Tools

9 Best HR Survey Tools

Andy Berkowitz

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December 2, 2024

Below, you’ll find a comprehensive list of dedicated survey tools for HR teams.

All the survey tools on my list have been created specifically to help HR teams evaluate employee experience, satisfaction, and more.

That last point is extremely important, because, often, we tend try to use a generic survey tool to run employee surveys.

Unfortunately, these tools have never been created for this purpose, and they often lack critical features that would make their surveys useful for HR.

That’s not the case with the HR survey tools on my list.

Before I show you what they are, though, we need to discuss two other things…

What makes running HR surveys different from other survey types?

At first glance, it might seem that an HR survey is just like any other such project.

You devise some questions that help you collect information on a specific topic. You then distribute it to your employees, who provide their input, and that’s it.

And yet, there are several key differences between HR surveys and traditional surveys.

#1. Anonymity and Confidentiality

HR surveys often focus on collecting information and feedback on sensitive topics like job satisfaction, management effectiveness, workplace culture, or even potential issues or malpractice in the workplace.

For that reason, these surveys often require complete anonymity. For one, anonymous surveys encourage honest and open feedback. And secondly, anonymity removes the fear of retaliation that many employees might experience when providing sensitive feedback.

To put that into perspective, a data presented by Forbes suggests that 74% of employees would be more inclined to give feedback about their company, workload and culture if the feedback channel was made truly anonymous.

#2. Focus on specific type of insights

Traditional surveys often focus on collecting either generic input or serve a very specific goals of the researcher. The latter is also the case with HR surveys, however, these goals are usually different.

HR surveys, typically, aim to align insights with company objectives with the ultimate goal to improve experience, engagement, foster a positive culture, or support strategic initiatives within the organization.

#3. HR surveys are quite sensitive in nature

There is no point in denying it, feedback you receive through HR surveys might include criticism of the company’s leadership, the management style, workplace conditions, team dynamics. It might also provide insights into malpractice or toxic behavior.

Needless to say, such feedback requires careful handling to avoid damaging trust and morale.

#4. HR surveys are usually part of a bigger picture

In fact, such surveys are rarely run in vacuum. They are usually designed to complement existing HR data, providing a holistic view of employee performance, engagement, and satisfaction. Because of that, it is critical that you have the ability to integrate and correlate survey data with other information and data points, something traditional survey tools don’t do particularly well.

But that’s exactly what HR survey tools have been designed to do.

What is HR survey software

When we use this term – HR survey software – we refer to various survey tools designed specifically to cater for the needs of HR teams.

These tools range in various capabilities or the types of surveys they help you run. But they all focus on delivering what you, an HR manager, need to run successful employee surveys, integrate the data into your other platforms, and drive successful programs and initiatives.

Of course, this is still quite a generic definition. So, the best way for me to explain the concept of HR survey tool is by comparing them with traditional survey software.

And let’s start with this…

Why generic survey tools aren’t good-enough for HR teams

Let’s face it; any survey tool can help you output an employee experience survey, an eNPS, or a pulse survey.

But most eventually become inadequate for several reasons:

It’s extremely difficult to scale your efforts with generic survey tools. Granted, you can launch as many surveys as you wish. However, since these tools haven’t been created with HR needs in mind, their ability to consolidate and analyze multi-survey data quickly becomes an issue.
Similarly, these tools rarely integrate with other HR platforms well. With some, you can create custom integrations through Zapier, but even that often proves less than adequate.
Many generic survey tools offer no way to collect anonymous feedback. And those that do, lack the ability to conduct fully-anonymous 2-way conversations and follow up with respondents.
Finally, generic tools usually offer insufficient analytics and reporting capabilities. Most don’t even offer the option to analyze sentiment, let alone use AI to quickly process and respond to employee feedback.

How HR survey tools overcome those issues

The opposite to the above is true about HR survey tools.

These tools are created for scale that HR teams need
HR survey tools offer advanced anonymity options built in
As obvious as this sounds, it’s a fact that these tools focus solely on HR surveys. This means that you can often launch surveys based on pre-defined surveys, and don’t have to set up anything from scratch.
And finally, these tools integrate with other HR systems, meaning that you can quickly turn the feedback into actionable items and projects.

So, with all that out of the way, let’s see what are the best survey tools for HR teams.

What are the best HR survey tools on the market today?

1. Suggestion Ox

Best for: Anonymous employee feedback

The first HR survey tool on my list is actually a tool I created, Suggestion Ox.

Suggestion Ox is an employee survey tool that helps HR teams collect truly anonymous feedback from employees.

With Suggestion Ox, you can create 100% anonymous surveys and suggestion boxes that allow employees to share great ideas, suggestions, and offer feedback on whatever issues you’d need their input.

Specifially, here are the HR surveys you can run with Suggestion Ox:

Employee suggestion boxes
Anonymous employee surveys
Pulse surveys (coming soon)

On top of that, Suggestion Ox allows HR teams and managers to conduct fully anonymous two-way conversations, and dig deeper into the person’s suggestions without ever revealing their identity.

Anonymous two-way conversations options.

Suggestion Ox also offers complete case management, reporting and analytics, and utilizes AI to help you process and respond to survey feedback making it quite a robust HR survey tool for you to consider.

2. Connecteam

Best for: eNPS and mobile employee surveys

Connecteam is an enormous platform that, aside the ability to run employee surveys, offers almost every feature and functionality a company would need to manage their employees. From operations, time clocking, staff scheduling, task management, to communications, training, quizzes, and so much more.

As part of its robust offering, Connecteam offers the ability to create surveys and polls and collect employee feedback.

What’s more, Connecteam offers a robust mobile survey app so that employees can access surveys, as well as other functionality, quickly and conveniently.

3. Deel

Best for: Onboarding and pulse surveys

Deel belongs to a separate group of HR survey tools which consists of all-in-one platforms with advanced survey functionality. This means that Deel is more than just a survey tool. In fact, the platform encompasses almost every aspect of people management, from payroll, taxes to hiring, onboarding, and more.

But as said, part of the platform is devoted to managing employee engagement, and the first step of such process is always surveying and collecting employee feedback.

On top of that, Deel’s survey tool offers advanced analytics, demographic filters, survey scheduling, and more.

4. Eletive

Best for: Automated pulse surveys

Eletive is another all-in-one platform. It actually consists of three major sections, one of which focuses exclusively on collecting employee feedback with pulse surveys.

You can use Eletive’s pulse surveys to measure employee engagement, wellbeing, and satisfaction. Eletive delivers real-time data so you can review insights quickly. It’s AI features can help you come up with relevant survey questions, and analyze results, too.

5. Worktango

Best for: Employee lifecycle surveys

WorkTango is another all-in-one platform on my list. In Worktango’s case, the platform’s main focus is to help companies understand and improve employee engagement and boost retention.

To meet that objective, Worktango offers quite a range of tools that, among others, include various survey types. But leaving surveys aside, Worktango can help you boost recognition in the workplace, improve performance, and make it easy for you to stay connected with you teams and gauge real-time sentiment.

6. FridayPulse

Best for: Pulse surveys

FridayPulse is an interesting tool. Based on its name, it’s easy to consider it just a pulse survey tool. And yet, there is quite a lot more to it.

FridayPulse focuses on helping organizations ensure that their teams are happy and productive.

Naturally, a major part of that is running regular employee surveys and analyzing the data. In the case of FridayPulse, this is done through regular and automated pulse surveys.

However, aside from that , FridayPulse offers predictive HappinessKPIs that predict performance, retention, and innovation among your teams making it quite a useful HR tool overall.

7. Empuls

Best for: Pulse surveys

Empuls is yet another comprehensive HR platform with a robust survey functionality built-in. With Empuls, HR teams can collect employee feedback, run rewards and recognition programs, manage employee perks and benefits, and also, create a social intranet for the organization.

But speaking of HR surveys, Empuls allows you to run engagement and pulse surveys, employee lifecycle surveys, eNPS, and create custom surveys to suit your needs.

As every other HR survey tool on this list, Empuls allows you to create fully anonymous surveys and personalize and customize survey widgets. The platform’s AI capabilities can help you better schedule surveys and improve participation, while reporting capabilities ensure that you can easily turn any feedback into actionable insights.

8. TeamMood

Best for: Quick daily mood surveys.

I guess it goes without saying that stress is the worst enemy of every team and organization. Stressful employees are less happy at work, less productive, and usually, their overall engagement is not what it should be. Not to mention that stressed employees are more prone to making mistakes, etc.

The thing is, we, HR teams, often don’t realize the actual level of stress among other teams, and that’s exactly what TeamMood helps us uncover.

TeamMood is a simple HR survey tool that allows you to run quick daily mood surveys. These surveys use a simple rating scale, represented by icons, so that team members can mark their mood of the day by selecting the relevant value. No other work is required from them.

TeamMood’s surveys are fully anonymous but they allow you to identify the overall level of stress among various teams and take proactive approach in eliminating it.

9. Pulse Feedback

Best for: Pulse surveys

Pulse Feedback is a HR survey tool exclusively focusing on helping human resource teams collect incredible employee feedback through pulse surveys, 360 degree surveys, and others.

Because it is a dedicated survey tool, Pulse Feedback includes many survey templates and question templates ready to use out of the box. You can quickly use one of the 120 scientifically developed questions to ensure your survey’s success. You can also leverage AI to identify areas of improvement in your surveys, build custom surveys with an intuitive survey builder, add custom questions, personalize invitation messages to participants, and more.

Pulse Feedback also offers anonymity option for all surveys. That said, you can also create partially and fully transparent surveys, depending on your needs.