Employee engagement levels peaked during the global pandemic but dropped after 2020, likely due to burnout and the challenges of adapting to hybrid work models.
The answer lies in understanding modern engagement trends that show employees want meaningful recognition, clear communication, and genuine development opportunities. Smart companies are ditching annual surveys for real-time feedback platforms that actually capture how employees feel every day, not just once a year.
This guide reveals which tools deliver real engagement improvements versus those that just generate pretty dashboards. You'll discover platforms that transform workplace culture through continuous listening, instant recognition, and data-driven insights that help you act before problems escalate.
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Why you need an employee engagement platform
Manual engagement insights tracking through spreadsheets and annual surveys misses critical warning signs until it's too late. Modern platforms provide a real-time look that helps you engage employees before they disengage, preventing costly turnover and productivity losses.
Real-time employee sentiment tracking
Traditional annual surveys capture employee sentiment once a year, missing 364 days of valuable engagement data. Modern platforms continuously monitor mood and motivation through pulse surveys and feedback tools. This real-time data reveals emerging issues like team conflicts or workload stress before they escalate into resignations or burnout.
Data-driven decision making
Gut feelings about employee experience often miss hidden problems brewing beneath the surface. HR teams can use engagement platforms to transform anecdotal observations into employee engagement data showing clear patterns across departments and demographics. Leaders can identify which initiatives actually improve morale versus those that just look good on paper, enabling evidence-based investments in workplace improvements.
Proactive retention strategies
Waiting until exit interviews to understand why employees leave means you've already lost valuable talent. Engagement strategies predict flight risks through behavioral patterns and sentiment trends months in advance. This early warning system allows targeted interventions like career conversations or workload adjustments that keep top performers from updating their resumes.
Scalable recognition and feedback
As teams grow, maintaining personal connections becomes increasingly difficult for managers juggling multiple responsibilities. Employee experience platforms ensure no achievement goes unnoticed by enabling peer recognition and automated milestone celebrations. This systematic approach to appreciation helps every employee feel valued, regardless of team size or manager bandwidth.
Key features to look for in an employee engagement platform
As we already mentioned, employee engagement tools can serve various purposes, but here are the key features they should have.
Employee surveys
Employee survey comments are one of the best feedback tools because they provide a direct way for employees to share their thoughts, feelings, concerns, and ideas.
They provide you with valuable insights into workplace culture and employee experience. If you don't have time to create employee surveys from scratch, you can choose platforms with pre-made templates and question libraries. Here are some Google Form templates to get you started.
Plus, you can use employee surveys to create tests and quizzes for employee skills assessment both for new hires and existing staff. That way, you can quickly assess their competencies and identify areas for growth.
Employee net promoter score surveys
Employee net promoter score shows how likely your employees are to recommend their workplace to others, which is a strong indicator of their job satisfaction. You can measure employee experience quickly and easily by asking staff to rate on a scale of 0-10 how likely they would be to recommend your company as a great place to work.
You can categorize employees into three groups based on their responses:
- Promoters – Highly engaged employees who are likely to act as your brand advocates.
- Passives – Moderately satisfied employees who are neutral most of the time. They don't actively promote your company, but they also don't criticize it.
- Detractors – Disengaged or dissatisfied employees who are more likely to share negative feedback about your company.
A high eNPS score on a company level means that your engagement strategies are working, while a low score signals there is room for improvement.
Employee pulse surveys
Employee pulse and engagement surveys are short check-ins that can be done frequently by HR professionals, unlike annual reviews which have to be prepared in advance, making them more time-consuming. They can be focused on one particular topic and usually don't take more than a few minutes to complete.
Pulse surveys are great for tracking changes using an employee engagement platform over time and spotting trends. For example, you may discover that stress levels rise during busy seasons so you can take action to prevent it.
Real-time feedback and recognition
Although important, annual performance reviews don't proactively address employee concerns. Real-time feedback and recognition are essential for keeping engaged employees.
AI-powered feedback allows you to spot issues early on and prevent them from turning into big problems. Instant feedback helps employees to adjust and improve which is essential for creating a productive workforce.
At the same time, real-time employee insights makes staff feel valued at the moment. Instead of waiting months to acknowledge great work and celebrate successes, talent management tools with instant recognition allow you to reinforce positive behaviors and boost motivation.
User-friendly interface
An intuitive interface makes a big difference and significantly increases participation rates. No one wants to struggle with clunky, complicated software, especially when the goal is to improve engagement.
The best employee experience software are those that are simple to navigate and come with intuitive dashboards and clear instructions. This reduces barriers to use, ensuring that everyone can participate, even those who aren't tech-savvy.
When survey tools are easy to understand and use, workers are more likely to engage with them regularly, helping you create a company culture based on continuous feedback and employee recognition.
It's also important to pick employee engagement tools that let your HR teams easily generate reports and interpret analytics.
How we evaluated and chose the best employee engagement platform
Two-thirds of this evaluation is based on employee feedback from the past year on platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot, which rated the tools using the following criteria:
- Features: While some tools focus only on engagement tracking, others offer a wide range of features like workforce management, employee recognition or time-tracking.
- Ease of use: We focused on tools with user-friendly and intuitive interfaces, with a special focus on mobile access.
- Customization: Engagement surveys, employee recognition, and personalized insights are at your disposal.
- Integration capabilities: If you don't want to burden your team members with another employee engagement platform to install, choose tools that integrate with communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams so you can run your engagement surveys there.
We also analyzed all the key features by going through their release notes when available.
Top 6 employee engagement software in 2025
Here's a list of leading employee engagement tools we've picked for you:
Connecteam
Connecteam is software for managing people designed to help keep teams connected, especially for companies with a lot of field or remote workers. With its mobile-first approach, it's a go-to choice in industries like hospitality, on-site services, and event management
Pros:
- Mobile-first design: Its employee engagement platform for iOS and Android is a great option for managing communication with non-desk and remote workers, who may not always have access to their laptops.
- Comprehensive features: Its key features include employee scheduling, time tracking, and communication tools.
- Customization: The platform is quite flexible and you can customize everything depending on what your business needs.
Cons:
- Learning curve: Some portion of the users found its features a bit overwhelming initially, as there are quite a few of them. The tool comes with a learning curve for users who aren't tech-savvy or familiar with similar tools.
- Pricing structure: Some useful features, like scheduling repeating shifts and adding additional fields and sub-tasks require higher-tier subscriptions, which may not be convenient for smaller businesses.
Bonusly
Bonusly is an employee engagement tool that focuses on micro-bonuses to keep workers motivated and engaged. It serves as a great way to build a culture of continuous employee feedback and recognition.
Pros:
- Peer-to-peer recognition: Bonusly makes it possible for employees to quickly and easily express appreciation to other team members. There's also an employee recognition feed that resembles social media by allowing people to add comments and reactions.
- Diverse rewards catalog: Bonusly offers a wide range of employee rewards, including gift cards and charitable donations. You can also add custom rewards like a paid day off, coaching session, etc.
- Integration capabilities: Bonusly can work directly within Slack and Microsoft Teams, so your employees can stay engaged without needing to switch to yet another app.
Cons:
- Reward fulfilment delays: Some users have said that there are occasional delays in reward processing.
- Limited customization: Some users mentioned that there's room for improvement in terms of flexibility and customization to fit unique company cultures.
Matter
Matter App is an employee experience software known for it’s mobile approach. Its interface resembles social media and uses game-like elements to improve and measure employee engagement.
Pros:
- Real-time feedback: This app lets employees provide instant internal communication and celebrate each other's successes quickly and easily, thanks to features like Feedback Friday and automated reminders.
- User-friendly interface: The Matter App is super easy to use with its intuitive features and interactive elements (likes, kudos, reactions), which leads to employees quickly adopting the app.
- Integration with communication tools: If you don't want to add another app to your tool stack, you can integrate Matter with Slack and Microsoft Teams with only a few clicks.
Cons:
- Feature limitations: There's room for improvement when it comes to analytics tools and reporting, so you might need to combine it with some other performance-tracking tool to get deeper insights.
- Scalability concerns: Matter is good if you're looking for a simple recognition app, but it may not be the best option for larger organizations searching for a comprehensive solution with a wide range of features.
Motivosity
Motivosity is a recognition platform designed to make gratitude and peer-to-peer recognition effortless and meaningful. Its main goal is to improve employee satisfaction and bring a modern approach to how people are recognised in the workplace.
Pros:
- Holistic engagement platform: Motivosity is a top workforce management software that focuses on employee engagement, recognition, rewards, and communication in a single platform.
- User-friendly interface: Its intuitive design, including profiles and feeds that resemble social media, makes this tool accessible to all employees.
- Customization options: It's one of the most flexible employee reward and recognition tools that allows you to set up your own recognition system. Also, there are hundreds of gift cards to choose from, including Amazon, local shops, and charity donations.
Cons:
- Integration limitations: Some users have reported challenges integrating with certain existing HR systems.
- Mobile app functionality: Users mentioned that some features aren't fully available in the mobile app and that the app could be improved.
Workleap Officevibe
Workleap Officevibe can be a good option if you're looking for a quick and simple way to implement continuous feedback to boost engagement.
Pros:
- Employee feedback tools: This tool offers multiple ways to monitor employee sentiment, including employee listening tools, performance reviews, pulse surveys, and 360 feedback for managers.
- Actionable insights: Its advanced analytics give you in-depth insights into your employees' engagement and performance. It even provides you with suggestions for improvement and the next steps you can take.
- User-friendly design: Workleap Officevibe is one of the most intuitive employee engagement tools on the market, and even team members who are not as tech-savvy find it easy to use.
Cons:
- Limited integration options: Many users wish there were more ways to connect the platform with other workplace tools.
- Feature depth: Its core features are reliable, but some advanced users desire more in-depth functionalities that go beyond the basics.
WorkTango
WorkTango is a holistic employee engagement and performance management tool. It combines features like employee feedback, AI-powered recognition, engagement insights, and actionable talent development plans into a single platform.
Pros:
- Comprehensive engagement solutions: It’s possible to measure engagement not only through employee engagement surveys but other solutions as well. It all depends on how detailed you want to go with the surveys.
- Integration capabilities: You can integrate it with HR teams, existing systems, and payment tools.
- User-friendly interface: WorkTango is available on all devices, and according to our research regular users have said it’s easy to use.
Cons:
- Pricing considerations: Some users mentioned that the starting price might be too high, especially for smaller businesses who have a limited budget.
- Customization constraints: Some users mentioned that the employee engagement platform could be more flexible and customizable.
Trends in employee engagement software for 2025
As workplace conditions shift, employee engagement software is also evolving and improving in order to keep up with employee needs. Here are some trends to keep an eye on.
Integration with AI and predictive analytics
Instead of just collecting feedback, the new generation of employee engagement solutions use AI-powered capabilities to spot patterns and correlations in employee engagement data and predict potential issues before they arise.
Predictive analytics allows you to make data-driven decisions and shift from being reactive to proactive. For example, some tools are able to predict employee experience based on work patterns and feedback allowing you to implement targeted engagement strategies before they negatively impact team performance.
Enhanced personalization and adaptive tools
A modern employee engagement platform is shifting toward personalized insights because we all know people value recognition and support that feel tailored to their individual needs. This can look like receiving feedback in a preferred format, getting custom rewards, or having the flexibility to customize their own learning paths.
For example, Effy AI's employee development software can generate personalized development plans with actionable insights for all your employees, with the help of AI.
Mobile-first design and accessibility
With more employees working remotely or on the go, mobile-first engagement tools are becoming the norm, especially in industries that require on-site work, like hospitality and different types of services.
Apart from having a dedicated employee engagement app, it's important to make sure it connects to the tools your employees are already used to checking every day, like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
The goal is to help employees stay connected whether they're on the job site, commuting, or working from home. Plus, better accessibility makes sure that everyone can engage easily, even team members who are not as tech-savvy.
The future of employee engagement is flexible, inclusive, and always within reach.
Conclusion
Finding the right engagement platform means choosing tools that match how your teams actually work, not forcing new habits. The best solutions integrate with existing workflows, making performance management and recognition feel natural rather than like another administrative burden for already stretched HR teams.
Start by identifying your biggest engagement challenge, whether that's remote team connection, recognition gaps, or workplace satisfaction. Then pilot one or two platforms with a small group before rolling out company-wide to ensure genuine adoption rather than checkbox compliance.
Remember that technology alone won't fix engagement problems rooted in poor management or unclear expectations. The right platform amplifies good leadership and culture but it doesn't replace them. Choose tools that support your people strategy, not ones that dictate it.
