Is collecting employee feedback harder than you thought? Wondering what tools you could use to help you streamline the process?
In this guide, I’m going to show you nine absolutely amazing employee feedback tools.
Each of them could help you collect ideas, suggestions, and concerns from your employees and manage and even act on their feedback.
Before we get to that, I thought we needed to get some context behind employee feedback software.
What is employee feedback software?
I’m sure you’ve been hearing the term – employee feedback software – quite a lot recently. It’s something that’s been on HR managers’ minds and thoughts for quite some time and for a reason.
We are living in quite challenging times when it comes to retaining employees, after all.
We faced the great resignation (although, luckily, it looks like this trend is over.) We faced quiet quitting, employees disengaging from work, challenges with finding talent, and then retaining those people…
Of course, many of these issues often have different causes behind them. But at the same time, sometimes, the easiest way to prevent them is to listen to employees’ concerns, hear their honest feedback about the company, and implement the best ideas.
That’s where employee feedback software comes in.
These tools allow you to provide employees with a meaningful and safe way to share feedback, suggestions, and ideas about the workplace.
For you, these tools offer capabilities to facilitate employee feedback, listen to their concerns or suggestions, analyze them, and draw conclusions that would help you improve the company culture.
Types of employee feedback tools
Another important thing to remember about employee feedback tools is that they can take many forms:
- Some work just like any other survey tool. They allow you to create an intake form that employees could use to share their feedback.
- Pulse survey tools help you do exactly what their name suggests, run quick pulse surveys.
- Digital suggestion boxes focus on anonymous feedback and help you create a safe space where employees can raise concerns while protecting their privacy.
- Finally, many such tools provide additional data analysis features like sentiment analysis, reporting, or case management.
What features and capabilities to look for in an employee feedback tool
As you’ve seen already, employee feedback tools differ from one another. Sometimes, these differences are subtle. Other times, these tools fall into different categories.
Unfortunately, this means that selecting the right tool to collect employee feedback can prove challenging. For that reason, I thought before we look at specific tools, it’d be good to go through their core capabilities in general.
And so, here’s what you should pay attention to when evaluating employee feedback tools.
Feedback widgets
The purpose of these tools is to allow employees to share their ideas, concerns, and feedback.
So, the tool must provide a way for you to collect all this information, and the best way to do that is through a dedicated feedback widget or an intake form.
These widgets can take several forms:
- Traditional surveys
- Anonymous surveys
- Pulse surveys
- Suggestion boxes
- Ratings and more
(A screenshot of an employee suggestion intake form.)
Deliver channels
As cliche as it sounds, it’s true: Your employees need to be able to access the widget to provide feedback. And as you can imagine, the easier it is for them to do so, the more likely they will be to share their ideas.
This is where it gets important – Different employee feedback tools offer different delivery channels.
Some, like Suggestion Ox, for example (disclaimer, this is my tool,) provide a whole range of ways to deliver the widget – through a shareable link, a QR code, Slack or MS Teams integrations, etc.
Others focus on fewer, more specific delivery channels, like a website widget.
When evaluating these tools, pay attention to what channels they allow you to use to distribute the widget, and choose the ones that match how you’d like your employees to reach it.
Anonymous feedback options
Fear of retaliation, trying to avoid conflict, concerns about career advancement, and worries about being labeled a troublemaker are just some of the concerns that prevent employees from providing feedback.
Unfortunately, these are justified.
I recently reviewed a fascinating but scary research by the University of Greenwich and Public Concerns at Work called “Whistleblowing: The Inside Story.”
As the name suggests, the research focused on whistleblowing specifically, but I fear its findings wouldn’t be much different if they focused on general feedback and concerns about the workplace.
The research discovered that, on average, 10% of people who provided feedback had to resign from their positions as a consequence. And for 69%, their workplace situation has worsened.
(Data from the research)
Given this, it’s no surprise that many employees choose to remain silent.
This is where anonymous feedback comes in. By protecting the person’s identity and stripping their feedback from any personally identifiable information (PII), the anonymous feedback software ensures their safety and breaks the psychological barrier from providing feedback.
IMPORTANT: Some tools, Suggestion Ox included, also allow you to respond to the employee anonymously and have a two-way conversation while protecting their privacy and identity at all times.
Case management
Feedback widgets help employees share their best ideas or top concerns. Case management capabilities help you, the manager or leader, to process and act on this feedback.
This is where you can assign and track issues from intake to investigation to resolution.
AI capabilities
When replying to candid feedback, speed matters as much as what you say in your message. Many employee feedback tools allow you to use artificial intelligence to write better and more accurate responses faster.
These AI capabilities usually fall into two categories:
- Expanding your answer. In this case, the AI builds up your message and helps provide a greater context for the respondent.
- Tone adjustment. Here, AI edits your message to adjust it to a desired tone of voice.
9 Top Employee Feedback Tools
#1. Suggestion Ox – Dedicated Anonymous Employee Feedback Software
Type: Dedicated employee feedback tool
Delivery channels supported:
- Shareable link
- QR code
- Slack integration
- MS Teams integration
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Yes
Case management: Yes
AI capabilities: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
Suggestion Ox (note, this is my tool,) is an employee feedback platform that uses the power of anonymity to help leaders and managers get truly candid information from employees, whether that is ideas, concerns, or questions.
Because of its name, Suggestion Ox is often considered akin to a “suggestion box.” But our platform does a lot more. For one, it empowers anonymous two-way communication so employees don’t just feel that they’re shouting into a void.
Using our Direct Replies feature, leaders can respond to employees while protecting anonymity.
Suggestion Ox also offers a whole range of delivery channels, case management, deep reporting and analysis (including keyword and sentiment analysis,) workflow management, and more.
Sign up for a free trial and see how easy it is to collect anonymous employee feedback with Suggestion Ox.
#2. Trakstar (part of Mitratech)
Type: Employee performance software with pulse survey capabilities
Anonymous feedback: No
2-way anonymous conversations: No
Case management: Unspecified on the website
AI capabilities: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
Trakstar is an all-in-one employee performance management software with capabilities ranging from performance reviews, employee education, and candidate sourcing to benchmarking and data analysis.
One of Trakstar’s key features is the ability to run pulse surveys to evaluate employee engagement and then review detailed analytics and reporting to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement.
#3. SurveySparrow
Type: Enterprise survey software
Delivery channels supported:
- Shareable link
- Website widget
- SMS
- QR code
Anonymous feedback: No
2-way anonymous conversations: No
Case management: No
AI capabilities: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
SurveySparrow’s name reveals it all. It’s a survey platform created primarily with large, enterprise-level companies in mind.
Because of that, SurveySparrow isn’t dedicated just to helping companies collect employee feedback. You can run all types of surveys with the platform, from NPS to market research to customer experience surveys and more.
However, SurveySparrow offers some features that might help large organizations run effective employee feedback programs. One of those is the ability to run recurring surveys and continuously evaluate employee engagement.
#4. WorkTango
Type: Employee engagement platform
Delivery channels supported:
- Shareable link
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Yes
Case management: No
AI capabilities: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
WorkTango is an all-in-one employee engagement platform designed to help companies manage the employee experience, boost engagement, and improve retention. And as part its impressive feature set, WorkTango offers capabilities to collect anonymous employee feedback.
First, you can run surveys with WorkTango and keep them anonymous, should you choose. Employees don’t need to provide their email address or sign up to give feedback.
You can also conduct two-way anonymous conversations, respond to employees anonymously, and maintain the conversation while safeguarding their identity and anonymity.
In addition, WorkTango provides various analytics tools to help you better understand employee feedback, visualize open-text survey responses to identify themes easily, and more.
#5. TINYpulse
Type: Employee engagement platform
Delivery channels supported:
- Shareable link
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Not specified
Case management: No
AI capabilities: Not specified
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
I admit that the word tiny in this platform’s name can be quite deceiving. That’s because TINYpulse is far from a tiny software. In truth, this is a comprehensive employee engagement platform with feature-set spanning tools for managers, recognition programs, and yes, employee feedback, too.
I have to say that the company’s website is quite elusive when it comes to describing its survey and feedback collection capabilities. However, I did find information confirming that the platform supports anonymous feedback collection and feedback analysis.
#6. CultureMonkey
Type: Employee feedback platform
Delivery channels supported:
- Shareable link
- SMS
- Website
- Slack, and more.
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Not specified
Case management: Yes
AI capabilities: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
CultureMonkey is a robust employee feedback tool. And by robust, I mean that the platform’s capabilities extend beyond the usual ability to gather, analyze, and act on employee feedback.
CultureMonkey offers over 70 research-based and fully customizable employee survey templates so that anyone can quickly get started collecting employee feedback.
The platform lets you review and identify actions based on feedback, manage projects, use word clouds to identify sentiment and run in-depth analyses with AI quickly.
#7. Officevibe by Workleap
Type: Employee engagement platform
Delivery channels supported: Unspecified
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Yes
Case management: Yes
AI capabilities: Unspecified
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
Officevibe is another all-in-one platform that features employee feedback software. This particular part of Officevibe certainly ticks all the boxes. You can run quick Pulse surveys with Officevibe, collect anonymous feedback, conduct eNPS surveys, respond to employees and discuss their feedback, and review a trove of data based on the information you’ve collected.
#8. Leapsome
Type: Employee engagement platform
Delivery channels supported: Unspecified
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Yes
Case management: Yes
AI capabilities: Unspecified
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
Leapsome calls its tool a “people enablement platform.” I do appreciate that it’s a bold name, but it fits the tool. After all, it aims to help companies boost employee management and development. Naturally, in the context of this guide, we’re most interested in the tool’s employee feedback capabilities, and I have to say, the platform certainly delivers.
Leapsome offers everything you’d expect from an employee feedback tool—the ability to run anonymous surveys, analyze data, perform sentiment analysis, conduct anonymous conversations with employees, and more.
But it also offers several additional features like question templates to help get your survey off the ground faster, private feedback, and more.
#9. 15five
Type: Performance management platform
Delivery channels supported: Unspecified
Anonymous feedback: Yes
2-way anonymous conversations: Yes
Case management: Yes
AI capabilities: Unspecified
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Overview:
As an all-in-one platform, 15five features an Engage capability that helps managers and HR teams conduct employee engagement surveys and gather ideas, suggestions, comments, and more from employees.
With Engage, you can run surveys, custom assessments, eNPS surveys, and targeted assessments. These tools help measure employee engagement, pinpoint problem areas, and ultimately, re-engage and retain talent.
One unique feature of the Engage module is a quick 6-minute assessment that helps companies measure their employees’ engagement across a 17-dimension model.
And there you have it…
Nine absolutely amazing employee feedback tools you should consider. All that’s left is to evaluate those tools more closely and choose the one to implement in your organization.
Good luck!
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