Hiring a new employee could cost your business $4,683 (or even $28,329 for executives), says the SHRM. That’s in addition to the cost of losing someone’s expertise and the time taken for the new starter to reach full productivity. 

This makes employee engagement a key focus for people teams. But keeping employees engaged isn't easy. 

As a people team leader, it's your job to find the most effective and valuable ways of measuring employee engagement. To do so, you need employee engagement tools that help you effectively manage learning and development, career progression, and performance management. 

In this article, you’ll find a compiled list of eight employee engagement software tools that will make your people happier at work and more likely to stay for the long term. 

Invest in the learning platform that actually gets used: Hand your employees the key to their development with Learnerbly. Book a demo

✅ Why employee engagement matters 

77% of global employees are thinking about quitting (59% are quiet quitting while 18% are actively disengaged and are looking to leave). This makes employee engagement one of the most important priorities for people team leaders. 

According to Gallup, keeping employees engaged can bring multiple benefits, including:

1. Lower turnover - Engaged teams saw an 18-43% reduction in turnover rates, meaning higher retention and fewer resources spent on hiring.
2. Increase in productivity - Engaged teams also saw an 18% increase in sales productivity and 81% less absenteeism.
3. More productivity - 14% better employee productivity compared to disengaged teams and a 64% reduction in safety incidents.
4. Better products - Employee engagement can reduce quality issues by 41%, which becomes a competitive advantage.
5. Increased profits - Improving the employee experience can also make you 23% more profitable.

💡Find out how to retain your people: How to keep your top talent when everyone's losing theirs

Top 8 employee engagement tools

Engagement tools come in different shapes and sizes - and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Make sure to carefully consider which tools best fit your employee engagement programs and strategy.

Here are 8 of the most important employee engagement tools:

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1. 🏆 Bonusly: Best for employee rewards and recognition 

Bonusly is a peer-to-peer recognition software tool that aims to promote a culture of appreciation in the companies that use it. It works by giving managers a monthly budget to reward team members for exceptional work, which they can then exchange for gift cards or cash.

Key features and benefits: 

• Automated milestones: Automate employee recognition to avoid missing important dates or milestones like work anniversaries
• Rewards: Access a wide variety of employee rewards like gift cards, cash, or charitable donations
• Peer-to-peer incentive programs: Build incentive programs to motivate people to reach their goals
• Integrations: Work with your existing tech stack, including SAP, BambooHR, and Workday

Pricing 

• Core: $3 per user/month
• Pro: $5 per user/month
• Custom pricing

Who should use Bonusly?

Businesses of all sizes. It’s best for those looking to instill a culture that celebrates people’s wins and rewards their workforce for hard work.

 2. 📊​ Lattice: Best for performance management

Lattice is one of the leading tools for managing people and improving the employee experience. It has different modules for handling a range of people team priorities.

Key features and benefits: 

• Performance: A thorough approach to talent management with performance reviews, feedback surveys, and 1:1 agenda templates
• Compensation: Link performance to compensation, build compensation-based career plans, and see industry benchmarking data
• Analytics: Dive deeper into employee feedback to quantify the success of your employee engagement programs

Pricing 

Lattice has a lot of features or “modules” and breaks down its pricing plans accordingly:

• Performance management + OKRs and Goals: $11 per user/month
• Enterprise plan: custom priced

Add-on modules: 

• Engagement: $4 per user/month‍
• Grow: $4 per user/month‍
• Compensation: $6 per user/month‍

Who should use Lattice? 

Businesses of all sizes that want to streamline and centralize the way they handle employee performance, manage compensation bands, and set career plans.

3. 🌍​ Culture Amp: Best for improving the employee experience

Culture Amp is an employee experience software tool that helps businesses improve processes across the entire employee lifecycle, from onboarding to career planning. 

This tool offers different solutions to empower, engage, and develop employees to identify and reach their personal milestones. 

Key features and benefits: 

• Shared competency library: Build internal maps to identify what skills you have and which gaps need to be filled
• Career pathing: Create individual career and development plans using simple templates
• Competency framework: Create clarity around role expectations and upskill managers to have ongoing career conversations with their direct reports

Pricing 

All prices are customized. You’ll need to speak to the Culture Amp sales team to get a quote. 

Who should use Culture Amp? 

Businesses with over 250 employees who want to improve their employee experience by setting clear career and performance goals.

4. 📖​ Learnerbly: Best for learning and development 

Learnerbly is the award-winning L&D marketplace that helps build a progressive learning culture for ambitious businesses. Our clients see on average over 95%+ employee activation and 40-60% month-on-month engagement since implementation.

With Learnerbly, companies can assign specific learning budgets to individuals or teams. This gives learners the freedom to choose their own learning resources and priorities. 

In fact, we’ve put choice at the center of the user experience, with a wide range of different high-quality learning resources available in several formats. This is in stark contrast to other providers, who generally only offer online videos, much of which is unvetted. Learnerbly’s unique approach leads to a huge uptick in learning engagement.

Key features and benefits: 

•  40-60% month-on-month engagement (compared to industry averages of 18-25%)
• A single invoice at the end of the month while accessing multiple providers and learning materials
• Learn from over 250 vetted providers like Masterclass, Blinkist, Stone River, Codecademy‍
• Multi-modal resources for your team to curate their own learning journey using different sources‍
• Review your budget spending and learning requests in an analytics dashboard‍
• Social learning features like playlists, recommendations, and the ability to see what other users are learning help to create a culture of collaborative learning across the business

Pricing 

Learnerbly has three different pricing plans, all of which offer access to multi-model resources, analytics, and the ability to assign individual employee budgets. Talk to sales to learn more about our prices. 

Who should use Learnerbly?

Businesses who want an L&D platform that people actually use.  

Companies choose us over other providers because we empower individuals to take the reins of their own development. That results in higher learning engagement and increased employee satisfaction at your organization.

💡Find out how to retain your people: How to keep your top talent when everyone's losing theirs

5. ​🏢​Kumospace: Best virtual office space

Kumospace is an online workspace that emulates office work and lets you host online events. Here, people can work from anywhere and run into their colleagues in the virtual hallways or have a chat by the water cooler. Kumospace helps bring teams together and build connections between colleagues.  

Key features and benefits: 

• Spatial audio so you can only listen to colleagues' conversations when you’re near others
• Private offices to host confidential or sensitive meetings
• In-app games like murder mystery for team building and engagement

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Business: $16 per user/month
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Who should use Kumospace? 

Kumospace is great for small remote and hybrid teams that want to replicate the experience of being in the same office, wherever they’re working from.

6. 💬^​ Slack: Best for team communication

Slack is an instant messaging and communication tool. It offers chat, video, and audio communication features that let users organize conversations into topic or group-based channels. 

Key features and benefits: 

• Channels to organize conversations by project. Channels can be set to public or private
• Integrations with the apps you use most, like email, calendar, and automation software
• Huddle rooms for quick video or audio calls
• Collaboration features like a digital whiteboard and file sharing for faster, more efficient teamwork

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Pro: $7.25 per user/month
• Business: $12.5 per user/month
• Enterprise: custom priced

Who should use Slack?

Small and medium businesses that need to communicate with team members in private, department-based, or cross-functional conversations. 

7. 🐒 CultureMonkey: Best for employee feedback

CultureMonkey lets you measure your workplace engagement and culture through surveys and feedback management. This tool prioritizes your employee sentiments and feedback when analyzing survey data, which helps prioritize key points for engagement plans. 

Key features and benefits: 

• Design engagement surveys from scratch or by using a template. You can also create pulse surveys 
• Collect anonymous feedback from employees through email or surveys
• Advanced reporting dashboards to visualize employee engagement data in a single screen

Pricing 

Custom pricing based on request.

Who should use CultureMonkey?

Any business that wants to monitor employee engagement closely and take action based on data.

8. ​🛣️ Progression: Best for designing career paths

Progression is a tool for defining roles, skills, and frameworks to build individual career paths. It allows you to see your employees’ expected growth plan in a visual and unbiased way. With Progression, your team can also review their skills gaps and work with a tool like Learnerbly to upskill and prepare for the next level.

Key features and benefits: 

• Predefined skill sets for a wide pool of roles (from designers to C-level executives) 
• Progression plans: Individuals can review their own progression plan and make edits
• Non-linear career plans so people can design them to fit different career moves, like taking a role in a different department

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Business: $10 per user/month
• Organization: custom priced 

Who should use Progression?

Businesses of all sizes that want to map and standardize each role’s skills and focus on creating career plans for everyone on the team.

💯 Take action: Your next steps for elevating employee engagement in 2023

We’ve seen how employee engagement tools can help make your team happier and more productive. This makes these platforms essential for retaining talent in modern workplaces.

The right tech stack for your organization will depend on your size, challenges, and unique priorities. But, for most companies, the best results will come from prioritizing communication, performance tracking, peer rewards, and L&D tools. 

By combining the different tools and software on your list, you can help build a strong basis for effective employee engagement across the organization. And of course, tools aren’t everything. But combined with the right processes, culture, and mindset, you’ll have everything you need to set your business up for success today and long into the future. 

💡Find out how to retain your people: How to keep your top talent when everyone's losing theirs

Additional resources

• State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report: Read this study by Gallup to see a full picture of the global landscape and identify what causes an employee to feel engaged. ‍
• Talent Activation Blueprint: Watch the webinar for advice on how to boost engagement, motivation, and continuous growth.