culture Amp’s primary strength lies in its flexible survey capabilities. The platform allows for highly customizable engagement, onboarding, and exit surveys, helping you to track the employee experience from start to finish.
• In-depth Analytics. The platform offers robust, data-driven insights. It provides actionable findings through heatmaps, trends, correlation analysis, and impact analysis that allows you to focus on the areas that will most impact engagement and employee retention.
• Performance Management. This allows for continuous feedback, goal setting, and performance tracking. This holistic approach aids in aligning individual performance with company objectives.

Cons

• Complexity. Due to its wide array of features, some users have complained of the platform being overwhelming. 
• Price. Given its comprehensive feature set, Culture Amp is on the higher end of the price scale, which may not be suitable for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.
• Poor customer support, especially when you need system errors or bugs resolved quickly. 
• Integration with certain HRIS tools is not as smooth or comprehensive as others. 

Pricing: 

• Contact sales to request a quote. 

9 Nectar — Best for Cultivating Positive Company Culture

Nectar is a platform that strongly focuses on peer-to-peer recognition and rewards to cultivate positive and appreciative company culture.

The platform utilizes a framework built on six pillars, called ‘C-R-E-A-T-E,’ to help companies build a great culture. 

• Connection. Building a supportive community in the work environment. 
• Recognition. Consistently acknowledging each team member’s contributions. 
• Empathy. Truly caring for your colleagues. 
• Alignment. Unite around a shared purpose to make the work meaningful. 
• Trust. Give people total autonomy over their work. 
• Elevation. Create opportunities for growth and development of each team member. 

In addition, based on this framework,  Nectar boasts of customers seeing a 94% increase in employee engagement. 

Pros 

• Peer Recognition. Nectar allows employees to recognize their colleagues’ hard work and achievements publicly. For instance, you can tag someone to shout out and write a personal message. 
• Rewards Catalog. Along with recognition, employees earn Nectar points that they can redeem for various rewards in Nectar’s extensive catalog, ranging from gift cards to customer experiences and products. They can also send company-branded swags that ship directly to their colleagues’ doorsteps. 
• Celebrate milestones. With Nectar, you can never miss another employee’s work anniversary, promotion, or birthday. 

Cons 

• Limited advanced features. It does not have as many advanced features (like performance management or in-depth analytics) as other platforms. 
• Reward Fulfillment. Some users have reported that the reward fulfillment process can be somewhat slow, although this may vary depending on the specific reward and location. 
• Nectar offers basic reporting functionality that doesn’t provide enough on employee engagement levels or trends. 

Pricing: 

• Standard plan. $2.75 per employee/month billed annually. 
• Plus plan. $4 per employee/month billed annually. 

10 Bonusly — Best for Employee Recognition and Rewards 

Bonusly is a peer-to-peer recognition platform that employs a fun way to gamify employee engagement by letting employees reward each other with points. 

To achieve this, Bonusly offers a 360-degree feature for employees to express their appreciation for their peers instantly. Managers also benefit from Bonusly’s dashboard as its people analytics function makes identifying recognition trends on your team easy. 

Another exciting part about Bonusly is their API function that allows you to build your own apps and integrations on the platform. 

Pros 

• Quick sign-in process. Bonusly integrates multiple SSO platforms such as Google, Okta, One login, Open ID, and Office 365 to make it easy for employees to sign in quickly. 
• Detailed engagement analytics. Get complete insights into top employees in the company, participation metrics, recognition breakdown, organization graphs, and top words used by employees. 
• Social-media feel. Using hashtags, likes, posts, and comments makes it feel like a social media platform — but for employees. 

Cons 

• Poor user experience. Bonusly can be challenging to navigate, especially for new users — and the onboarding experience isn’t helpful. 
• Reward variety. Users operating in multiple countries have mentioned occasional challenges with reward availability and appropriateness for employees in different locations.

Pricing: 

• Core. $3 per employee/month billed monthly. 
• Pro. $5 per employee/month billed monthly.

If you’d like a custom plan, please contact Bonusly. 

11 Mo — Best for Building Workplace Communities

Mo is a culture and employee engagement software that redefines the traditional approach to appreciating employees by encouraging them to build a workplace community instead. 

Some of its core features, like the ‘Mo Boosts, ’ helps create automated prompts that enable high-performing teams to share appreciation, wins, learnings, wins, gifs, funny pet pictures, and more. In addition, Mo’s Assistant feature will ensure team leaders emulate the behaviors they want to see in their employees. 

Mo also promotes a workplace togetherness culture using peer-to-peer nominations so high-performing team members get their deserved recognition. 

Pros 

• Moments. These are social posts that help shape employee experience and engagement while showcasing your culture. 
• Multilingual support. Users can access the platform in 12 languages. 
• Mo is available on Android & iOs. 

Cons 

• Limited integrations. Mo only integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams. 
• Poor Customer support is only available on weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM GMT. 
• No free trials. 

Pricing: 

• Starter. £3 per employee/ per month billed monthly. 
• Level up. £5 per employee/month billed monthly. 

If you want a custom plan, contact sales. 

Related → Making Waves: The Power of Watercooler Conversations in the Workplace. 

Benefits of an employee engagement platform

Enhances employee engagement

The core idea behind every employee engagement platform is to facilitate regular interactions between employees and management. This can be done through chat forums, video meetings, team collaboration spaces, and more. 

By facilitating this interaction, employees can be active participants within their teams and the company. This way, they’re not just recipients of company policies and decisions; they’re part of the discussion, problem-solving, and innovation. 

Streamlines internal communication

Through features like instant messaging, discussion forums, and announcement boards, employee engagement platforms help reduce email clutter, ensuring faster, more efficient communication. This saves employees time, enabling them to focus on their core tasks rather than sorting through a mountain of messages. 

Also, with all the relevant information at their fingertips, they can work more efficiently and make informed decisions. Information can be disseminated quickly and accurately, whether it’s project updates, policy changes, or organizational announcements.

Related → 7 Internal Comms Trends That Will Shape 2023.

Facilitates peer recognition

Most employee engagement tools have a peer-to-peer recognition feature that allows employees to appreciate and acknowledge their colleagues’ efforts. 

This could be as simple as a “thumbs up” icon next to a team member’s post or a more elaborate system of badges, points, or awards. Whatever the format, the intent is the same — to make it simple and enjoyable for employees to show appreciation for each other’s efforts.

Additionally, peer recognition can further improve team harmony by encouraging open communication and fostering camaraderie. 

Related → Employee Appreciation: 16 Virtual Team Celebration Ideas. 

Offers valuable insights

Employee engagement platforms offer advanced analytics and reporting tools that provide valuable insights into your team’s engagement levels, areas of improvement, and overall performance. 

For instance –  

• Are there particular teams that consistently outperform others? 
• Are there teams that rarely participate in company-wide discussions or events? 

With this information at their fingertips, managers can pinpoint where engagement is thriving and where it may need a boost. They can also leverage these insights to make strategic decisions about talent management, team structure, and resource allocation among teams. 

Encourages transparency and trust

By facilitating an open line of communication, there’s a free flow of information, enabling two things: 

• A centralized place where management can share company updates and plans openly 
• Involvement of employees in the decision-making process, eliminating barriers between different hierarchies in the organization. 

Whether it’s a suggestion box, a discussion forum, or a direct messaging feature, these platforms give employees the confidence to share their thoughts without fear of reprisal.

This transparency fosters a sense of inclusivity and respect among employees, as they feel valued and involved in the company’s trajectory.

Supports work-life balance

Work-life balance is a vital aspect of every employee’s wellness, and many employee engagement platforms provide the necessary resources to achieve that. 

Features such as notifications and reminders to take breaks, tools to manage workloads efficiently, or mindfulness and stress management resources help employees prevent burnout. 

When employees feel their physical, mental, and emotional well-being are valued, they are likely to experience increased job satisfaction.

Saves time and resources

HR teams often manage many tasks, from conducting performance reviews to administering employee engagement surveys and managing employee engagement programs. With employee engagement platforms, many of these tasks can be automated. 

For instance, performance reviews can be scheduled and conducted through the platform, surveys can be sent out and collected digitally, and recognition programs can be administered with just a few clicks.

This eliminates the need for constant oversight and significantly reduces the administrative burden on HR teams. Additionally, it ensures that these tasks are carried out consistently and on schedule, leading to better results and more accurate data.

Use Workvivo to improve your company culture and boost employee engagement

Thinking of a comprehensive solution that helps cultivate robust and positive company culture and employee engagement? 

Then Workvivo is your answer. 

Why Workvivo? 

Workvivo offers a wide range of features, from communication and collaboration tools to peer recognition and learning and development opportunities, making it an essential asset for any modern business.

Think of Workvivo as a bridge that brings the connectedness of a physical office — thereby making it an ideal choice for remote and in-house teams. 

In addition, its powerful analytics offer insights into the heart of your company’s culture, helping you understand what works, what needs improvement, and the steps to take to make your company a better workplace.

But don’t just take out word for it; see how our customers succeed with Workvivo. 

Employee engagement platform FAQs

What is an employee engagement platform?

An employee engagement platform is a type of software that helps businesses increase job satisfaction, employee retention, and productivity. It acts as a tool for feedback, communication, recognition, learning, and social interaction among employees in an organization. 

How do employee engagement platforms work?

Employee engagement platforms create a unified system for a streamlined flow of interaction between employees and management in terms of collaboration, learning, participation, and peer recognition. 

The platforms also track and collect data from these interactions and use it to provide insights into employee engagement levels across the organization. 

Are employee engagement platforms important?

Yes, they are. 

These platforms help — 

• Foster a positive work environment. 
• Increase employee productivity
• Reduce employee turnover
• Increase employee satisfaction and engagement

Are employee engagement platforms suitable for remote teams?

Employee engagement platforms are especially beneficial for remote teams as they can help to bridge communication gaps, promote collaboration, and ensure remote employees feel connected and valued.

Can you integrate employee engagement software with other systems?

Yes, you can. 

Leading employee engagement software integrates with Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and other productivity tools. 

This allows for a more streamlined workflow and a comprehensive view of employee engagement and performance.

What features should a good employee engagement platform have?

A good platform should have features for communication and collaboration, peer recognition, feedback and surveys, learning and development, and social interaction. 

It should also offer analytics and reporting tools to monitor engagement levels and track improvements over time.