Top 9 Employee Survey Tools to Track Engagement and Energize Your Team

Are your workers engaged? Are they excited to show up daily and do their best work, or are they merely biding their time until a better offer comes?

The business world is brimming with specialized tools designed to help you dig into what makes your employees come alive and what dulls their sparkle. 

So why rely on intuition when there's a wealth of first-hand insights at your fingertips waiting to be unlocked? 

This article will analyze the best employee survey tools to gather feedback about your employee journey, everyday processes, or essential company issues so you can align your actions and resources to serve the real needs of your workforce.

We'll explore the standout features that set these measurement tools apart, the use cases they cover, and the numerous benefits they can bring to your survey and people management processes.

⚙️ What is an employee survey tool?

An employee survey tool is software that enables businesses to create surveys to gather employee feedback about different aspects of the workplace experience, from organizational culture to job satisfaction, engagement, and productivity levels.

They simplify the process of creating and distributing employee feedback surveys and analyzing the results to help you quickly understand how your workers are feeling and what you can do to promote employee happiness and continuous development.

🕵️‍♀️ Why use employee survey tools?

Traditional survey methods have several drawbacks that online employee survey software effectively addresses. 

Here are some of the ways they can tackle existing pain points and transform your operations for the better:

Labor-intensive processes

With traditional methods, conducting an employee survey is a labor-intensive activity that can span several weeks or months. 

By the time the process is completed and you get around to analyzing the data and addressing the highlighted improvement areas, underlying tensions may have worsened and created a whole new set of issues that also need fixing. 

With employee survey software, you can launch surveys and gather feedback in minutes thanks to ready-made templates, question banks, and the power of automation. So, instead of constantly being six steps behind, you can get real-time feedback, stay in tune with employee moods, and immediately resolve issues as they arise.

Prone to errors

Employee survey software uses machine learning, robotic process automation, and other specialized technology to enable businesses to gather and analyze feedback data. This ensures that no insights fall through the cracks and that you get an accurate picture of the current state of your employee experiences.

Your employees can submit their responses directly on your chosen platform, and the feedback tool will evaluate the data and generate results almost instantly. This means there will be a tiny margin for error, unlike traditional methods where HR personnel have to feed the data into a system to collate and interpret results.

Manual processes

Employee survey tools are designed to optimize the feedback collection process so you can spend less time conducting surveys and focus on designing experiences your people will treasure.

They can help you generate well-crafted survey questions and designs, automatically send out employee surveys, and track responses with just a few clicks. Similarly, participants can complete surveys faster and at their convenience without worrying about carrying paperwork or damaging their forms.

Hard to analyze data

Unless your HR team only oversees a handful of employees, you can't get away with analyzing all the feedback you receive via traditional paper-based surveys on your own. Even if you could, it'd probably take forever.

On the contrary, employee survey software offers standardized questionnaires, making quantifying, compiling, and evaluating data easy. You can mine employee insights in minutes, spot patterns of statistical significance, and make unbiased decisions.

Also, you can use these tools to automatically produce visually appealing, easy-to-understand reports and share them with the higher-ups as proof of HR effectiveness or to get buy-in for new policies. 

Low participation rates

One of the main challenges of using traditional surveys is getting enough people to even partake in it to extract reliable and valid data. 

Employee survey software leverages technology to maximize convenience for both participants and administrators. Since employees can fill out survey forms on their computers or mobile phones wherever they are, less (perceived) effort is involved, making them more likely to complete it.

You can set it up so that the tool sends periodic reminders via your preferred internal communication platforms, such as Slack, email, or Microsoft Teams, to anyone who has yet to take the survey to push them to do so.

Limited use cases

The beauty of survey software is that it can help you measure sentiment across different areas of your employee's work life. If you invest in a comprehensive employee survey tool, you can use it to conduct various types of surveys, including eNPS surveys, pulse surveys, remote work surveys, job satisfaction surveys, leadership surveys, onboarding surveys, and more.

Some survey tools have options for anonymous responses. When employees know that whatever they say can't be traced back to them, they'll be encouraged to speak their minds openly without fear of getting punished for their feedback.

🧰 9 Employee survey tools: 4 Categories

Employee survey tools come in many packages. Some only allow you to collect a specific type of employee feedback. Others cater to multiple survey use cases and are part of a broader software suite, offering additional features for employee engagement, such as rewards and recognition.

The best employee survey tool for you will depend on several factors, such as what type of surveys you want to send out, the frequency of your measurements, the volume of responses, and the level of insights you want to access. 

Best employee survey tools

Looking for software that covers every kind of employee survey scenario, offers advanced integration options, gives you plenty of room for customization, and is packed with nifty features to help you listen better to what your team is saying? These tools are the best in the business.

Zavvy

4.8/5 customer rating (G2)

Zavvy is an all-in-one employee survey software that enables you to gather strategic insights from your employees to understand their key motivators and pain points and formulate meaningful plans for driving and sustaining engagement. 

Say goodbye to unnecessary admin. By leveraging the power of automation, Zavvy will help you quickly set up and distribute surveys, notify participants, collect responses, and send out reminders to employees who are taking longer to respond.

After collecting your survey results, Zavvy instantly analyzes what your employees say and breaks down the complex data into simple, easily digestible reports. This way, HR managers can drill down into every relevant engagement metric to fully understand your organization's employee experiences.

👀 Core functionalities

• Zavvy offers various survey types for measuring employee engagement, including pulse surveys, employee net promoter score wellness surveys, remote work surveys, job satisfaction surveys, leadership surveys, exit surveys, and more.
• The fully customizable tool lets you design the perfect surveys for your needs using a mix of rating scales and open-ended questions. You can decide how frequently a survey should be sent out, make your surveys anonymous to encourage employees to give honest answers, and tailor surveys for the entire organization or only specific employee groups.
• With Zavvy's expansive library of research-backed feedback survey templates, you can start tracking and analyzing employee sentiment in minutes instead of building your surveys from scratch.
• Zavvy offers seamless integration with your favorite HR and collaboration tools, including Personio, BambooHR, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, reducing disruptions to workflow and boosting your survey participation rates.
• You also get access to Zavvy's best-in-class consultation services at no extra cost. So, you'll always have a dedicated team of employee experience specialists on standby to help you get the most out of the platform and smooth out any kinks in your feedback process.

💸 Costs

With pricing plans starting at $4/£4/€4 per employee per month and a minimum package requirement of only $300/€300/£300 per month, Zavvy is one of the most affordable employee engagement survey tools you can find.

👤 User experience 

• Zavvy is super easy to use both from the admin and user point of view.
• The platform has many features, so it can be a bit overwhelming when you first start using it. However, detailed instructions guide you as you go.

🏅 Best for 

Zavvy is perfect for remote and hybrid companies of all sizes, aiming to convert employee feedback into growth opportunities.

SurveySparrow

4.4/5 customer rating (G2)

SurveySparrow's employee experience survey solution is designed to help businesses understand how their employees feel about their jobs and the overall workplace conditions.

👀 Core functionalities

• With the capability for multilingual surveys, you can give all your employees from diverse backgrounds an equal voice and ensure no perspective is left out.
• The tool supports multiple types of surveys such as pulse, pre-hire, training, exit, onboarding, engagement, management, and eNPS surveys.
• SurveySparrow's flexible design allows users to automate and tailor surveys to their liking when using its pre-built survey templates or creating custom surveys from the ground up.

💸 Costs

SurveySparrow has a free plan that lets you collect up to 100 survey responses per month and five paid plans:

• Basic - $19 for 1 user and 500 responses
• Premium - $29 for 1 user and 2,000 responses 
• Business - $99 for 2 users and 10,000 responses
• Enterprise - $499 for 10 users and 50,000 responses
• Elite - Custom pricing for 10+ users and 100,000+ responses

👤 User experience 

• The user interface on the front end is simple, modern, and interactive, which helps to improve response rates.
• Creating custom surveys with SurveySparrow may require technical expertise, patience, and learning to enable users to adjust to the tool and take full advantage of its features.

🏅 Best for 

Survey Sparrow is best suited for large multinational enterprises across different industries. 

SmartSurvey

4.6/5 customer rating (G2)

Want to measure your employee satisfaction score, gauge training effectiveness, dig into the reasons behind employee churn, or monitor your organization's pulse from week to week? SmartSurveys gives you the tools to understand what's working or not working for your staff members throughout the employee lifecycle.

👀 Core functionalities

• There are 35 employee survey templates and 20 question types, including multiple choice and free text for effective tracking of different engagement drivers.
• You can add notes, switch fonts, apply company colors, shorten or increase survey length, translate surveys into multiple languages, and perform other customization actions.
• The platform provides comprehensive reports and allows you to filter results using variables like language, department, and location.

💸 Costs

SmartSurvey has two plans for organizations to choose from:

• Business - £70 per month, billed monthly or £60 per month, billed annually for 1 master user
• Enterprise - Custom pricing for more than 1 master user, access to a dedicated customer service team and account manager, and other advanced features

👤 User experience 

• The interface is easy to navigate, even for non-technical staff.
• Some users consider the tool a bit old-fashioned and could use a tune-up to make it more visually appealing.

🏅 Best for 

Globally distributed teams of all sizes can benefit from using SmartSurvey to track employee engagement metrics and strengthen their company culture.

Employee engagement survey tools

Engagement survey tools are used to measure overall employee engagement levels. They investigate different parts of the employee experience, from well-being to career growth and diversity and inclusion, so you can identify areas for improvement and what you're getting right.

Here are some of the best employee engagement survey tools in the market.

Energage

4.6/5 customer rating (G2)

Give your employees opportunities to be heard and learn what's driving your company culture with Energage. It helps you create custom surveys to gain valuable insights into your people's experiences, boost performance, and improve employee engagement.

👀 Core functionalities

• Energage provides pre-built survey templates to delve into different workplace culture and engagement themes with the option to add custom survey questions to identify additional employee concerns and areas of contentment.
• The AI-based analytics and reporting features don't just showcase your survey findings; they benchmark your employee feedback data against results from other companies in your industry to see where you're excelling and the spots where you need to put in work.
• The platform recommends prescriptive measures to address the gaps in your workplace culture and create sustainable initiatives to reduce turnover and enhance employee performance.

💸 Costs

You can only get information about Energage's pricing upon request.

👤 User experience 

• The survey experience is seamless from start to finish. 
• Although the tool is intuitive, the vast amount of information it houses sometimes makes finding the features users want tough.

🏅 Best for 

Energage is ideal for companies that want to benchmark their employee engagement survey data and leverage it to amplify their employer brand and participate in culture and industry excellence awards.

ContactMonkey

4.4/5 customer rating (G2)

ContactMonkey takes the guesswork out of your people management processes and allows you to build a thriving and engaged workforce by empowering your employees to voice their concerns, desires, and opinions. 

It delivers surveys directly to your employees' inboxes. They don't have to visit a separate app to complete the survey form, which means better participation rates and broader insights into employee engagement for you.

👀 Core functionalities

• The users can customize their surveys with quantitative and qualitative survey questions, anonymous comments, eNPS, polls, and rating scales.
• Custom template builder and ruch template library for employee surveys and emails.
• The software's OpenAI integration helps you produce customized survey statements and questions, so you never have to worry about running out of content or boring team members with repetitive questions.
• You can centralize and streamline your workflow by integrating ContactMonkey with your HRIS and communication tech stack.

💸 Costs

Only available on request.

👤 User experience 

• It's easy to learn and master using the application.
• The platform's employee engagement survey template designs are not very flexible.

🏅 Best for 

ContactMonkey favors all-size companies that want to continuously improve internal communications and collect honest employee feedback within their email environment. 

➡️ For more tools, check out our review of the best tools for measuring engagement.

Employee pulse survey tools 

Unlike engagement surveys, pulse surveys are short, targeted, regular, and focused on specific topics. Depending on your needs, they can be sent out weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly.

Employee pulse surveys usually feature a handful of questions. They are great for monitoring the mood of your company or measuring the impact of recent policies or changes in real time. If you're only interested in sending out pulse surveys, check out these tools:

Polly 

4.6/5 customer rating (G2)

Source: Polly

Polly is an employee pulse survey tool designed to be integrated into your preferred communication channels so employees can complete surveys in the flow of work without leaving their Slack, Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet apps. 

👀 Core functionalities

• A robust library of pre-made templates for gathering purposeful feedback.
• With Polly's automation capabilities, you can set up your engagement workflows to run on autopilot so you're regularly checking in on your employees without manually managing the process.
• The platform lets you export your survey findings into different data formats for easier sharing and visualization. 

💸 Costs

Depending on the communication channels you use, here's a breakdown of Polly's pricing tiers:

Polly for Microsoft Teams

• Standard - $49 per month with a minimum 3-month subscription 
• Pro - $24 per month with a minimum 12-month subscription
• Custom 

Polly for Slack

• Team - $2 per user per month with a minimum spend of $42 per month, billed monthly
• Business - $4 per user per month with a minimum spend of $84 per month, billed monthly
• Enterprise - Custom pricing

Polly for Enterprise

• Custom pricing

👤 User experience 

• Everything is where you'd expect it to be, so you can easily set up surveys in minutes without external help.
• The layout is user-friendly and pleasing to the eyes.

🏅 Best for 

Polly is best suited for small to large-sized businesses that use Microsoft Teams or Slack as their primary communication platform and want to incorporate pulse surveys into their existing workflow. 

CharlieHR

4.7/5 customer rating (G2)

CharlieHR helps you launch pulse surveys with one click to uncover how your employees are really feeling and what improvements they would like to see in your policies and operations.

👀 Core functionalities

• Users get access to expert-designed pulse survey templates with ready-made questions. There is also the option to fully customize polls and zero in on the questions and issues that matter to the user.
• The tool integrates with other HR apps like Pave, Workable, Hofy, and more, reducing the need to constantly shuffle back and forth between apps.
• With automatic reminders, users never have to chase team members around to get them to complete surveys.

💸 Costs

CharlieHR's subscription costs are broken into tiers based on the number of employees you have:

• 1-4 team members - £5 per month
• 5-14 team members - £40 per month
• 15-29 team members - £100 per month
• 30-49 team members - £170 per month
• 50-99 team members - £300 per month
• 100-149 team members - £400 per month
• 150-199 team members - £500 per month
• 200-249 team members - £600 per month
• 250+ team members - £700 per month

👤 User experience 

• Some users find the Slack integration function poor and some UI/UX elements a bit clunky and confusing to navigate.

🏅 Best for 

CharlieHR is ideal for startups and small businesses with up to 200 employees who want to run quick and impactful pulse surveys.

Free employee survey tools

Being a small team with a restrained budget doesn't mean you have to abandon your goal of monitoring engagement via employee feedback until you can afford it.

You can start where you are with these free employee survey tools:

Assembly

4.8/5 customer rating (G2)

Get to know your team, understand their motivations, and discover how to create enriching workplace experiences and culture that helps them feel more engaged, happy, and productive with Assembly's engagement survey solution.

👀 Core functionalities

• Access actionable employee feedback to identify successes and blind spots, monitor trends, and make data-backed engagement decisions with real-time analytics and reporting features.
• Assembly can be embedded into your existing tools, including Workday, Box, Humaans, Slack, Deel, and Microsoft Teams, to minimize workflow disruptions and promote faster responses and increased participation.
• The platform offers a variety of ready-to-use templates for employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys, satisfaction surveys, benefits surveys, career development surveys, eNPS, and more.

💸 Costs

Assembly is free to use for up to 50 team members. Any more than that, and you'll have to pay $5 per employee per month billed monthly or $4 per employee per month billed annually to continue using the Engagement module. 

👤 User experience 

• The tool is appealing and user-friendly, making the workflow fun and engaging.
• No unwanted distractions exist, so you quickly create, distribute, and analyze surveys.

🏅 Best for 

Assembly is best suited for small organizations with limited budgets looking to set up a quick and painless system for measuring employee engagement.

Team Insights

5/5 customer rating (G2)

Team Insights offers a variety of question types, including numerical scale, open-ended, multiple selections, page with comments, and eNPS for tuning into the needs and opinions of your employees. You can use this engagement platform to develop questionnaires from scratch or with customized templates for various workplace topics and goals.

👀 Core functionalities

• Many handy features help you streamline and optimize the feedback collection process. This includes personalized dashboards, employee segmentation, data visualizations, multilingual options, and user roles and permissions.
• Users can choose between one-time employee surveys or recurring pulse surveys to collect anonymous employee feedback.
• The platform's power AI analysis will evaluate survey results and summarize the most relevant data points for you. It also allows users to export responses in Excel for further analysis. 

💸 Costs

You can create employee surveys with unlimited questions and responses for up to 50 users with Team Insights Free Plan.

👤 User experience 

• The software is simple to use and makes it easy for employees to complete surveys at a faster pace.

🏅 Best for 

Team Insights is best suited for growing teams with a handful or thousands of employees.

🆚 Feature summary table comparing the 9 employee survey tools

🧩 Key features of effective employee survey tools

Different tools will offer a variety of features that may or may not be relevant to you. However, some crucial features should be present in any tool worth considering.

• User-friendly design for high response rates: It's simple logic; if an employee survey tool has a complex and confusing interface, people will find excuses to not use it. You want a tool that allows your employees to effortlessly complete surveys and HR managers to easily customize questionnaires and interpret the data they generate.
• Analytics and reporting for actionable insights: The more robust the analytics feature of survey software, the better the quality of data you can extract from it to inform decision-making. The best tools don't just stop at data analysis; they report the data using visualizations like charts, graphs, and dashboards to give you a clear, unbiased picture of how your workforce is faring.
• Customization to fit company-specific needs: Look for a tool that allows you to customize key aspects of your survey, like design, templates, branding options, question types, frequency, start and end dates, and more. 
• Enabling anonymity: Even if your company culture prices transparency very highly, a topic or issue might arise that some employees may not feel comfortable speaking openly. If you can't grant them the psychological safety that anonymous surveys offer, you will miss out on their honest perspective. 
• Integration with existing platforms: When your survey tool easily integrates with other technologies that you use, it'll be easier to get employees to participate in surveys because you can deliver them to where they are, be it email, Slack, or Teams. 
• Security and confidentiality consideration: Ensure the tool takes appropriate measures to protect and secure sensitive employee information and survey data. Confirm that it's compliant with relevant data regulations like GDPR and ISO 27001.
• Scalability for growing businesses: You don't want a tool you'll have to change every time your company expands. Ideally, your employee survey tool should grow with you and be equipped to handle your increased survey responses, volume, and data analysis requirements without trading off effectiveness or performance. 

➡️ If you need a tool for improving engagement, not just measuring it, check out this list of top engagement software.

➡️ Amplify your employees' voices with Zavvy's survey tool

Creating a continuous feedback culture is as close as you can get to reading your employees' minds, anticipating their needs and challenges, and solving them for them. 

Employee survey platforms like Zavvy allow you to accomplish this by gathering valuable insights about what drives your team and what changes they would like to see within the company.

Zavvy's intuitive and customizable employee engagement software helps you build out the survey system of your dreams to measure the strength of your employee experiences and refine your talent initiatives with precision. 

With features like eNPS software, pulse monitoring, and an anonymous feedback tool, you can run any operational survey and track the metrics most important to your organization in minutes. 

📅 Intrigued? Book your free demo to see how Zavvy can help you harness the power of your employee perspectives. 

❓ FAQs

Why do you need an online survey tool?

Online employee survey tools spare you the headache of manually distributing, tracking, and evaluating a ton of paperwork to measure shifts in employee engagement. They enable you to automate your feedback systems and easily collect valuable feedback data that can be used to improve business outcomes and keep your team happy, loyal, motivated, and burnout-free.

What are the most common employee surveys?

The most common employee surveys include:

1. Employee engagement surveys: Measure the level of employee engagement and satisfaction within the organization.
2. Employee satisfaction surveys: Assess employees' satisfaction with various aspects of their job and the workplace.
3. Pulse surveys: Short, frequent surveys to get quick insights into specific issues or the current mood of employees.
4. 360-degree feedback surveys: Collect feedback about an employee from their peers, subordinates, and supervisors.
5. Onboarding surveys: Gather feedback from new hires about their onboarding experience.
6. Exit surveys: Conducted with departing employees to understand their reasons for leaving and gather insights for improvement.
7. Culture surveys: Assess the overall health and effectiveness of the organization's culture.
8. Wellness surveys: Evaluate the physical, mental, and emotional health of employees, often linked to workplace wellness initiatives.
9. Training surveys: Assess learner satisfaction with various aspects of training, such as instructor, topics, training methods, etc.