Welcome to our deep dive into the best employee survey tools on the market!
In an era where understanding and enhancing employee engagement is more critical than ever, the right survey tool can be a game-changer for your organization.
After meticulously evaluating 23 different options, we’ve distilled our findings to bring you the top 5 tools that truly stand out.
Employee survey tools are specialized software applications designed to facilitate and streamline the process of gathering feedback from employees within an organization.
Beyond just collecting data, these tools are equipped with analytical capabilities to interpret the feedback, providing valuable insights into employee morale, workplace culture, and overall employee experience.
This analysis helps leaders and managers make informed decisions and implement changes that can lead to improved employee satisfaction, better team dynamics, and enhanced organizational performance.
In essence, employee survey tools are a vital component in understanding and enhancing the employee experience, fostering a more engaged and productive workforce.
Core features that should be in all employee survey tools
- Anonymous surveys: It provides honest feedback from employees, as they can share thoughts without fear of repercussions.
- Pulse surveys: These quick, frequent surveys provide real-time insights into team morale, helping you make timely adjustments to maintain productivity and engagement.
- Flexible surveys: The ability to customize surveys allows you to target specific areas of interest or concern, making the feedback you receive more relevant and actionable.
- Good reporting: Clear and comprehensive reporting translates survey data into actionable insights, enabling better decision-making and strategy formulation.
- Integrations with communication tools: Seamless integration with existing communication platforms ensures higher participation rates and easier access to surveys, enhancing overall efficiency.
- Ease of use and intuitive UI: A user-friendly interface allows that all team members, regardless of their tech proficiency, can easily participate, leading to higher response rates and more inclusive feedback.
The reasons we disqualified more than 17 tools from our comparison
Generic survey tools
We’ve seen companies use generic survey tools for employee surveys and they’re missing so many core features highlighted previously, these tools shouldn’t be considered.
- SurveySparrow
- SurveyMonkey
- Qualtrics
- And many more like Google Forms or Typeform
NB: Qualtrics has some specialized tools for employee surveys but they’re insufficient to qualify.
Hidden pricing
We believe in pricing transparency and if a company decides not to show pricing for a tool as simple as employee surveys, it’s not very trustworthy.
Here are the tools we removed from our comparison because of this criterium:
- Kudos
- Limeade Listening (TINYpulse)
- Workvivo
- Cooleaf
- Peakon
- CultureMonkey
- Leapsome
- Culture Amp
- Vantage Circle
No self-service
We believe you should be able to try out a tool for free before having a call with a salesperson. Having to request a demo for all the tools you want to compare is a waste of time.
All the solutions with the price hidden are like that. But there are also a few other tools with pricing but with only the ability to request a demo:
But beware of the survey fatigue
While employee survey tools have become more prevalent, their tendency toward feature overload can hinder their effectiveness by overwhelming employees and managers, ultimately leading to slower decision-making and reduced employee engagement.
We explain in details why in this article.
Top 5 employee survey tools
After disqualifying all these products, we ended up with these 5 tools:
1/ TeamMood is the best employee survey tool
TeamMood has all the core features mentioned above: pulse surveys, anonymous surveys, custom & flexible surveys, integration with communication tools, great reporting, and it’s easy to use.
It’s also the best rated on review sites at 4.8/5.0 and the most affordable at 2$/month/user.
And that’s why it’s the best employee survey tool.
In addition to the core features, here are a few other features that make TeamMood better than the alternatives.
Reacting to surveys
Everyone within a team can react to others’ moods and comments anonymously. This helps create a space where everyone feels understood and supported.
There’s also a feature named “Kudos” to make reacting to successes even more seamless, boosting team morale by acknowledging efforts and spreading positive energy.
Mood tracking
In addition to employee surveys, TeamMood allows you to track the mood of employees.
Tracking the mood is the better than other KPIs for employee morale.
There are plenty of KPIs you can use to measure how well employees are doing: productivity, lead time, bugs, etc.
But they might feel the pressure to always do more to improve KPIs and it’s always going to lead to stress.
Therefore, mood tracking is a much better way to measure employee morale.
In-depth reporting tools
In addition to a niko-niko calendar to quickly visualize a timeline of the moods of the teams, you have the mood average variation, best/worst days, wordclouds, and participation rate.
You can see the trends at a high level, then dive deep with segmentation by team, department, location, or really anything you need. Leadership gets regular check-ins of the mood from collaborators, and reports can be made in just a couple of clicks.
2/ Why 15five isn’t the best employee survey tool?
15five is probably a close second.
But some of the reviews left worried us a little bit when it comes to customer support.
“Lack of customer support. You have to do all of it yourself they have few webinars but nothing on the individual front to get it sorted.”
3/ Why Officevibe isn’t the best employee survey tool?
We’ve seen a few reviews mentioning that the platform was buggy and not that easy to use so we would be a bit careful before using it:
“Poor usability and buggy software. Difficult to navigate and some features don’t work properly.”
It also has one of the worst customer ratings out of all the tools we looked at.
4/ Why Connecteam isn’t the best employee survey tool?
Connecteam is an all-in-one solution. They don’t just have employee surveys, but also a lot of other features.
If you need all these features, it’s an upside.
But if you only want surveys, you will get a product that is harder to use than tools focused on employee surveys.
Here’s one review from G2 explaining the problem:
“Since it was so customizable, it was really left up to me to create what I wanted and it was quite time-consuming. Also, some features were not perfected yet and did not always give me the experience I wanted”
It also means surveys get less attention because they have to work on so many other features so you will always have subpar tools for your employee surveys.
5/ Why ThriveSparrow isn’t the best employee survey tool?
ThriveSparrow is a relatively new product and is currently missing some features like an integration to Microsoft Teams or more in-depth reporting tools.
Also without any reviews on G2 or Capterra, it’s hard to have confidence on the platform.
Check out TeamMood
- TeamMood increases feedback frequency. Get daily or weekly notifications to everyone in your team in just a few minutes after signing up.
- TeamMood is fun. The only thing your teammates need to do is click on their corresponding mood and they are done. Written comments are optional. It’s perfect to start getting more feedback. And it’s easy and quick enough to keep this habit in the long term.
- TeamMood is anonymous. Your teammates won’t be scared to give honest feedback because their identity is hidden.
- TeamMood helps you transform feedback into action. Our analytics dashboard help you monitor and analyze feedback to uncover actionable insights more easily.
Learn more about TeamMood
and sign up here
Header photo by Gautier Pfeiffer