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11 min read

Top 6 Tools to Measure Employee Engagement Compared

Global HR

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Author

Lorelei Trisca

Published

January 10, 2025

Last Update

January 14, 2025

Table of Contents

What are the different measurement tools to measure employee engagement?

6 Best tools for measuring employee engagement

Summary table comparing the best employee engagement survey tools

How can I select the right tool to measure employee engagement in my organization?

Measure and improve staff engagement with Deel Engage

Key takeaways
  1. Employee engagement measurement tools help identify disengagement, uncover workforce sentiment, and align team goals with business objectives.
  2. Prioritize platforms with robust analytics, real-time feedback, communication tools, and actionable insights for informed decision-making.
  3. Use Deel Engage to manage global workforces while ensuring employees, contractors, and freelancers feel valued, motivated, and engaged.

Employee engagement is the foundation for driving meaningful outcomes in an increasingly competitive and distributed workplace. But let’s face it: keeping track of team sentiment, identifying signs of disengagement, and aligning workforce goals with organizational objectives can feel overwhelming, especially when managing contractors and freelancers globally.

At Deel, we understand these challenges better than anyone else and have a proven track record of supporting diverse, remote workforces.

This blog compares the top six tools reshaping how organizations measure and boost employee engagement. Discover the key features to unlock your workforce’s full potential, from pulse surveys to analytics that predict turnover risks. Because when your employees are engaged, your entire organization wins.

Disclaimer: The data outlined in this content is accurate at the time of publishing and is subject to change or updating. Deel does not make any representations as to the completeness or accuracy of the information on this page.

What are the different measurement tools to measure employee engagement?

Employee engagement is a dynamic and complex affair. Your workers might be delighted with their jobs and your organization’s culture today, but that may change next week or two months from now.

They may have great relationships with their coworkers, a healthy work-life balance, and managers who contribute to their success. Yet, they may still quit or consider leaving because there are few opportunities for career advancement.

To get a holistic view of your employee engagement levels, how they shift over time, how they impact behavior, and the improvements your workers would like to see, you can’t just rely on one process or method. You need a mix of measurement tools and approaches.

Survey tools

Modern talent and employee engagement survey tools save you the time and stress of manually running and analyzing surveys. They allow companies to collect high-level feedback on the factors hindering or driving organizational engagement.

Survey tools enable you to measure how people feel about the different aspects of the employee experience that contribute to engagement, including culture, well-being, inclusion, autonomy, leadership, compensation, job satisfaction, and more.

Pulse survey platforms

Although the quarterly or annual employee engagement survey you send out can tell you a lot about how happy and satisfied your employees are, it may not accurately reflect your employees’ feelings throughout the year.

Employee pulse survey platforms can help with this. They allow you to continuously listen in on your employees and find out what’s working or not working for them by sending out short questionnaires regularly.

This way, you can diagnose any fluctuations in employee engagement and morale in real-time and take steps to address the root cause before the situation worsens.

Engagement metrics trackers

If you’re not correctly measuring employee engagement, you’ll end up with questionable results that do not reveal the actual state of your engagement levels. When you devise talent and employee engagement strategies or make business decisions based on this unreliable data, they may prove ineffective or have disastrous consequences.

Using employee engagement metrics trackers can help you pick up on trends and determine whether the changes you’ve made are positively or negatively impacting morale by monitoring relevant employee engagement KPIs and metrics such as:

Looking to take your employee engagement efforts to the next level? Explore Deel’s comprehensive guide on creating an employee engagement action plan.

6 Best tools for measuring employee engagement

Let’s look at some of the best examples of contractor and employee engagement survey tools currently in the market and the unique advantages they can offer your business.

Deel Engage

Deel Engage is a talent management platform designed to help organizations measure and enhance their people experience, enabling a highly motivated and engaged workforce.

With the survey module on Deel Engage, you can gather feedback from your staff to understand perceptions of your company’s culture and create an environment that supports and empowers people to perform their best. The additional Engage modules—career development, performance management, and career management— allow organizations to strategically address current or potential issues and boost engagement before challenges arise.

The platform also features powerful AI-driven analytics you can use to summarize survey results into an easily digestible report.

Key features

  1. Deel Engage supports various people engagement survey types, including pulse surveys, remote work surveys, wellness surveys, eNPS surveys, and leadership assessments. These tools provide insights into satisfaction levels across all aspects of the team experience
  2. The Engage Slack plug-in enables features like running pulse surveys directly within Slack for easier participation from contractors and freelancers
  3. The platform allows customization of surveys, including switching between non-anonymous and anonymous feedback options tailored to organizational and talent needs
  4. Combine qualitative and quantitative survey methods by using open-ended or rating scale question types—or both
  5. Deel Engage enables global companies to survey both direct employees and individual contractors on a unified platform, making it ideal for organizations with diverse workforces
  6. All Deel Engage customers receive platform onboarding, a dedicated customer success manager, and access to guides, tutorials, and best-practice materials. When needed, customers can request support from Deel’s L&D consultants, who can assist with setting up specific people processes

Pros

  • Easy to use and integrates smoothly into existing workflows
  • Helps engage employees and contractors from their first day through onboarding and beyond
  • Automates processes like survey reminders for better participation rates
  • Offers a wide range of use cases beyond engagement, such as onboarding, training, performance management, career pathing, and people development
  • Ideal for companies looking to consolidate talent management into a single solution, ensuring unified data

Cons

  • The survey module is not available as a standalone product. You must purchase the complete Deel Engage solution. This may not suit organizations looking to reduce spending.

Pricing

Deel Engage plans start at $20/employee/month/. The global-first HRIS built to scale with your business remains free to use.

Surveys
Collect insightful worker feedback
Drive engagement with custom surveys. Use central dashboards to analyze data and create action plans with other Deel Engage tools.

CultureMonkey

CultureMonkey is an employee engagement program that allows businesses to listen to their employees and make data-backed decisions to improve their culture through surveys and feedback.

Key features

  1. Capabilities for sending multi-lingual, customizable, and anonymous surveys measuring over 15 drivers of engagement, including recognition, mental health, work-life balance, leadership, and workplace autonomy
  2. CultureMonkey’s sentiment analysis tool can analyze the employee feedback you gather and determine whether the overall attitude is positive, negative, or neutral
  3. The platform enables you to benchmark your engagement scores against high-performing organizations in your industry to better understand where you stand and your goals

Pros

  • There is a wide variety of pre-made survey templates and questions
  • The tool offers advanced dashboards with options for viewing survey reports by location, roles, department, and manager level
  • It integrates with other business tools such as Slack, Zoho People, Google Suite, and Microsoft Teams

Cons

Pricing

CultureMonkey offers custom pricing, so you need to contact the company for a quote.

Sogolytics

Sogolytics is an online employee survey tool that enables organizations to prioritize engagement and uncover behind-the-scenes insights that can help them improve employee retention and satisfaction by asking the right questions at the right time.

Key features

  1. Sogolytics provides eNPS and text sentiment analysis tools to enable you to read between the lines and monitor the pulse of your workforce in real-time
  2. With Sogolytics’ automated pulse surveys, you can schedule surveys to go out at specific times, track responses, and nudge employees to complete them without monitoring the entire process manually
  3. Robust analytics enable you to visualize feedback data and identify significant trends, which you can use to improve employee engagement

Pros

  • Customer support is quick and responsive
  • The tool supports integrations with other business tools
  • The user interface offers pop messaging that guides users on using the software

Cons

Pricing

Sogolytics has a free plan with basic features and four paid-tiered plans:

  • Plus for $25 per month, billed as $299 annually
  • Pro for $199 per month billed monthly or $66 per month billed as $788 annually
  • Premium for $299 per month billed monthly or $99 per month billed as $1188 annually
  • Enterprise feedback with custom pricing

Empuls

Empuls gives companies the tools to measure employee sentiment and engagement and gather actionable feedback on building a winning workplace environment where everyone feels happy, satisfied, and motivated.

Key features

  1. Find out how engaged your employees are and how loyal they are to your organization with Empuls’ eNPS, pulse surveys, well-being surveys, and more
  2. Empuls follows up survey reports with recommended action plans that you can use to address factors that are causing or are likely to cause disengagement
  3. The platform allows you to leverage anonymity and open-ended questions in your surveys to get more detailed and honest responses on what’s working and what needs to be improved

Pros

  • The tool has additional functionalities for setting up and managing peer recognition, rewards, and benefits programs
  • Its gamification features can boost survey participation rates
  • There are data visualization tools for rendering survey reports in more engaging and easy-to-understand formats

Cons

Pricing

Empuls’ survey module starts at $2 per employee per month, billed annually.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a survey and feedback management solution designed to help organizations measure engagement and analyze results to uncover what motivates their employees and how they can boost satisfaction, retention, and job performance.

Key features

  1. SurveyMonkey enables you to build your employee engagement surveys from scratch or select from the pre-made options for assessing employee engagement and other use cases in its vast template library
  2. There are over 25 question types and hundreds of pre-written questions, so you can gather nuanced feedback to help you improve your engagement scores in whatever format works best for your organization
  3. The platform uses AI to help you optimize your survey for increased participation and better responses by detecting biases in your questions and rating how easy it is to complete before you send it out

Pros

  • The interface is easy to use and has extensive customization tools
  • The software breaks down how people interact with each section or question in your survey so you can refine future questionnaires for better results

Cons

Pricing

SurveyMonkey has a basic free plan with a limited number of responses per survey and several paid plans to choose from, including:

  • Advantage for $39 per month, billed annually
  • Standard for $99 per month, billed monthly
  • Premium for $139 per month, billed annually
  • Team Advantage for $30 per user (minimum of three users) per month, billed annually
  • Team Premium for $92 per user (minimum three users) per month billed annually.
  • Enterprise at a custom cost

Sparkbay

Sparkbay is a SaaS solution that helps companies measure engagement and understand how their workers feel and what they need to thrive by giving them the tools to run engaging surveys and collect meaningful feedback.

Key features

  1. Sparkbay offers pulse surveys with short, science-backed questions that reveal the state of your workforce engagement throughout the year
  2. Interactive dashboards allow managers to compare results or break them down by office, department, title, tenure, demography, direct manager, and more. This way, they can understand what their engagement data is saying at a granular level
  3. The platform’s prediction engine monitors feedback for signs of disengagement and sends alerts whenever an employee segment shows an increased risk of voluntary turnover

Pros

  • Data presentation in reports is simple and sleek
  • The Heatmap feature shows you your top engagement issues per employee demographics and department

Cons

  • Exporting engagement survey data from the platform can be a laborious process
  • The length of survey periods can’t be increased or customized.
  • Access to a dedicated customer success manager requires a minimal commitment of $5,000

Pricing

Sparkbay offers three pricing tiers:

  • Up to 200 users for $5 per person per month billed annually
  • 201 to 500 users for $4 per person per month, billed annually
  • 501 to 1000 users for $3 per person per month, billed annually

Summary table comparing the best employee engagement survey tools

Feature Deel Engage Culture Monkey Sogolytics Empuls SurveyMonkey Sparkbay
Highly customizable survey builder
Qualitative & quantitative surveys
Advanced anonymity settings
Engagement & pulse surveys
eNPS surveys
Feedback analytics
Role-based dashboards & permissions
Trend analysis and data comparison
Automated survey reminders
AI-powered survey creation and analysis
Data segmentation and data visualization dashboards
Survey deadline customization
Text/sentiment analysis
Industry benchmarking
Question bank
Template library Coming soon
Dedicated L&D consultant
Single sign-on
HRMS integrations
Slack integration
Importing old feedback results
Performance reviews
Complimentary modules for improving engagement (360) feedback, 1:1s, learning, career management, connections, praise and recognition Feedback, praise and recognition Praise and recognition Praise and recognition

How can I select the right tool to measure employee engagement in my organization?

Here are some tips to keep in mind when researching employee engagement measurement tools to enable you to choose an option that aligns with your specific context, needs, and preferences:

  1. If you need a simple eNPS tracker, you can settle for a super cheap, no-frills survey tool that’s easy to use and offers basic features for measuring engagement
  2. If you want an extensive question bank, prioritize tools that provide a large library of pre-written science-backed survey questions and multiple question types covering different employee experience scenarios from onboarding to exit
  3. If you want complex analytics, the ideal option should enable you to track key employee engagement metrics, predict turnover risk, and link results to business metrics and performance. It should also allow you to slice, dice, and analyze your engagement data by department, location, unit, manager, and demographics and offer recommendations based on generated insights to make your people feel heard
  4. If you have a limited budget, look for a tool with affordable pricing options that can adjust to your needs as your workforce grows without drastically increasing costs. Additionally, it should offer a free trial and monthly billing so you can test-drive the software and quickly back out at any time if it doesn’t suit your needs without risking a substantial financial investment
  5. If your organization is small or large, confirm that the tool you’re considering is designed for your team size and will provide effective support in collecting and processing your survey feedback and generating employee engagement insights from meaningful perspectives to your company
  6. If you have a distributed workforce, you will need a tool that allows you to investigate the realities and experiences of all your employees as effectively as possible. Opt for a solution that lets you create remote work surveys and surveys in languages other than English

So, if you want to go beyond measuring and start acting on your engagement data, then consider a complete employee engagement solution, like Deel Engage, that gives you features you can use to build career frameworks, run training programs, design learning materials, facilitate employee development, and coach your managers to be better leaders.

Measure and improve staff engagement with Deel Engage

To truly understand if your workforce is satisfied, motivated, and committed to driving your business forward, you need more than just a gut feeling—you need actionable insights on their engagement levels.

Simply asking people to rate their engagement in a meeting won’t give you the full picture. Deel Engage is a great solution for measuring staff engagement and improving it:

  1. Track key engagement metrics such as talent satisfaction, well-being, and eNPS scores
  2. Analyze feedback comprehensively
  3. Get data-driven recommendations to address your most pressing engagement challenges

But measuring engagement is just the beginning. With Deel’s full Engage suite, you’ll monitor engagement and take strategic actions to enhance it. All Engage modules help you create an environment where your talent can thrive, boosting morale and performance.

Ready to transform your people experience and build a more engaged workforce? Schedule a demo to see how Deel Engage can help you measure and improve engagement effectively.

FAQs

The most common tool for measuring employee engagement is surveys. Companies use surveys to evaluate different engagement drivers and gather feedback about employees' motivations and job satisfaction levels by asking targeted questions.

The three aspects that actively contribute to measuring employee engagement are physical, cognitive, and emotional. The physical element focuses on how much physical engagement employees experience during work. The cognitive aspect concerns employees' concentration level and confidence in their ability to execute their responsibilities. Finally, the emotional aspect deals with how employees feel about their work environment regarding belonging, culture, professional growth opportunities, and relationships with coworkers and managers.

You can measure employee engagement activities via surveys, sentiment analysis, performance reviews, and stay or exit surveys, using metrics like employee net promoter score, absenteeism rate, turnover rate, post-training survey rate, employee satisfaction score, internal communication receptiveness, and more.

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About the author

Lorelei Trisca is a content marketing manager passionate about everything AI and the future of work. She is always on the hunt for the latest HR trends, fresh statistics, and academic and real-life best practices. She aims to spread the word about creating better employee experiences and helping others grow in their careers.

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