6 Best Employee Feedback Tools To Boost Engagement

Alex Cleary

Employee Feedback

Employee feedback can shed light on countless areas for your business to improve, yet choosing the right employee feedback tool isn’t quite so simple.

Employee feedback is a much sought-after resource for internal communicators. After all, collecting regular feedback helps them discover new ideas, build a healthy internal communication culture, and boost employee engagement.

But while communicators agree employee feedback is immensely valuable, how employee feedback is gathered differs greatly from business to business. Finding the right employee feedback platform for your unique workplace culture is the key to gathering truly useful feedback.

Thankfully, there are myriad employee feedback solutions on the market. We’ll show you what they offer and how they differ from one another so you can find one that best suits your business.

Whip up emails your employees want to open

What Is Employee Feedback?

Employee feedback is information shared by employees with their employer regarding their experience with, expectations for, or opinions about the company. Feedback is a fundamental part of a data-based approach to internal communications, and implementing an employee feedback system has numerous benefits not just for growth and productivity but also for employee engagement.

Via employee feedback, you elicit actionable insights about your company and identify the employees who best understand your company’s objectives and ambitions. Plus, employee feedback and employee engagement can reinforce one another. As you make changes based on employee feedback, employees feel more engaged. In turn, they are more willing to share feedback because they see it being acted upon.

What Types Of Employee Feedback Can Be Collected?

Employee feedback covers many topics. Depending on the type of feedback you’re collecting, employees can weigh in on issues like job satisfaction, engagement, workplace culture, potential pain points, and any number of other areas of business that impact employees. Whether you’re looking to improve internal communications for your small business or a large corporation, collecting employee feedback is an easy decision.

Not all employee feedback is straightforward question/answer analysis. 

For example, businesses may want to assess their reputation among employees and understand how employees speak about the company to others. This is known as the employee Net Promoter Score for an organization.

What is your employee Net Promoter Score? An eNPS is a number that encapsulates all the responses to a survey asking how likely employees are to recommend their business to others. Rather than looking at each response in isolation, you calculate eNPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors a business has among its employees from its percentage of promoters.

Image of employee net promoter score (eNPS) scale used for measuring employee engagement.

Despite eNPS being an important indicator of employee satisfaction, many employee feedback platforms don’t offer users the option to measure eNPS. Using ContactMonkey’s team feedback tools, measuring eNPS is simply a matter of drag-and-drop. You can embed an eNPS survey within your employee emails in seconds, and the final score will automatically be calculated and displayed in your analytics dashboard as responses come in.

Real-time analytics that get it right

Discover where your employees are clicking, the best times to engage them, and which content resonates best.

What Employee Feedback Tools Should I Use?

Feedback can take on different forms. The great news for businesses is there are numerous employee feedback software tools out there aimed at collecting various kinds of feedback.

When assessing which solutions to check out, always keep your needs—current and future—at the forefront of your decision-making process. Conduct frequent surveys? A fast, easy-to-use employee feedback solution is probably right for you. Opt for longer, more deliberate surveys? Employee feedback software with in-depth customization is likely your best choice. 

Picking the right feedback platform for your employees can literally save you days of work every year on your internal communications—suffice it to say, the right choice matters!

1. ContactMonkey

ContactMonkey is a powerful employee feedback platform and one of the most helpful new tools used to collect employee feedback. With ContactMonkey, company emails become powerful channels for two-way communication and employee feedback.

ContactMonkey’s email template builder lets you embed employee surveys directly in your emails, from newsletters to CEO messages to crisis communications. And not only can you use ContactMonkey to keep track of the feedback you collect, but you also have access to tons of other useful internal email features for reaching and engaging your employees.

With ContactMonkey’s internal communication and employee feedback management platform, you can:

Design and send engaging employee survey emails 

ContactMonkey’s email builder tool gives you the power to create beautiful, eye-catching internal emails for every occasion, with no coding needed. The drag-and-drop functionality speeds up the design process and lets you embed images, videos, event invitations, and, of course, pulse surveys, directly into your employee email. 

Great email design means more eyes on your surveys and more respondents. And for added engagement, you can use the merge tag feature to personalize the body copy and subject line of your survey email to each recipient, which is proven to boost open rate by 26%.

Make feedback easy to collect and share with embedded pulse survey questions

With ContactMonkey, you can embed pulse surveys directly into any email you send. Just type out your question, then drag the survey tile where on your email you’d like it to display, and choose from a selection of survey types. In addition to eNPS surveys, you can select emoji reactions, star ratings, yes/no responses, and more:

Employee surveys within ContactMonkey's email template builder - internal communications trends

Not sure how to word your question? Try using ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate questions for your emails. Describe what you’re trying to learn from employees, then have the AI assistant generate the wording, which you can edit according to your audience.

ContactMonkey is also one of the easiest feedback tools for employees. With no link to an external site or long-form survey to fill out and return, answering survey questions is fast and frictionless. Employees can share feedback with one button click–it’s that simple.

Encourage candid responses with anonymous feedback

All of ContactMonkey’s surveys, including eNPS, let you enable anonymous commenting to give employees the chance to contextualize or add detail to their responses.

ContactMonkey email - embedded anonymous employee feedback comment box

Get immediate insights with real-time tracking

Analyze your employee surveys using ContactMonkey’s in-depth email tracking features. Open the campaign overview page for any email you send to find a detailed account of the responses your survey questions received, including all anonymous comments collected. Analytics update in real time to bring you insights immediately after you press send. 

Plus, ContactMonkey also tracks other useful internal email metrics, such as unique clicks and opens, open time, how long people spent reading the email, and more, giving you more information for how to best engage your workforce.

Collect event RSVPs and crucial guest information using event management

Trying to plan an internal corporate event but having trouble getting employees to RSVP? Need employee feedback on details like food allergies or plus ones?

ContactMonkey’s built-in event management feature allows you to create events, design invitation forms to collect crucial guest information, embed invites directly in your employee emails, and track RSVPs and form responses all in one place as they come in.

Image of Event Management dashboard within ContactMonkey

You can see how ContactMonkey optimizes employee feedback and increase employee engagement by booking a free demo with one of our friendly internal communications experts.

Turn emails into engaging conversations

2. 15five

15Five prides itself on its holistic, evidence-based approach to everything Human Resources and performance management. 15Five’s unique software solution offers a platform to bridge the gap between management and employees, and includes numerous functions to encourage engagement and feedback:

  • Mobile support to reach employees who aren’t sitting at a computer all day.
  • Post pulse survey questions to your company’s platform that will appear on your employees’ desktop and mobile devices.
  • 1-on-1 meetings functionality lets employees have detailed conversations with management.
  • Employees can request feedback around particular topics directed at specific people.

15Five is a performance management tool rather than an internal communications tool, which means that in order to reach employees they must access 15Five via their computer or mobile apps.

ContactMonkey easily integrates with your existing Outlook or Gmail inbox so your employees need not adopt a new platform. And because emails designed with ContactMonkey are fully responsive, they’ll look great on whatever email client or device your employees already use.

3. Officevibe

Much like 15Five, Officevibe offers in-depth employee feedback options via their platform. Officevibe is all about team management, and their platform gives users a wide array of tools to measure their employee engagement:

  • 1-on-1 meetings let employees speak their minds about numerous topics set by an agenda.
  • In-depth survey tools feature resources like pulse surveys, custom polls, anonymous employee feedback, eNPS, and more.
  • Tracking features for monitoring employee engagement levels over time and comparing how your business stacks up against others in your industry.

Officevibe is a fantastic team management tool that can help you understand complex employee engagement issues. But like 15Five, employees must navigate through the Officevibe app in order to access the feedback materials.

With ContactMonkey, your employees need not access a new platform in order to give feedback. Get more eyes on your surveys by embedding employee surveys, pulse questions, eNPS questions, and more directly in your employee emails. Employees can give feedback right from their desktop or mobile devices. No new apps required.

4. TINYpulse

TINYpulse is an employee engagement software meant to take the complexity out of collecting employee feedback and boost employee engagement. Like Officevibe and 15Five, the TINYpulse platform features numerous resources for management to find out how their employees really feel about issues that affect the business:

  • Easy-to-use employee engagement platform.
  • Numerous feedback options including anonymous feedback, science-backed questions, and survey templates.
  • 1-on-1 meetings can help employees share their true feelings.
  • Track engagement over time to identify employee engagement trends and areas of improvement.

TINYpulse is its own platform, which means employees will have to access employee feedback materials via their employee feedback software. Employees love saving time just as much as internal communicators, and having to learn about a new app can be draining.

With ContactMonkey, your employees give feedback directly from their inboxes, no new apps required. This is how we at ContactMonkey see the situation: the easier your employees can provide feedback, the more likely they are to do it!

The more eyes you get on your survey, the more responses you’ll get and the more feedback you’ll receive. And with ContactMonkey, you can track open rate, click-through rate, read time, and other metrics for your employee feedback emails. Determine which parts of your business are most engaged using segmented reporting, and find your best performing surveys using ContactMonkey’s compare campaigns feature.

5. Energage

Energage is a feedback tool for managers who want to create a solid workplace culture at their business. Energage is aimed at “increasing engagement, reducing turnover, and attracting the right talent”. They offer numerous employee engagement options from their platform including:

  • Various surveys including workplace surveys, annual surveys, pulse surveys, and more.
  • Employer branding to better express your company’s values to candidates.
  • Data insights and survey analysis.
  • Tools for creating meaningful and engaging employee interviews and discussions.

Energage has a really nice-looking platform that makes it easy to create surveys if you’re management or complete surveys if you’re a worker. But, like the rest of the platforms we’ve reviewed, your employees are still required to access the platform in order to fill out surveys.

ContactMonkey requires no login or opt in. Maybe most importantly your employees can’t unsubscribe from your employee emails, so you can always gather accurate data on who is (and isn’t) completing your surveys.

6. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a comprehensive survey tool that helps you build in-depth, great-looking surveys. Unlike the tools we’ve mentioned already, SurveyMonkey’s surveys can be used both as an anonymous employee feedback tool and as a survey tool for external audiences. Gather employee feedback and customer feedback with:

  • Schedule surveys with automated deployments.
  • Track feedback on both an employee and department basis.
  • Gather feedback via weblink, email, mobile chat, social media, and more.
  • Automatically analyze your results and get powerful analysis.
  • Export your results or integrate your data with your favorite apps.

Unlike some other employee feedback programs on this list, SurveyMonkey does not require users to access a platform in order to respond to surveys. However, they are required to fill them out in their browser. With ContactMonkey employees can respond directly from their inboxes, which means more and faster employee feedback. You can also use ContactMonkey’s tracking feature to discover who has and hasn’t filled out your survey yet to maximize your results.

Whip up emails your employees want to open

Choosing The Right Employee Feedback Tool

Ultimately, the right employee feedback tool for your organization is the one that your team finds easiest to use. You can have the most comprehensive analytics available but they won’t be worth anything if your employee feedback management platform has no feedback to manage or analyze.

With ContactMonkey, you can maximize the reach of your employee feedback surveys and ensure that you’re getting as many responses as possible. Both your email tracking stats and your survey results are displayed within the same dashboard, letting you quickly gain insights on how employees react to your surveys, what works and what doesnt, and how to make an internal email into a lean, mean, survey response-getting machine. 

You can see firsthand how ContactMonkey can maximize your employee feedback results by booking a free demo with one of our friendly experts.

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