As the focus on employee experience and satisfaction increases, your organization must also be contemplating the adoption and implementation of an employee engagement software. However, if you have started the process of selecting the right one, you would understand that it requires a lot of thought and research before you choose one. To make your journey of adopting the best employee engagement software, we have a comprehensive resource right here.

This blog will help you answer all your questions around employee engagement software including the what, the why, and the how. 

What is employee engagement software?

Put simply, employee engagement software is a set of programs or a platform that is designed to help growing organizations like yours to augment their employee engagement. Focusing on different aspects of engagement including satisfaction, happiness, belongingness, etc. the right employee engagement software can help gauge employee pulse, monitor key organizational parameters or employee wellbeing index, share insights and best practices and monitor progress to bridge gaps. 

Employee engagement software can help you adopt a technology lens as well as a scientific approach for:

• Collecting employee feedback
• Undertaking pulse surveys
• Streamlining manager action
• Aligning the team to work towards a shared goal
• Creating the right culture for growth

Top 5 benefits of employee engagement software

If employee engagement has been a priority for you, you may be relying on spreadsheets and documents to capture employee feedback and associated actions. However, the right employee engagement software has the potential to relieve you from the administrative nightmare of handling large spreadsheets, vulnerability to human error and promote greater insights. 

Here are some of the top benefits you can leverage: 

1. Focus on people analytics

Employee engagement software can help you make sense of the data that you collect and capture through various surveys. It can enable you to gauge trends and perform analytics on the data to derive meaningful insights. The bottom line here is that you can use the software to adopt a data driven approach to foster a culture of engagement.

2. Access a real time dashboard

Accessing employee feedback at the end of the year may not be the wisest approach. Employee engagement tools can help you access employee data in real time to ensure that any challenge or concern is addressed instantaneously, before it becomes too difficult to handle.

3. Save time

Manually sending out surveys, collecting responses, organizing them and then translating them into insights can be very time consuming, especially if you are using pulse surveys. Employee engagement tools here can take care of all these activities in a process driven manner to help you focus on acting upon the insights to drive change rather than just preparing for it.

4. Leverage AI recommendations

Some of the top employee engagement software leverage technological drivers like artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide intelligent insights based on wide spread research. It can offer you guided templates by leveraging AI to create a high performance culture and drive continuous performance improvement.

5. Understand employee sentiment and pulse

Finally, the right employee engagement software can help you understand employee sentiment and pulse in a continuous manner. It can enable you to constantly monitor diverse organizational health parameters based on employee pulse.

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Top 6 questions to ask before choosing your employee engagement software

If you are wondering how to start your journey with the right employee engagement software, ask yourself these six questions and follow the steps thereafter:

1. Do you just want a snapshot of employee engagement?

Start by understanding if you simply want to know how many employees are engaged and how many are not or do you want a deeper understanding. While the former will give you a quantitative view with strong data points, the latter can help you identify strengths and weaknesses to take the next steps.

2. Do you want a clear picture of active disengagement?

Next, ask yourself, whether you are only concerned with engagement or do you want to get insights on disengagement as well? The right employee engagement software can help you get a comprehensive understanding about which employees are disengaged, why and how to navigate the same.

3. Do you want to monitor engagement trends?

Increasingly, mapping employee engagement is becoming a continuous approach. You need to decide whether or not you wish to keep monitoring the different factors impacting employee engagement with tools like pulse survey or do you want it to be a once-a-year activity. 

4. Do you want real time insights?

While some software might give you regular updates, others might provide you with real time insights. You have to take a call whether or not a real time focus on employee engagement is an organizational priority.

5. Do you want to scale your team?

Your software choice will also depend on the size of your team. Depending on whether or not you wish to scale, your options will differ. As a fast growing company, your team size is likely to increase, hence choosing a software that supports flexible scale up and down makes sense. 

6. Do you need integrations?

Finally, you need to gauge whether or not you wish to integrate the employee engagement software with other platforms you are already using. Integrations can be a powerful way to eliminate the friction of toggling between different platforms and increase participation in surveys and other activities. 

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Evaluating the right employee engagement tool: A step-wise guide

If you have an answer to the above mentioned questions, follow this detailed guide to evaluate to evaluate and select the right platform:

1. Specify your need

Be clear on what you need and what are the main challenges or requirements that you seek to fulfil with the employee engagement software.

What are the features you require?

Start by listing down the features you need. These can include the ability to conduct surveys, perform analytics, get guided templates for conversations and much more. These features will help you narrow down your list and eliminate the ones that are not able to offer the basic functionalities you require. 

Decide your scaling needs

In addition to the features, you need to understand how many people will be using the platform. The idea is not only to have a figure for right now, but also for a few years down the line in accordance with your scale up plan. You cannot choose one employee engagement software now and then change it once you add more members to the team. That would lead to unnecessary complication and resource wastage. Go for a platform that allows easy scale up and down.

2. Understand the software available

Compare the various employee engagement tools based on what they are offering and how it can add value to your organization.  

What are the basic facilities? 

Make a list of all the basic facilities or features you will get access to in the base version without any add on. Compare it to your needed features list and identify gaps if any.

How is the user experience?

In addition to the features, gauge the user experience the employee engagement software is able to offer. Unless the experience is enriching, it will be very difficult for you to encourage your team members to use the same. Try to understand if the software is intuitive and user friendly or not, by hands-on testing. 

Does it leverage technology?

Next, check whether or not the platform leverages technological advances to create meaningful impact. You may want to go in for a platform that leverages data analytics to help create meaningful insights and AI driven recommendations. Take the case of SuperBeings. Powered by AI, this employee engagement platform provides AI driven 1:1 recommendations and templates for managers at all levels, amongst other offerings.

Does it capture the right parameters?

Finally, you need to check whether or not the employee engagement tool captures the right parameters and has a solid foundation. Check whether it maps all parameters for organizational health index, if it has insights to improve managerial skills, whether it provides guided templates for powerful conversations, etc. 

For instance, to promote employee engagement, SuperBeings captures data on 40+ organizational parameters, and helps build 20 key leadership competencies for managers. The right employee engagement software will be backed by science and based on evidence of practices that drive change. 

3. Explore the product comprehensively

After a macro view, dive deep to get a detailed understanding of which employee engagement software best suits your needs.

Does it offer integrations?

Understand the type of integrations that the employee engagement software offers. In the absence of integrations, your team members will be forced to switch from the work tools to the software you have chosen for any activity/initiative. This inertia of toggling will reduce participation and give you an incomplete picture. 

For instance, SuperBeings offers integrations for Slack, Gchat, Email and MS Teams which will allow your team members to participate in daily pulse surveys from their preferred collaboration tool itself. 

What are the insights and analytics provided?

It is equally important to understand what insights and people analytics will you be able to gauge from your employee engagement software. The right software can help you get insights on different parameters and cultural aspects like innovation, competition etc. These insights can help you take informed actions to facilitate better experience. 

SuperBeings can help you with insights on employee engagement and its drivers and deep dive to slice and dice the data with filterable heatmaps. It also provides cultural insights based on Competing Values Framework for leaders to build the right culture for their business needs.

Does the platform offer comprehensive support?

Finally, from a product standpoint, you need to understand the support available. This refers to the resources you might get access to as a user including e-books and other material that can help you understand different employee engagement practices. 

Furthermore, comprehensive customer success support is also important to address any technical challenge you may face. Therefore, ensure that the platform is able to provide assistance along the length and breadth. 

4. Make an informed choice

Based on your research and analysis, you will be able to shortlist the top 2-3 options for the best employee engagement software. You can make the final call using these three steps.

Request a free trial

Check if the employee engagement platform can give you a free trial. Even if it is not free, request for a trial period before you make a long term commitment for a test ride with your employees. 

Explore reviews

Go through the online reviews of different fast growing organizations using the software and see what they have to say. While not all reviews will help you, some genuine and authentic ones can help make the final choice.

Suit your budget

Finally, choose that platform that suits your needs, but also fits your budget. You wouldn’t want to go above and beyond just on the software. 

Fall back on this guide to choose the best employee engagement software in 2022. SuperBeings can be your partner to create an enriching and high performance culture by connecting OKRs, employee engagement, continuous performance management, and manager development in one unified solution.