To maintain a constant pulse on your employees, you need to understand their perspective. Although making an educated guess is always an option, the odds of improving engagement levels aren’t in your favor by relying on conjecture. Thankfully, companies now have several different employee engagement survey software solutions to choose from. But that leads to an entirely different problem – which engagement survey tool is best for your particular needs and goals?
So you can make a fully-informed decision on the right solution for you, we’re going to look at engagement software for creating surveys from a few different angles, including:
- Why it’s so important to invest in your company culture and engagement
- Defining engagement survey software and its unique benefits
- Comparing the different survey software providers
After reading these insights, you’ll have a better understanding of what the right survey tools can do for your organization and people. With highly engaged employees being nearly 20% more productive than their peers, we promise you it’s time well-spent.
Investing in Culture & Engagement is Critical
While improving culture and engagement levels within your organization provides obvious benefits – better employee satisfaction rates, a fulfilling employee experience, and a generally more appealing work environment – investing in them ultimately comes down to value.
Just like any strategy or initiative within your company, if employee engagement planning doesn’t translate to healthier top and bottom lines, then it’s not worth the resources you devote to it. However, as the following statistics demonstrate, investments into critical engagement survey software and other engagement tools can significantly impact a company’s financial well-being.
- Highly engaged teams are 21% more profitable
- Employee disengagement costs companies up to $550B annually
- Engaged teams realize 24% less turnover
- Highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share
- Engaged companies outperformed the S&P 500 by over 25% from 2012 to 2017
Survey Software Drives Your Strategy
Those statistics are irrefutable evidence of the vital role that employee engagement has on virtually any company’s financial success and viability. But engagement itself can still seem somewhat nebulous. By definition, the concept is straightforward – the connection your employees feel towards their work, co-workers, and your organization. However, how does a company go about improving engagement?
That’s what makes employee engagement software so critical, allowing an organization to measure, analyze, and improve engagement levels among its people. But as we’ve written before, even employee engagement solutions can seem a bit confusing, especially to HR professionals and managers new to the concept. In fact, the term “employee engagement software” encompasses many different types of employee engagement tools:
- Employee feedback & survey tools
- Workplace measurement
- Employee recognition & rewards
- Performance reviews & management
- Internal communication tools
- Workplace well-being & wellness
- Employee learning & development
While all of these tools play an essential role in a sweeping, comprehensive engagement strategy, it’s the first one, employee feedback & survey tools, that forms the foundation that everything else builds from. From academically-researched survey questions to actionable insights, it’s your survey solution that feeds all of the other engagement tools.
The Engine that Propels Engagement
Engagement surveys are the conduit between your people and the top & bottom-line drivers that make an employee engagement initiative such a strategic powerhouse. Surveys – including longer-form baseline surveys, employee pulse surveys, and polls – provide the window into your people that you need to guide your decision-making. Since it’s talent that drives growth and innovation within an organization, it’s only natural that the more committed and driven that talent is, the greater the individual employee performance and, thus, the benefits to the company.
It’s the survey software platform that allows you to collect real-time feedback, identify trends, and provide real-time insights into how the different drivers of engagement function within your workforce. Further, after the data collection, analysis, and action planning on areas for improvement, the survey software also lets you track your progress with follow-up pulse surveys and polls.
In other words, the better survey solutions turn your employee engagement strategy into a self-perpetuating, ever-evolving cycle that continuously looks for pain points and addresses them. That process of addressing issues within your employees is where other varieties of engagement software – peer recognition platforms, well-being programs, continuous performance management tools, and others – impact an engagement strategy.
But it’s all moot without the engagement survey software collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data to begin with. It’s the engine that propels everything forward. Likewise, if the survey software doesn’t provide your people with an effective, empowering voice, then it’s limiting the effectiveness of your engagement strategy, which, in turn, limits the improved engagement levels you might otherwise realize.
Choose Your Survey Software Wisely
The issue is choosing engagement survey software that adds value with its benefits and features rather than overload your Human Resources. Ideally, when looking at survey solution providers, you want a single tool that automates the process of collecting employee feedback, analyzing the survey results, identifying issues, and suggesting a course of action.
This comprehensive approach is what distinguishes engagement survey software from standard employee survey providers. Although it might sound like semantics, standard survey solutions like Survey Monkey, Google Forms, and Typeform simply don’t have the ability to drive improved engagement. Of course, that’s not to say that these solutions don’t have their time and place, but, short of polling employees on who they want to cater the upcoming quarterly town hall meeting, their impact is minimal.
Engagement survey solutions are obviously far more comprehensive, with the better ones being efficient, fast, scalable, and providing your decision-makers with accurate, real-time information they can use to steer the organization. Ultimately, your engagement survey software should be the catalyst that improves your engagement drivers across every level of the company.
Comparing Survey Software Providers
To help you choose the solution that’s best for your needs, we’ve identified some core features and functions to look for from a provider. Keep in mind that every company is different, so what you might deem the most important feature could be secondary to another. However, all of these features are essential to efficiently measure engagement, empower your employees, and affect positive change in your company:
Further, we’ve also identified the survey software providers that most companies include in their search and due diligence process to create due diligence report:
- Betterworks Engage
- Culture Amp
- Glint
- Peakon
- Qualtrics
- TINYpulse
- Officevibe
- Quantum Workplace
- Culture IQ
Using the key features and the most popular survey software providers, we’ve created a matrix for you to use as you research the different options. As you’ll see, there’s only one that gives you everything you need in an engagement survey software solution.
The bottom line is this – your engagement survey software is the cornerstone of your entire engagement strategy. Further, the right solution also provides your employees with an impactful voice that helps drive change and, therefore, greater engagement.
To that point, when employees feel their voice is not only heard but also a pivotal part of decision-making, they’re 4.6x more likely to perform their best. So choose a solution that gives you all of these features, scales as you grow, empowers your people, and makes life easier for your HR department.
