Alexis Kestler
Building a positive and engaging workplace culture is crucial for business success. With rising competition for top talent, organizations must focus on improving employee experience to attract and retain the best employees.
Employee experience platforms are revolutionizing how companies engage their workforce. These platforms provide tools to gather employee feedback, manage performance, align goals, offer learning resources, celebrate achievements, and more – all from one centralized hub.
According to a Deloitte survey, 79% of executives rate employee experience as important or very important. Organizations that invest in employee experience enjoy higher productivity, innovation, lower turnover, and stronger employer brands.
This article reviews the top 10 employee experience platforms to help you find the right solution for your organization. We analyze the key features, benefits, and potential drawbacks of each platform.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee experience refers to how employees perceive their interactions with different aspects of work like company culture, leadership, peers, policies, work environment, and technology. It focuses on creating a positive, engaging, and empowering workplace.
The four core pillars of employee experience are:
- Culture: Values, norms, behaviors that shape the work environment
- Technology: Tools and systems employees use to get work done
- Physical space: Office design, layout, comfort, and accessibility
- Brand: How employees view the organization from the inside
When these pillars work together seamlessly, they create a positive and productive employee experience.
Why is Employee Experience Important?
Investing in employee experience provides several benefits:
- Higher engagement: Employees who have a positive work experience are more engaged with their roles.
- Lower turnover: Good experiences make employees want to stay with the company. Reduced turnover saves recruitment and training costs.
- Stronger employer brand: Current employees share their positive experiences, helping attract top talent.
- Increased productivity: Engaged employees give their best effort and deliver stronger performance.
- Better customer service: Happy employees lead to happy customers and higher satisfaction.
- Higher innovation: Employees feel empowered to think creatively and drive innovation.
In short, optimizing employee experience directly impacts the bottom line by lowering costs and driving sustainable growth.
Key Features of Employee Experience Platforms
Leading employee experience platforms offer the following key capabilities:
-
Gathering feedback: Pulse surveys, always-on feedback, and structured performance reviews to understand employee sentiment.
-
Communication: Social tools, anonymous messaging, and collaboration apps to foster open dialogue.
-
Engagement: Peer recognition, rewards, celebrations for work anniversaries, and personal milestones like birthdays or marriages.
-
Performance management: Goal setting, progress tracking, continuous feedback, and reviews.
-
Learning and development: Personalized L&D recommendations, microlearning content, mentoring programs, and coaching.
-
Analytics: Sentiment analysis, predictive modeling, and other insights from employee feedback data.
-
HR workflows: Tools to simplify processes like onboarding, transfers, offboarding, time-off requests.
-
Integrations: APIs and pre-built connectors with communication tools, project management systems, and other HR tech stacks.
Let‘s look at the top employee experience software platforms that bring these capabilities together.
1. WorkTango
WorkTango is an end-to-end employee experience platform designed for the modern, distributed workforce. It brings all the engagement, communication, and analytics tools teams need to thrive in a hybrid work environment.
With WorkTango, organizations can digitize HR workflows, gather feedback through pulse surveys, enable social recognition, and access predictive analytics – all on a single platform.
Key features:
- Omnichannel pulse surveys throughout the employee lifecycle
- Conversational AI for gathering quick feedback via chat
- Social recognition feeds for peer appreciation
- Rewards engine with gift cards, charity donations, merch redeemals
- Automated milestones and anniversary messages
- Anonymous messaging board for suggestions
- Predictive analytics and recommended actions for managers
- Real-time mood tracking from employee comments
- Talent marketplace to advertise open roles
- APIs and integrations with leading HCMs and communications tools
WorkTango provides a customizable platform to enhance both remote and in-office employee experiences. Its focus on digital HR processes, collaboration, and data-driven insights makes it a leading choice for forward-thinking companies.
Pricing starts at $8 per employee per month.
2. Motivosity
Motivosity takes an community-based approach to improving employee experience. It provides tools to foster social connections, recognize achievements, gather feedback, and measure sentiment.
The platform helps leaders identify priorities to guide employees towards impact. Managers can track progress on key activities through automated nudges and reminders.
Key features:
- Build online communities to engage employees
- Automated nudges for managers to develop high-impact habits
- Peer recognition and rewards to celebrate wins
- Pulse surveys to gather quick feedback
- AI-powered sentiment analysis
- Anonymous employee activation results
- Predictive modeling based on senior leader actions
- Team collaboration tools
- Integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and HR platforms
Motivosity creates a sense of belonging by connecting employees to each other and the organization. Its focus on driving high-impact activities makes it easy to activate managers to improve engagement.
Pricing starts at $7 per employee per month.
3. Leapsome
Leapsome offers an all-in-one people enablement platform covering performance management, engagement, learning, and internal mobility.
It provides tools to align employee goals, gather feedback, create individual development plans, and match internal talent to open roles.
Key features:
- Performance management with agile or annual review cycles
- Employee pulse surveys with advanced analysis
- Ongoing and 360-degree feedback processes
- Learning management system (LMS) for development
- Internal mobility and talent marketplace
- Manager effectiveness ratings
- Team collaboration tools
- HR analytics and custom reports
- APIs for deep integrations with HCMs
Leapsome enables people leaders to continuously develop talent, gather insights, and make data-driven decisions. Its integrated platform covers all key aspects of employee experience management.
Pricing starts at $7 per employee per month.
4. Culture Amp
Culture Amp is an enterprise HR platform focused on listening, acting, and analyzing to optimize employee experiences. It gathers feedback across the entire employee lifecycle.
The platform standardizes listening via surveys and one-on-one discussions. Collected data provides insights to guide suitable actions around engagement, performance, and growth.
Key features:
- Employee pulse surveys with advanced analytics
- Always-on performance management
- Peer recognition and rewards
- Structured review process with self, manager, peer feedback
- Customizable employee lifecycle milestones
- Manager effectiveness ratings
- Talent mobility and internal job marketplace
- Reporting dashboard for HR metrics
- 130+ integrations with leading HR tech
Culture Amp consolidates all listening, acting, and analyzing on a single platform tailored to different industries. Its focus on continuous performance development helps attract and retain top talent.
Pricing starts at $6 per employee per month.
5. Qualtrics XM for Employees
Qualtrics XM for Employees delivers a powerful employee listening platform to analyze feedback, improve experiences, and retain talent.
It automates unified feedback collection across engagement, performance, learning, leadership, and more. You get a consolidated employee sentiment dashboard with advanced analytics.
Key features:
- Automated feedback requests and reminders
- Standardized surveys with advanced logic
- Analysis of open text feedback
- Integration with operational data
- Real-time reporting and dashboards
- Feedback intercepts based on user behavior
- Natural language queries for analysis
- Predictive modeling and statistical analysis
- 120+ pre-built integrations with HCMs, CRMs
Qualtrics combines experience data (X-data) with operational data for a complete analysis of employee sentiment drivers. This guides leaders towards suitable actions to positively impact experiences.
Pricing is customized based on each client‘s requirements.
6. Officevibe
Officevibe focuses on pulse surveys and analytics to measure employee engagement and satisfaction levels.
It offers quick weekly surveys, feedback modules, and AI-powered analytics to surface insights. These help managers identify issues impacting employee experience and morale.
Key features:
- Automated weekly pulse surveys
- Anonymous feedback collection
- Employee sentiment tracking
- Manager effectiveness scoring
- Custom surveys for projects, meetings, events
- Real-time reporting dashboards
- Benchmarking against industry metrics
- Survey scheduling, reminders, notifications
- Integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams
Officevibe provides an easy way to gather quick feedback on how employees feel about their experience. Its anonymized data and analysis help managers pinpoint problem areas and improve engagement.
Pricing starts at $7 per employee per month.
7. Kazoo
Kazoo offers tools to engage employees, align goals, streamline HR workflows, and gather feedback.
It features an activity feed for peer recognition, automated goal tracking, flexible performance reviews, and pulse surveys. Users can access all features on a simple mobile interface.
Key features:
- Peer recognition and rewards
- Individual and company goal alignment
- Ongoing performance feedback cycles
- Pulse surveys with advanced analysis
- Employee engagement scoring
- Workflow automation for HR processes
- Time-off management and live PTO balance
- Mobile-first user experience
- 130+ integrations with leading HR tech
Kazoo provides an easy-to-use platform covering all aspects of employee experience management. The mobile interface makes it easy for employees and managers to stay engaged from anywhere.
Pricing starts at $4 per employee per month.
8. Hppy
Hppy is an employee recognition and rewards platform focused on social praise, points, and peer appreciation.
It features a central newsfeed where employees and leaders can recognize achievements big or small. Users can redeem earned points for gift cards, donations, and other rewards.
Key features:
- Activity feed with peer recognition posts
- Company value badges to tie rewards to core values
- Points system for quantifying recognition
- Rewards marketplace with branded merch, gift cards, and more
- Mobile apps on iOS and Android
- Analytics on participation and engagement
- Integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams
Hppy offers a lightweight yet powerful solution to enhance engagement and recognition between peers and teams. The newsfeed and points system make appreciation transparent across the organization.
Pricing starts at $3 per employee per month.
9. Reward Gateway
Reward Gateway focuses on employee recognition, rewards, and discounts to drive engagement.
It allows organizations to create targeted programs for service milestones, peer-to-peer recognition, spot bonuses, and more. Employees redeem points from these programs in an online marketplace.
Key features:
- Tailored recognition programs for values, service, performance
- Peer-to-peer social recognition system
- Points-based online shopping marketplace
- Discounts for top brands, gift cards, events, and more
- Rating system for employee sentiment tracking
- Reporting and analytics on program ROI
- Integrations with HRIS, payroll, and communication tools
Reward Gateway brings together the motivation of points and rewards with the fun of social recognition. Organizations can track participation levels and recognition habits to measure engagement over time.
Pricing is customized based on each company‘s requirements.
10. Kudos
Kudos is a simple yet powerful peer recognition platform to improve employee engagement and productivity.
It features a feed for employees to recognize peers for achievements, collaboration, living company values, and daily wins. Managers can also share top-down recognition.
Key features:
- Activity feed for peer recognition stories
- Ability to attach badges to stories based on core values
- Points system to quantify appreciation
- Redemption of points for rewards like gift cards
- Ratings widget to track employee satisfaction
- Mobile apps on iOS and Android
- Analytics on engagement and program ROI
- Integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams
Kudos offers an easy way to start building a culture of appreciation through peer recognition powered by points and rewards. Its simple interface drives adoption across roles and departments.
Pricing starts at $2 per employee per month.
Key Considerations for Choosing an Employee Experience Platform
Here are some important factors to evaluate when choosing an employee experience software solution:
-
Key capabilities – Does the platform support your use cases like surveys, performance reviews, collaboration, recognition, analytics?
-
Ease of use – How easy is the platform to use for employees, managers, and HR admins?
-
Mobile experience – Are critical features available on iOS and Android apps?
-
Implementation time – How long does the initial software setup and rollout take?
-
Customer support – Does the vendor offer 24/7 support and an online knowledge base?
-
Security – What compliance standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001 does the platform support?
-
Scalability – Can the solution support your employee base as it grows over time?
-
Data and integrations – Does it centralize data from other HR systems? What pre-built integrations are available?
-
Reporting – Does it offer dashboards, analytics, and tools to glean insights?
-
Pricing – Is the pricing model affordable for your budget? Do they offer discounts on annual contracts?
Selecting the right employee experience platform is key to driving engagement across the workforce. Evaluating solutions against these criteria will help you find the best fit.
Conclusion
Employee experience platforms play a vital role in creating a positive, motivating workplace where people enjoy coming to work. They provide listening tools, engagement capabilities, and data-driven insights to retain your best talent.
Leading solutions like WorkTango, Culture Amp, Qualtrics, Motivosity, and Leapsome offer robust features to gather feedback, drive performance, align goals, facilitate social recognition, and more.
Focus on platforms that align with your employee experience strategy and provide capabilities that map to your use cases. Taking time to find the right platform pays off manifold in higher retention, productivity, innovation, customer satisfaction, and lower turnover.
Investing in employee experience platforms demonstrates your commitment to making the workplace somewhere employees want to be – not where they have to be. This message alone can go a long way in boosting engagement.
