In recent years, employee experience has gone from a vague concept to one of the essential pillars of employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Companies are investing in designing, tracking, and measuring employee experience, which gave rise to a whole market niche dedicated to EX.

In this article, we’ll break down the definition and use cases for EX management software, suggest a list of the best options to use, and highlight features you should look for when choosing your platform.

Definition of employee experience management software

Employee experience management software provides companies and their human resources departments with tools to design, track, manage, and measure employee experience strategies, their results, and employee feedback.

With good EX management software, you can combine your HR workflows and initiatives in one place and make it easy to take action and focus on improving employee experience instead of juggling between apps.

Additionally, companies should also pay attention to the digital employee experience, which relates more closely to how employees interact with each other and the technology they use in everyday work. To nail down digital employee experience, companies need to bring HR and IT teams together to optimize workflows, software options, and experiences for employees on a daily basis.

7 Best employee experience solutions in 2023

Qualtrics

The EX software by Qualtrics offers employee feedback features and real-time analytics for companies. You can also map the analytics to your company’s organizational chart. Qualtrics helps companies see the impact of employee experience on productivity, job performance, and company goals.

Qualtrics has an AI-driven analytics feature, decision tools, 360-degree feedback, engagement tracking, and goal setting, among other key features.

Gable

Gable is a workplace management platform that helps companies manage workspaces for their remote employees. With Gable, companies can provide coworking spaces, meeting rooms, and event venues for employees everywhere and keep a pulse on how and why employees use these spaces.

Gable lets employees find and book workspaces nearby, connect and build relationships with their coworkers, and manage their workspace presence on their own terms. On the other hand, HR and People Operations teams manage and track budget spending, usage policies, and data on employee satisfaction, usage, and engagement from a single, robust dashboard.

Want to see Gable in action? Check out how other companies use Gable to build connections, showcase company culture, and manage a remote workforce with ease.

Lattice

Lattice is a full-scope people success platform, but the best choice for EX management is its Engagement platform. They offer real-time employee feedback data, which you can set up to track commitment to the company, job satisfaction, and many other aspects of employee experience.

Additionally, Lattice Engagement combines employee engagement data with their performance metrics, so HR teams can track the impact of engagement on productivity and performance and make adjustments to ensure team members are engaged, happy, and motivated at work. Gable integrates with HRIS tools (like BambooHR, Workday, hiBob), SSO, and Slack, to make communication and management seamless for both employees and HR teams.

Bonusly

Bonusly is an employee recognition platform that gives companies the chance to recognize and reward their employees and build culture and engagement through recognition.

Their recognition platform has points, badges, and rewards as a system of nurturing engagement, and their analytics tools show insights that help HR teams make decisions and improve outcomes. Bonusly helps encourage peer-to-peer feedback, which helps close the feedback loop, provides better team communication, and strengthens culture.

CultureAmp

Culture Amp is an employee experience platform that helps companies manage employee performance, engagement, and development, all while strengthening their company culture. They offer employee survey templates, analytics, as well as management tools that promote development, like check-ins and agendas, to make team communication easier.

Culture Amp integrates with many HR tools like BambooHR and Personio, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

15Five

15Five is a holistic performance management solution for HR teams. It helps companies connect the dots between performance and engagement, communicate and track OKRs, and train managers to help their teams perform better.

The key feature for HR teams is the performance suite, which lets them run performance reviews and track results team-wide, make informed career growth decisions, and analyze performance holistically.

Kona

Kona is a predictive people analytics tool designed as a Slack add-on. Kona helps remote teams with employee wellbeing and burnout prevention by gathering daily feedback from team members and turning those touchpoints into a predictive analysis of your team’s engagement.

Kona also facilitates manager support, as it lets them see how their team is feeling as a group as well as individual data, shows burnout scores, and gives out alerts on burnout detection, all of which help managers and HR teams to be proactive instead of reactive in their responses to engagement and wellbeing changes.

Oyster

Hiring, payroll, and benefits are an essential part of employee experience, particularly in global and remote teams. With Oyster, companies can hire, onboard, pay, and care for remote employees and global teams in one place.

Instead of switching between apps and trying to stay compliant internationally with your in-house team, Oyster helps you vet, automate, and simplify the process so your employees enjoy an easy and smooth experience every step of the way.

Features to look for in employee experience platforms

While it is unlikely you will find all of the features listed below in a single platform, we wanted to make a list of the essential elements of employee experience to consider when researching HR technology for EX (apart from pricing, of course!):

• Employee onboarding
• Real-time feedback
• Pulse surveys
• Performance management
• Integrations and automation
• Employee lifecycle monitoring
• Distributed workspace management
• Employee recognition
• Reporting and analytics
• User experience

Why you should use employee experience software

We think every employer should use EX software, as employees in every industry benefit from a better experience at work. However, for global, distributed, and remote companies, it’s essential to manage employee experience effectively, as a better EX helps their recruiting, retention, and engagement efforts.

Employee experience is made up of 3 key pillars: people, places, and technology. The job of employers is to design employee experience strategies that combine these pillars together to create a unified experience for employees everywhere.

Improving employee engagement and retention

In 2022, HR and People Ops experts listed employee retention and engagement as their #1 priority for the next year. And it’s hardly a surprise: it’s much less costly for companies to retain existing employees than hire new ones, but it’s also difficult to retain them in the age of The Great Resignation.

Additionally, employee engagement is a vital metric that determines employee satisfaction, predicts retention and indicates how well they are performing and whether the company is on the right track to hit its business goals.

Employee experience is one of the ways employers can ensure employees stay happy at work and have a sense of purpose and connection to their work — making them less inclined to be disengaged or switch jobs.

Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their employers, and companies with engaged employees have 2.5 times higher revenues than those where employees are disengaged

Keeping (remote) employees happy

Employee experience directly translates into how happy employees are at work, so employers should treat EX with the same importance they usually give to customer experience. Designing great onboarding for new hires, gathering feedback about the work environment, and tracking employee sentiment are all actions that tie into the happiness and engagement of your teams.

Using employee experience tools helps you keep employees happy, ensure they hit their KPIs and employee productivity targets and keep attrition at bay — all of which help the company’s bottom line and business outcomes.

Showcasing company culture

Managing employee experience is closely tied to how you showcase and maintain company culture, especially in remote teams. With distributed and remote work, it’s challenging to retain the sense of culture and belonging, especially if you don’t redesign the processes and experiences employees go through on a daily basis.

A solid EX strategy shows employees that the company takes workplace flexibility seriously and is ready to tailor employee experience to what workers need in the new, evolving workplace.

Make employee experience your top priority

Employee experience touches on every part of your company’s operations, from hiring and onboarding, through engagement and retention to bottom lines and business goals. Investing in employee experience management software lets your HR team focus on implementing their strategy and helping employees (and the company as a whole) thrive.