5 Employee Engagement App Options That Will Wow Your Workers

Are your employees satisfied with their jobs? Do they enjoy coming to work? And are they aligned with your company’s goals? If you answered yes to these questions, congratulations! You likely have highly engaged employees. But, if you’re like many businesses, your employees might not be as engaged as you think.

Often a topic mainly for enterprise-level firms, small businesses today also need to focus on employee engagement. According to Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report, only about 23 percent of employees feel engaged, and 15 percent are actively disengaged. And while that engagement figure is the highest its been since 2009, it clearly shows there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Luckily, there’s an app for that. Several, in fact. An employee app can improve communication, support frontline safety, reduce costs, and improve profitability. With employee engagement being a high priority, we took the time to figure out which ones are the best for small business owners.

What are employee engagement apps?

Employee engagement platforms offer modern workplace communication tools that enhance connectivity and productivity, particularly for deskless or remote workers. These platforms include features such as measuring employee engagement, anonymous feedback channels, continuous feedback, and peer recognition programs.

These apps offer a range of collaboration features, enabling employees to feel connected to each other, which further improves productivity and alignment. They allow employees to access information to stay informed and engaged, and can serve as a touchpoint to stay connected to the organization.

Employee engagement apps often include features that track workers’ performance and goals, offer employees rewards and recognition, improve communication between employees and managers and among teammates, and more.

The best employee engagement apps are designed to be effective, customizable, and easy to use and can significantly contribute to improving the employee experience, ideally increasing their length of employment and reducing turnover.

Why do you need an employee engagement app?

We all know the days of staying at a single company for an entire career are long gone. Today’s workers tend to job hop frequently. In fact, employee turnover accelerated by as much as 70 percent post-pandemic, and it takes employers nearly 20 percent longer to fill roles compared to pre-pandemic levels. As a result, employee engagement has been seen as a method for retaining more employees, longer.

So when a company finds good talent, they want to do everything they can to hold onto them as long as possible. And that’s what an employee engagement app can do.

An effective employee engagement solution is designed to improve communication, recognition, rewards, surveys, and feedback. Engagement apps help employees to engage with each other and forge stronger relationships. With better communication comes increased transparency, while also improving accountability with goal tracking. And ultimately, this should lead to improved employee happiness.

Ultimately, these apps reinforce a company’s culture and values, driving increased employee satisfaction and loyalty.

How to find the best employee engagement software

We provide our picks below—and our rationale for picking them. But don’t just take our word for it. If you’re looking for the best employee engagement software out there, consider asking your employees what kind of features they would want out of an app. This will help you weed out apps that don’t necessarily fit your employees’s criteria. Remember that an app is only useful when it’s actually adopted by your staff.

Additionally, consider talking to other business owners in your industry about the apps they use. This can give you an idea of how they’re using it, what their employees like or dislike about some apps, and how you might deploy it in your own business.

The top 5 employee engagement apps your employees will love

1. Homebase

We know we might be a little biased on this one, but what can we say? We believe we’ve built a powerful employee engagement tool that small business owners—and their employees—love.

Homebase offers a suite of features designed to improve employee happiness and productivity. It starts with our free mobile app for employees, which fosters transparency and trust with up-to-date schedules, hours worked, and earnings. The app can send reminders for upcoming shifts and allows employees to manage their time-off requests and availability. To facilitate team communication and coordination, the platform enables shift trades and covers.

Our app fosters a positive work environment by enabling team members to give each other shout outs. It also automates performance tracking, such as on-time arrivals, and offers early access to wages for employees, helping them handle emergency expenses and enhancing their financial security.

Keeping your finger on the pulse of how employees feel is essential, and Homebase makes it easy by collecting, analyzing, and acting on employee feedback in real-time. The app gathers feedback from employees at the end of every shift, and managers get automated reports on employee sentiment, offering valuable, just-in-time insights that help them give praise and provide coaching as needed.

Homebase’s comprehensive features help increase employee engagement, which ultimately improves both loyalty and productivity.

2. Leapsome

Leapsome is a dynamic employee engagement app that empowers organizations to nurture their workforce, enhance collaboration, and drive productivity. The platform combines performance management, engagement surveys, and continuous feedback to cultivate a thriving workplace that boosts employee growth and development.

Leapsome’s top features include Performance Management, Engagement Surveys, and Continuous Feedback. Performance Management simplifies performance evaluations with customizable templates, goal setting, and real-time feedback, enabling managers and employees to align on objectives, track progress, and provide constructive feedback. Engagement Surveys offer insights into employee sentiment and engagement levels, facilitated by customizable surveys and automated feedback collection. These employee surveys collect feedback from employees to understand workplace mood and measure employee satisfaction over time. Continuous Feedback encourages regular, constructive feedback among team members, facilitating one-on-one discussions, peer reviews, and 360-degree feedback, thereby creating a positive company culture that fosters growth, productivity, and positive relationships.

3. Worktango

WorkTango is an employee engagement platform that helps employers deliver an excellent employee experience. It features recognition, incentives, feedback, and goal setting, all aimed at improving engagement, increasing retention, and fostering sustainable cultural change across teams. As an employee survey software tool, WorkTango gives employees a voice and lets managers act on their suggestions, making employees feel heard and cared for.

The platform offers 1:1 Sync-ups feature that use pre-built and customized templates to track progress towards goals and holds each other accountable using the meeting feature. Recognition rewards provide a limitless selection of valuable prizes along with peer-to-peer social recognition. And its survey feature uses configurable survey forms for onboarding, development, and engagement.

WorkTango is designed to improve employee engagement by enhancing communication, collaboration, and feedback gathering. Its dashboard organizes collected diagnostic feedback throughout the entire employee lifecycle, enabling the identification of trends and determination of the best course of action.

4. Eletive

Eletive is a comprehensive human resources software tool designed to enhance employee engagement, performance management, and self-leadership within organizations. It offers a user-friendly platform with features such as real-time pulse surveys, OKR goal-setting, 360-degree feedback, and 1:1 communication tools. Unlike traditional survey tools that offer sporadic feedback, Eletive’s real-time pulse surveys provide continuous employee engagement insights, allowing for constant monitoring of employee sentiment. This ensures that organizations can promptly detect changes in engagement levels and respond with appropriate interventions.

The platform includes intuitive dashboards and heatmaps for visualizing engagement data, customizable survey templates that allow organizations to tailor questions to their specific needs, and goal-setting and performance-tracking tools. Additionally, Eletive offers employee dashboards designed to empower employees in their own growth journey.

5. Bonusly

Bonusly is an employee recognition software that encourages and facilitates peer-to-peer recognition, offering tools to automate employee milestones and track performance for rewards and incentives programs. It operates on a points system, allowing employees to collect rewards based on their points. Each month, employees are allocated a budget of points that they can send out to their peers alongside personalized recognition messages. Other team members can then comment on the public recognition, express their appreciation for the employee, and send them additional points.

As one of the top employee engagement apps, Bonusly stands out by providing a comprehensive platform for employee recognition and rewards. Employees can use their points to select from various rewards through the platform, including gift cards, charitable donations, cash-out options, and custom rewards that employers can configure.

In addition to exchanging positive peer feedback, the software can be used to automate celebratory messages for important dates like anniversaries, birthdays, and employee start dates. Employees can comment on these messages too, to celebrate their colleague’s milestone.

Why your business needs the best employee engagement app

Improving open communication, facilitating collaboration, and providing recognition all are key drivers of employee satisfaction. Whether it’s through real-time feedback, performance tracking, or peer recognition, these tools are designed to engage employees, making them feel valued as a contributor to your organization’s success. And if you make your employees feel valued, they’ll likely reward you with their loyalty.

So if you’re having issues hanging onto quality talent, there’s a good chance you need an employee engagement app.

Get started with Homebase today.