Top 7 Tools to Measure Employee Engagement and Increase Business Performance

Employee engagement is the heartbeat of your organization—the silent force driving your company's success, the intangible factor influencing tangible outcomes. 

Today's market offers a plethora of tools designed to probe, measure, and optimize employee engagement. 

The objective? To get under the skin of engagement and understand what truly makes your workforce tick.

This article will explore the tools to measure employee engagement that you can use to gauge employee sentiment and discover how to support and motivate your workforce in ways that matter to them.

We've curated a list of the top 7 tools transforming companies globally, ushering in increased performance and employee satisfaction. These aren't just 'survey tools.' They're holistic platforms that combine analytics, feedback, communication, and actionable insights. 

👩‍💻 What are the different measurement tools to measure employee engagement?

Employee engagement is a dynamic and complex affair. Your workers might be delighted with their jobs and your organization's culture today, but that may change next week or two months from now.

They may have great relationships with their coworkers, a healthy work-life balance, and managers who contribute to their success. Yet, they may still quit or consider leaving because there are few opportunities for career advancement. Or because your pay and benefits suck.

To get a holistic view of your employee engagement levels, how they shift over time, how they impact behavior, and the improvements your workers would like to see, you can't just rely on one process or method. You need a mix of measurement tools and approaches.

Survey tools

Modern employee engagement survey tools save you the time and stress of manually running and analyzing surveys. They allow companies to collect high-level feedback on the factors hindering or driving organizational engagement. 

Survey tools enable you to measure how people feel about the different aspects of the employee experience that contribute to engagement, including culture, well-being, inclusion, autonomy, leadership, compensation, job satisfaction, and more.

Pulse survey platforms

Although the quarterly or annual employee engagement survey you send out can tell you a lot about how happy and satisfied your employees are, it may not accurately reflect your employees' feelings throughout the year.

Employee pulse survey platforms can help with this. They allow you to continuously listen in on your employees and find out what's working or not working for them by sending out short questionnaires regularly. 

This way, you can diagnose any fluctuations in employee engagement and morale in real time and take steps to address the root cause before the situation worsens.

Engagement metrics trackers 

If you're not correctly measuring employee engagement, you can end up with questionable results that do not reveal the actual state of your engagement levels. And when you devise employee engagement strategies or make business decisions based on this unreliable data, they may prove ineffective or have disastrous consequences.

Using employee engagement metrics trackers can help you pick up on trends and determine whether the changes you've made are positively or negatively impacting morale by monitoring relevant employee engagement KPIs and metrics such as:

• satisfaction rates; 
• voluntary turnover rates;
• productivity metrics;
• employee net promoter score (eNPS);
• employee absenteeism rates. 

➡️ Check out our comprehensive guide on measuring employee engagement. We analyze multiple methods and metrics to collect meaningful insights into your people's engagement levels.

💻 7 Best tools for measuring employee engagement 

Let's look at some of the best examples of employee engagement survey tools currently in the market and the unique advantages they can offer your business.

Zavvy

Zavvy is an employee engagement platform that helps organizations measure and improve their people experience to build a highly motivated and engaged workforce. 

With Zavvy, you can gather employee feedback to understand what your people think of your company's culture and how you can create an environment that nurtures and enables them to do their best work. This way, you can strategically address existing or potential issues and increase employee engagement before it's too late.

Our employee engagement survey platform comes with powerful AI functionalities. You can leverage AI to summarize the results of your surveys into an easily digestible report that you can share with team leaders and executives.

👀 Key features

• Zavvy offers a broad range of employee engagement survey types, including pulse surveys, remote work surveys, wellness surveys, and leadership assessments. All these tools will give you comprehensive insights into satisfaction levels across every aspect of your employee experience over time.
• The platform has a growing library of research-backed feedback and survey templates that you can use throughout the employee lifecycle, saving you the time and effort required to create surveys from scratch.
• It gives you the option to customize employee surveys to your liking and switch from non-anonymous to anonymous feedback options depending on your needs and employee preferences.
• With Zavvy, you can reap the benefits of qualitative and quantitative survey methods by using one or the other or combining open-ended and rating scale question types.
• Unlike most other employee engagement tools, Zavvy does not have a minimum spend for consultations policy. All our customers enjoy access to a dedicated employee experience specialist and free consultations from implementation to training and rollout.
• Zavvy integrates seamlessly with dozens of HRIS, communication, and collaboration tools, including Personio, Humaans, BambooHR, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Loom, and more.

👍 Pros

• The tool is easy to use and transition into.
• You can use it to engage employees and measure engagement from the first day of the onboarding journey.
• It allows you to automate lots of processes, including survey completion reminders.
• Offers additional use cases beyond measuring engagement, including onboarding, training, performance management, career pathing, and employee development.‍

👎 Cons

• The starting price for a package is $/€300. This price might be too high for very small teams.
• As the product is under constant development, some bugs will peek through from time to time.

💸 Pricing

Zavvy's plans start at $4/€4 per employee per month, with a minimum package value of $300/€300/month.

CultureMonkey

CultureMonkey is an employee engagement program that allows businesses to listen to their employees and make data-backed decisions to improve their culture through surveys and feedback.

👀 Key features

• Capabilities for sending multi-lingual, customizable, and anonymous surveys measuring over 15 drivers of engagement, including recognition, mental health, work-life balance, leadership, and workplace autonomy.
• CultureMonkey's sentiment analysis tool can analyze the employee feedback you gather and determine whether the overall attitude is positive, negative, or neutral.
• The platform enables you to benchmark your engagement scores against high-performing organizations in your industry to better understand where you stand and your goals.

👍 Pros

• There is a wide variety of pre-made survey templates and questions.
• The tool offers advanced dashboards with options for viewing survey reports by location, roles, department, and manager level.
• It integrates with other business tools such as Slack, Zoho People, Google Suite, and Microsoft Teams.

👎 Cons

• The tool doesn't cover all relevant aspects of the employee experience.
• Using the question bank can be challenging at times.
• Survey reports can take a while to download.

💸 Pricing

CultureMonkey offers custom pricing, so you'll have to contact the company for a quote.

Sogolytics

Sogolytics is an online employee survey tool that enables organizations to prioritize engagement and uncover behind-the-scenes insights that can help them improve employee retention and satisfaction by asking the right questions at the right time.

👀 Key features

• Sogolytics provides eNPS and text sentiment analysis tools to enable you to read between the lines and monitor the pulse of your workforce in real-time.
• With Sogolytics' automated pulse surveys, you can schedule surveys to go out at specific times, track responses, and nudge employees to complete them without monitoring the entire process manually.
• Robust analytics enable you to visualize feedback data and identify significant trends, which you can use to improve employee engagement.

👍 Pros

• Customer support is quick and responsive.
• The tool supports integrations with other business tools.
• The user interface offers pop messaging that guides users on using the software.

👎 Cons

• Pages and links don't load as fast as they should.
• The workflow for distributing surveys isn't intuitive.
• There are glitches in surveys sometimes, requiring you to duplicate them to get them to work.

💸 Pricing

Sogolytics has a free plan with basic features and four paid-tiered plans:

• Plus for $25 per month, billed as $299 annually.
• Pro for $199 per month billed monthly or $66 per month billed as $788 annually.
• Premium for $299 per month billed monthly or $99 per month billed as $1188 annually.
• Enterprise feedback for custom pricing.

Empuls

Empuls gives companies the tools to measure employee sentiment and engagement and gather actionable feedback on building a winning workplace environment where everyone feels happy, satisfied, and motivated.

👀 Key features

• Find out how engaged your employees are and how loyal they are to your organization with Empuls' eNPS, pulse surveys, well-being surveys, and more.
• Empuls follows up survey reports with recommended action plans that you can use to address factors that are causing or are likely to cause disengagement.
• The platform allows you to leverage anonymity and open-ended questions in your surveys to get more detailed and honest responses on what's working and what needs to be improved.

👍 Pros

• The tool has additional functionalities for setting up and managing peer recognition, rewards, and benefits programs.
• Its gamification features can boost survey participation rates.
• There are data visualization tools for rendering survey reports in more engaging and easy-to-understand formats. 

👎 Cons

• The user interface is complex, so it may take some time for users to navigate it.
• The lack of a monthly billing option can make the price of the software costly and unattractive, especially for small businesses.

💸 Pricing

Empuls' survey module starts at $3 per employee per month, billed annually.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a survey and feedback management solution designed to help organizations measure engagement and analyze results to uncover what motivates their employees and how they can boost satisfaction, retention, and job performance.

👀 Key features

• SurveyMonkey enables you to build your employee engagement surveys from scratch or select from the pre-made options for assessing employee engagement and other use cases in its vast template library.
• There are over 25 question types and hundreds of pre-written questions, so you can gather nuanced feedback to help you improve your engagement scores in whatever format works best for your organization.
• The platform utilizes AI to help you optimize your survey for increased participation and better responses by detecting biases in your questions and rating how easy it is to complete before you send it out. 

👍 Pros

• The interface is easy-to-use and has extensive customization tools.
• The software breaks down how people interact with each section or question in your survey so you can refine future questionnaires for better results.

👎 Cons

• There is limited flexibility when it comes to designing surveys.
• Sometimes survey pages freeze or take a while to load.
• The software can be pricey, especially for organizations with limited budgets.

💸 Pricing

SurveyMonkey has a basic free plan with a limited number of responses per survey and several paid plans to choose from, including:

• Standard for $99 per month 
• Advantage for $34 per month, billed annually
• Premier for $99 per month, billed annually
• Team Advantage for $25 per user (minimum of 3 users) per month, billed annually
• Team Premier for $75 per user (minimum 3 users) per month billed annually.

Limeade Listening (Formerly TINYpulse)

Limeade Listening is a tool for measuring and improving employee engagement. It enables businesses to gather employee feedback and insights consistently and in real time so they can direct their efforts and resources toward activities that will inspire positive organizational change.

👀 Key features

• The platform provides a range of engagement and pulse surveys for diagnosing discontent and other root causes of employee disengagement.
• Using Limeade Listening's advanced visualizations, you can dive deeper into your analytics and reports to unearth patterns and opportunities for improvement before they start impacting employee loyalty.
• The recommendations feature uses survey data to offer relevant and meaningful suggestions on fixing the issues plaguing your workforce.

👍 Pros

• Intuitive to use from the employee and administrative end.
• Users can easily customize survey questions, formats, segments, and timing.
• Employees can fill out surveys directly from their email inboxes without logging into the platform.

👎 Cons

• Sometimes survey questions can be basic and irrelevant.
• Completing surveys can sometimes be annoying because you must repeat your responses.
• Responses to open-ended questions are often categorized using the wrong themes, leading to incorrect sentiment analysis. 

💸 Pricing

Limeade Listening doesn't publicly advertise its pricing information.

Sparkbay

Sparkbay is a SaaS solution that helps companies measure engagement and understand how their workers feel and what they need to thrive by giving them the tools to run engaging surveys and collect meaningful feedback.

👀 Key features

• Sparkbay offers pulse surveys with short, science-backed questions that reveal the state of your workforce engagement throughout the year.
• Interactive dashboards allow managers to compare results or break them down by office, department, title, tenure, demography, direct manager, and more. This way, they can understand what their engagement data is saying at a granular level.
• The platform's prediction engine monitors feedback for signs of disengagement and sends alerts whenever an employee segment shows an increased risk of voluntary turnover.

👍 Pros

• Data presentation in reports is simple and sleek.
• The Heatmap feature shows you your top engagement issues per employee demographics and department.

👎 Cons

• Exporting engagement survey data from the platform can be a laborious process.
• The length of survey periods can’t be increased or customized.
• Access to a dedicated customer success manager requires a minimal commitment of $5,000.

💸 Pricing

Sparkbay offers three pricing tiers:

• Up to 200 users for $5 per person per month billed annually.
• 201 to 500 users for $4 per person per month, billed annually.
• 501 to 1000 users for $3 per person per month, billed annually.

🆚 Summary table comparing the best employee engagement survey tools

Selecting a tool that suits your needs is just the first step. To properly leverage the results from your surveys to improve employee retention, morale, and productivity, you're still going to need to:

• ➡️ Design an effective employee engagement program.
• ➡️ Come up with a concrete action plan to address the root causes of disengagement that are impacting your employees.

➡️ If you need a tool for boosting engagement, check our analysis of the best employee engagement software.

🕵️‍♀️ How can I select the right tool to measure employee engagement in my organization?

Here are some tips to keep in mind when researching employee engagement measurement tools to enable you to choose an option that aligns with your specific context, needs, and preferences: 

In the words of Kris Lippi, CEO of ISoldMyHouse and Member of the Forbes Real Estate Council:

"Measuring employee engagement isn't merely about numbers; it's about unlocking the untapped potential of a workforce."

You're better off choosing a full-service engagement platform that allows you to make that happen.

➡️ Get the pulse of employee engagement with Zavvy

The only way to know that your employees are content, excited about their jobs, and adequately motivated to put in their 100% to ensure your business reaches its goals is by tracking engagement levels.

But you can't just call a meeting and tell them to rate how engaged they are and expect to get valuable insights.

Zavvy helps you monitor handy engagement metrics like your employee satisfaction, well-being, and eNPS scores, analyze the feedback you receive, and offer strategic recommendations to address your top engagement issues.

📅 If you're ready to make deliberate efforts to build an engaged, high-performing workforce, schedule a demo to see how Zavvy can help you monitor and transform your employee experience.

❓ FAQs

What is the most commonly used tool to measure employee engagement?

The most common tool for measuring employee engagement is surveys. Companies use surveys to evaluate different engagement drivers and gather feedback about employees' motivations and job satisfaction levels by asking targeted questions.

What are the 3 aspects of measuring employee engagement?

The three aspects that actively contribute to measuring employee engagement are physical, cognitive, and emotional. The physical element focuses on how much physical engagement employees experience during work. The cognitive aspect concerns employees' concentration level and confidence in their ability to execute their responsibilities. Finally, the emotional aspect deals with how employees feel about their work environment regarding belonging, culture, professional growth opportunities, and relationships with coworkers and managers.

How do you measure employee engagement activities?

You can measure employee engagement activities via surveys, sentiment analysis, performance reviews, and stay or exit surveys, using metrics like employee net promoter score, absenteeism rate, turnover rate, post-training survey rate, employee satisfaction score, internal communication receptiveness, and more.