Employee engagement is one of the strongest drivers of productivity and retention. But businesses struggle to achieve strong engagement. Engagement levels have hovered around 30 percent (see below) for years, according to Gallup research. That means only 1 in 3 employees is engaged.
Let's start by understanding what engagement means. "Employee engagement relates to the level of an employee's commitment and connection to an organization," according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). "Employee engagement has emerged as a critical driver of business success in today's competitive marketplace. Elevated levels of engagement promote retention of talent, foster customer loyalty, and improve organizational performance and stakeholder value."
The benefits of engagement are proven:
Then there is the cost of poor engagement.
Gallup has measured engagement for decades and reported that 2021 was the first year-over-year decline—dropping from 36 to 34 percent. But even at 36 percent, that means 64 percent of employees are disengaged and holding businesses back. That's a problem. Gallup has been calling employee engagement a "crisis" since 2016, and it just worsened for the first time. Yet only 25 percent of companies have an engagement strategy.
In response to the "crisis," the demand for mobile apps to boost employee engagement has surged. The market for engagement apps reached $878.3 million in 2020 and is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 11.8 percent. These tools are mobile because, as we all know, people are very interested in surveys—much of the innovation focuses on creating feedback mechanisms that are fun, responsive, and meaningful.
Most engagement apps aim to quickly and easily help managers understand what is working and what isn't by hearing directly from employees. This article will explore some of the popular, innovative, and effective employee engagement apps and assist you in understanding your options regarding features, benefits, and costs.
You've heard of pulse surveys—they are quick, short questionnaires designed, as the name suggests, to gauge a company or team's pulse on a specific topic. However, many managers are unsure of what questions to ask or how to interpret the results.
TINYpulse makes it easy to launch internal pulse surveys designed by organizational psychologists to ask the right questions and gather data you can analyze and act on confidently. The app also features a "Cheers for Peers" feature that allows employees to give kudos to coworkers and across teams, providing managers with insights into how well individuals and groups collaborate. Pricing information is not published.
Have you ever received a certificate for excellent work and wondered, "where's the cash?" With Bonusly, you provide employees with a monthly points allocation they can gift to coworkers for jobs well done. Employees can spend these points in a Bonusly catalog and redeem them for gift cards or cash. Options include brands like Starbucks, Uber, or nonprofit donations.
The gifts employees give one another appear in a team or company-wide feed so that everyone can see who and what actions win rewards. The goal is to foster trust and collaboration. You can set the criteria for rewards around the company's core values and business objectives and define what actions are point-worthy. You can also analyze the giving to assess whether you meet your behavioral and cultural goals. Pricing starts at $2.70 per user per month.
One of the biggest complaints about employee surveys is that they rarely result in meaningful change, or the changes made are ineffective because they are based on subjective opinions. Like TINYpulse, Culture Amp offers templates with questions designed by organizational psychologists and takes it further with AI-driven analytics that give actionable recommendations.
You can run surveys on chat, mobile, and desktop apps. Culture Amp collects answers, delivers results with heatmaps, bubble charts, or spreadsheets, and makes recommendations using its algorithms. Culture Amp continuously learns from all the companies using the app. For example, it can identify individuals at risk of quitting and recommend targeted interventions based on both historical and real-time data. Pricing is not published.
Qualtrics is the dominant force in engagement apps—calling its solution just an app might underestimate it. You could describe it as an employee engagement listening engine. We include it here to demonstrate what is possible. Not only does it support omnichannel survey delivery, but it also uses natural language processing to analyze communications between employees both upstream and downstream.
You can send surveys, activate "always-on" mode, listen to internal communication channels while ensuring anonymity, and obtain detailed data and recommendations in real-time. Qualtrics also provides customer survey and listening solutions that analyze everything from support calls to Yelp reviews, offering the same quick, specific advice for your customer support teams. Pricing is not disclosed.
Engagement surveys and analytics might not give you a full view of your employees' experience. WeThrive surveys help connect the dots between engagement, wellbeing, and DEEI. The app offers surveys in each category to evaluate predefined aspects of employees' current state, compares current conditions to benchmarks, and provides specific recommendations for situational and structural changes.
The surveys explore both conscious and subconscious factors that influence people at work. Employees can complete an evaluation survey in each of the three categories and receive immediate, personalized feedback for growth. They can also monitor and review their recommended actions, insights, and progress through personal dashboards. Best of all, WeThrive is free for up to 10 users.
Most employee engagement mobile apps are designed for HR and executive teams to facilitate company-wide surveys and assessments. Officevibe, although you might use it company-wide, is designed to help managers support their team's growth and development, ultimately becoming better managers themselves. The goal is to empower managers to engage with team members, cultivate trust, tackle challenges, and build strengths.
The app features multi-channel surveys in three areas: employee engagement, where workers share their needs; a two-way one-on-one development app to create powerful, effective one-ones; and a manager growth app that gives recommendations to managers based on the outputs from their reports and general tips like how to have tough conversations. Officevibe is a Certified B-Corp and offers a free version of the app for up to 10 users.
Few employee engagement mobile apps target specific fields. While frontline work is broad, it differs from office work and presents unique stresses and challenges, as we've recently seen. Blink aims to help executives and managers stay connected with frontline workers, who are often offsite.
Blink brings the power of a desktop computer to mobile phones for deskless workers. Its goal is to boost employee engagement by strengthening connections between frontline workers. They can access all their tools and systems and communicate in real-time through an integrated chat feed. Blink makes it easy for HQ managers to connect work with the company's mission and vision through in-app communication. It also offers surveys and polls, giving managers instant access to employee feedback. Pricing starts at $3.40 per user per month.
If all the features of employee engagement mobile apps have your head spinning, you may want to consider Engagement Multiplier. The app begins with a ten-minute survey available on any device, which scores your company and provides feedback that offers immediate insights to guide your employee engagement program. After acting on your results, you can run the survey and see the impact of your actions.
The recommendations you get from Engagement Multiplier are a set of guides that offer tips on how to address areas where scores are low. The app also allows you to run customer surveys, provides graphic results such as word clouds and sentiment scales, and enables employees to set up individual accounts to track their engagement. The pricing is also straightforward — $5 per user per month.
Do you enjoy playing Wordle to connect with your friends and relatives? You will enjoy Trivia. Admittedly superficial—there are no engagement assessments or suggestions for improvement. Trivia is a Slack app that makes it simple for employees to have fun together and build bonds outside of work. Especially with remote and hybrid work, a little healthy competition can break the monotony and strengthen teams.
While you might think you'll get tired of playing Trivial Pursuit repeatedly, Trivia offers multiple one-on-one and team games. The app provides instant quizzes, true or false games, word puzzles, Pictionary, and more to give employees engaging activities when they log into Slack. You can also create custom games that connect to your business and help strengthen bonds around your core values and goals. Trivia has a free version for beginners.
Surveys are not the only tool in your toolbox for measuring employee engagement. You don't have to invest in an AI-driven system that measures 12 dimensions of engagement and delivers a tailored action plan for each employee (that would be nice, though). Other tools for your employee engagement toolbox include:
You can see that there are multiple flavors of employee engagement mobile apps. Finding the right one for your business depends on your engagement status, goals, budget, and tech stack (for example, you can only use Trivia if you also use Slack). The stakes are high as competition for employees grows. It is easier than ever to measure, analyze, and improve your employees' experience with these tools.
Gallup found that executives account for 70 percent of employees' engagement—more than a mobile app can achieve. If executives are not engaged, their employees are unlikely to be engaged either. A survey of 500 US executives revealed that they spend three to four hours per day "on administrative tasks." And 44 percent said they are "frequently overwhelmed" by admin work.
Companies turn to managed virtual assistant services like Prialto to free executives from the busy work that distracts them from focusing on strategic work, including developing their managers and staff. Offloading administrative tasks like calendar management, travel and expenses, and email organization gives executives three to four more hours per day to focus on their core responsibilities to grow their business units and teams.
Prialto is a managed virtual executive assistant service that has been helping executives and teams maximize productivity for over ten years. Subscribe to our newsletter (see below) to get more information about workforce productivity, engagement, and retention.
About the Author: Bill is Prialto's senior content marketing manager and writes about the future of work and how businesses can be more productive and successful. His work has appeared in the World Economic Forum Agenda blog and CIO magazine.