Employee engagement? There’s an app for that

In our recently released Future of Work Study, we dug into whether or not knowledge workers are feeling a sense of connection to what they do. The survey revealed that nearly all employees (91%) want a closer relationship with their in-office coworkers, and 85% wish they could connect more with remote colleagues. Most employees also want more transparency in the workplace: 80% want to know about their company’s decision-making processes, and 87% want to work for more transparent companies down the road. And almost a quarter of respondents—24%—are dissatisfied with how their organizations currently share information.

Thankfully, there are a number of apps that can help you improve employee engagement in the workplace. Some allow you to create surveys so you can find out what’s working—and not working—through firsthand feedback. Other apps help foster an inclusive company culture by providing a space where everyone feels welcome to communicate openly and be themselves. But most important, they all help to create a happier digital workplace that ultimately improves team performance.

TINYpulse: Quick employee engagement check-ins

Most companies are familiar with employee “pulse checks”: surveys that help management figure out how their team is feeling about workloads, stress levels, and office culture. These types of surveys are incredibly useful for maintaining employee engagement, and TINYpulse is one of the originators. This software also has the popular Cheers for Peers feature, which creates a specific space for teammates to celebrate their accomplishments in a modern digital workplace.

Qualtrics: Track trends in employee satisfaction

For measuring employee experience, it’s hard to beat the best-in-class analytics engine behind Qualtrics. Not only can the app integrate with office collaboration platforms to easily send employees surveys and receive responses, it can also identify and prioritize key drivers of employee engagement through its predictive intelligence. Data collected by the app can be shared across your organization, allowing for better transparency and enabling any member of your team to play a more active role in defining the company culture.

Culture Amp: Deep insights into employee motivation

Culture Amp is the app to use if you want to dive deep into how your team is feeling. It’s a powerful feedback and analytics platform that was developed by a team of data scientists and organizational psychologists. As a result, it provides highly detailed insights into what you could be doing differently—and how you can do it. To make things even more interesting, Culture Amp leverages machine learning to constantly self-improve. Its Text Analytics reports offer insights from your own data as well as data from over 1,400 companies that also subscribe to the app.

Hyphen: Analyze employee engagement survey results

There’s no point in gathering company surveys if no one’s committed to studying the results and making real change. That’s why Hyphen takes the polling process one step further, yielding actionable takeaways from the data to help set deliverables, drive initiatives, and track them from start to finish. Employee life-cycle surveys, pulse polls, and crowdsourced, bottom-up feedback provide Hyphen—and your entire team—with a constant supply of useful information, and the process can be easily automated with the help of the platform’s bot, Hyphy, once it’s integrated with your office collaboration tool.

Bonusly: Rewards-based employee engagement

When it comes to team performance, you can praise and thank your employees for their great work all you want, but it’s even better to give them a real reward. That’s why Bonusly lets you recognize people not only with words but with points. Every employee gets a monthly allotment of points that they can send to colleagues to express their gratitude. If employees collect enough points, they can exchange them for a tangible token of appreciation: gift cards from leading brands, endowments to charities, or good old-fashioned cash—they’re all options in Bonusly’s catalog. This gives teams a huge morale boost and enables managers to look at trends to see where (and why) employees are excelling.

SurveyMonkey: Customizable questionnaires

You’ve no doubt heard of SurveyMonkey. User-friendly questionnaires can be created and distributed in no time at all, helping teams come to a consensus on everything from annual corporate strategies to fun office events. The simplicity of deployment across multiple channels and platforms has made it a leader in employee engagement apps, and customizable design themes and templates let companies build polls that reflect their brand.

Officevibe: Measure team engagement

A long report can be overwhelming, which is why Officevibe’s highly visualized analyses are so useful. Its output helps managers easily understand their team’s level of engagement and satisfaction while also tracking trends based on specific user attributes, like salary, hire date, and department. And then there’s Leo, Officevibe’s lovable Slack bot. Leo automatically solicits the team’s feedback on a regular basis and also fosters a livelier company culture by sharing praise directly with coworkers.

It should be clear to employees that their input matters to management. That’s why “employee engagement” by way of sending out surveys once or twice a year no longer suffices. Evaluating your team’s feelings, productivity, and performance is a continuous cycle, and one that should take top priority. Temperature checks should take place frequently, but there’s no consensus on how often employee engagement surveys should be administered. Start by asking your employees what works best for them and adjust accordingly, whether that means issuing a survey every six weeks or six months.

There are so many apps out there that both collect measurable feedback and provide a space where the whole team can connect, collaborate, and—yes—occasionally banter and get to know each other better. And that goes a long way toward getting employees more motivated and satisfied at work.