Timely and effective feedback is critical for organizational success. Without getting feedback from employees, you’re playing a guessing game when it comes to understanding what issues they may be experiencing at the coal face of your company, how happy they are and what improvements could be made.
Table of contents
Why you need to track employee feedback
10 best tools for employee feedback
How to choose the best employee feedback tool for your organization
Why you need to track employee feedback
Gathering employee feedback is important for many reasons that help to deliver positive outcomes for an organization. It helps to foster a sense of belonging and engagement between the employees and the company – the sort of “buy in” that makes them feel they are part of something bigger and are helping to deliver important projects and goals.
By asking employees for feedback, you are:
- Promoting effective communication
- Building solid working relationships
- Building trust between employees and management
- Showing employees you value them, which can improve engagement, boost morale and help you to retain top talent
- Receiving feedback that can help you to improve your leadership
- Able to find out about problems so that you can fix them
- Able to foster and encourage innovation
- Able to identify any obstacles that may prevent you reaching objectives and targets
- Helping to build a positive company culture that can give you an advantage over your competitors.
You should ask for feedback regularly so that any issues do not fester, and you can address them quickly. Look at ways of collecting anonymous feedback so that even hesitant employees can feel safe and empowered to have their say without fear of reprisals… after all, you don’t want to only hear from some voices within the company if you want to use feedback to helo drive and deliver meaningful change.
What is an employee feedback tool?
An employee feedback tool is a system that lets you ask your employees for feedback on any possible topic that affects your workplace, and lets you capture the data in a way that is easy to access and interpret.
10 best tools for employee feedback
There are lots of different employee feedback tools on the market that have different features that may be useful depending on employees’ needs. These are some of the best:
1. DeskAlerts
DeskAlerts is an internal communication software system that works by being deliberately disruptive so that the information sent to employees is guaranteed to be seen. It bypasses the email system so that these messages are not lost, skipped or ignored. DeskAlerts lets you gather feedback from employees by sending surveys, polls and quizzes where you can get results in real time.
It guarantees 100% delivery and fast feedback from employees. It takes employees only several minutes to answer a survey sent by their manager via DeskAlerts, and five minutes for the manager to review the results.
You can also use DeskAlerts to send news, policy updates and video messages from CEO.
2. 15Five
This app lets you send custom surveys to employees – either to the whole organization or to different groups of staff. There’s also a section for goals and tasks that people want to achieve so that they can be held accountable.
3. Trakstar
Trakstar is a system that specializes in the delivery of employee engagement surveys. It is aimed at human resources departments and provides customizable solutions for an organization, and can be integrated with a range of other human resource software systems.
4. ContactMonkey
ContactMonkey is a system that lets you email surveys to employees and provides an analytics dashboard where you can analyze your insights. The system is easy to use and lets you drag and drop embedded surveys into emails. You can also include emoji reaction, thumbs up/thumbs down responses and yes and no answers.
5. Kazoo
Kazoo is an employee feedback software tool that helps provide managers with information that is actionable and meaningful. By using the Kazoo templates, you can find out deep insights, including any strengths or opportunities for the company. It can also be used for coaching and mentoring support between managers and their direct reports.
6. Workmates by HR Cloud
Workmates is a platform for engagement that is based online so that managers can track team performance and improve efficiencies. The system lets you ask employees to share how they feel at that point in time as well as send surveys and provide the tools to help you analyze the results. It can also be used for other HR functions such as onboarding new employees, running employee recognition programs and more.
7. Officevibe
This platform enables you to gather specific insights from team members so you can identify anything that they are dissatisfied with while also identifying opportunities to increase efficiency. You can use it to send weekly surveys and package your resuts in a way that can be shared as reports with the whole company. The system has a custom polling option that will let you get feedback about different projects.
8. Culture Amp
The Culture Amp system gives you the tools you need to run performance reviews as well as culture and pulse surveys all tin the same place. Data can be reviewed based on the stage of the employee’s lifecycle with the company to pinpoint where there may be ongoing cultural issues. The analysis will let you determine the most important drivers for morale and engagement within your company. Surveys can be sent to entire teams, or personalized questions can be sent to specific team members.
9. TINYpulse
TINYpulse is employee engagement software that has been designed to make it simpler for companies to gather employee feedback and boost their employee engagement levels. It features a range of different tools to help managers find out how their employees feel about issues that affect the company. There are different ways of sending feedback, including anonymously. TINYpulse will let you track engagement levels over a period of time to identify any trends or improvements.
10. Motivosity
Motivosity will let you track various types of measurements associated with employee feedback and engagement, such as Employee Net Promoter Scores and pulse surveys so that you can display all the information in the same place on a dashboard, via automated insights. Motivosity provides an anonymous employee feedback tool and can be used to benchmark the company against others in the industry.
Download 41 questions for your anonymous survey for free.
How to choose the best employee feedback tool for your organization
Different companies have different needs depending on their structures, their industry, their corporate goals, their employee demographics, etc. So the right employee feedback tool for one organization won’t necessarily be the right one for another.
To determine the best tools for employee feedback for your organization, you should evaluate the following:
- What are you trying to measure?
- What is your budget?
- Do you have any technical constraints?
- Do you need an easy to use system or one that requires some skill to manage?
- What features are necessary?
- What features are only ‘nice to haves’?
With these questions answered you can look at the different employee engagement tools on the market to determine if they suit your needs.
Before you make a decision, make sure you understand the features that they include to make sure they align with your priorities. Are there any missing functionalities? Look at customer reviews before making a final decision.
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Companies that have reliable data are better placed to make the best decisions that will drive future success. Knowing the mood of the workplace and where there are any pain points or problems for employees will help you to drive efficiencies, and therefore productivity and profitability to make sure your business stands out from the competition.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I collect employees' feedback anonymously?
Many employee feedback tools have an option where you can receive information from employees in an anonymous manner. Usually there will be settings that allow you send an anonymous employee survey. You should also ensure you structure any questions in a way that employees cannot be inadvertently identified by their answers.
Learn more about the anonymous employee survey.
How do you gather staff feedback?
There are different ways to gather staff feedback. This includes townhalls, team meetings, one-on-one consultations with employees, focus groups, suggestion boxes, comments sections on company blog posts or forums, as well as sending surveys, polls and quizzes.
What is the best way to collect feedback?
The best ways to collect collect feedback is via a survey that asks specific questions that can then be analyzed to determine answers.
How do you monitor employee happiness?
Employee happiness can be monitored through the conduct of an employee happiness survey. This lets you gather insights into employee happiness in real time. You can follow up with further surveys to determine if there is a change in happiness levels – either positively or negatively.
