Engaged employees are more productive, more collaborative, and more likely to stay working for your company. And with 33% of hiring managers predicting that employee turnover will increase in 2024, there’s never been a better time to get the right employee engagement tech on your team.
Employee engagement apps are intuitive and easy to use. They enjoy high rates of adoption. And they offer a range of features that support employee engagement.
But which are the best of the many employee app options available? In this guide, we look at the seven best employee engagement apps for 2024 and explain a little more about why an app could benefit your business.
Best employee engagement apps for 2024
The best employee engagement solution varies depending on your industry, the functionality you need, and the engagement metrics you want to improve. Here are our top picks for this year.
Blink: best employee app for frontline workers
Workleap Officevibe: best employee app for EX data
Engagement Multiplier: best employee engagement app for small businesses
Bonusly: best employee app for rewards and recognition
WeThrive: best employee app for mental health support
Culture Amp: best app for performance management
Workvivo: best employee app for large, multi-lingual organizations
1. Blink — best employee engagement app for frontline workers
Blink is an employee engagement app built specifically for frontline workers. It brings employee engagement tools to every employee smartphone.
Frontline workers don’t need a desktop computer or even a company email address to access the Blink app. Instead, a simple sign-on process gives them access to an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard.
Here, they can view employee communications, respond to surveys, read policy documents, and use the newsfeed to take part in the company conversation.
They can also use the Blink Hub to access the other workplace tools you use. With a couple of clicks, they can view their current training module, their pay stub, or their upcoming shifts.
Managers get lots of useful engagement features too — like recognition and survey tools. They can also use Blink’s workforce analytics to measure engagement and make data-driven decisions.
All in all, the Blink employee app helps frontline teams to connect with each other and with leadership. It ensures they have access to the people, comms, and tools they need to do their jobs well.
Pricing
Pricing is available on request.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.6/5
- G2: 4.6/5
See Blink in action. Get your free demo.
2. Workleap Officevibe — best employee app for EX data
Performance management and recognition tools are part of the Workleap Officevibe employee app. But its most impressive features revolve around employee feedback. This app has a range of tools to help your HR team understand employee sentiment and make data-backed improvements.
Pulse surveys, onboarding surveys, eNPS scores — there are plenty of ways to find out what employees are thinking. You can also launch anonymous surveys so you know you’re getting honest, unfiltered feedback from employees.
Officevibe then helps you make sense of the feedback you’ve gathered. You can use reports to identify trending feedback topics. And use well-presented survey data to benchmark employee experience (EX) results and set targets.
Pricing
Workleap Officevibe has a free version with limited functionality. Prices for paid plans start at $3.50 USD per user per month.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.6/5
- G2: 4.3/5
3. Engagement Multiplier — best employee engagement app for small businesses
Engagement Multiplier is a reasonably priced app aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. It’s not as in-depth as some of the other employee engagement software on this list. But it can be really useful for new companies and start-ups wanting to learn more about their engagement levels.
Features include benchmark assessments, anonymous data collection, recommended actions, and the ability to create custom employee engagement surveys.
Pricing
Prices start from $7.20 USD per user per month.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.8/5
- G2: 4.3/5
4. Bonusly — best employee app for rewards and recognition
Bonusly is all about motivating your teams with employee recognition and rewards. The app lets you give each employee an allowance of points. They allocate these points to co-workers, appreciating them for their support, for doing a great job, or just for being an awesome work friend.
Recipients can then exchange their points for a variety of different rewards, choosing between big brand gift cards, company merchandise, and custom rewards chosen by your company. Employees can also convert their reward points into charitable donations.
Bonusly supports the kind of peer-to-peer recognition that engages employees. It also allows you to share recognition in a company-wide feed, so you improve motivation and amplify company culture to every member of every team.
Pricing
Bonusly offers new users a free trial. Paid plans start from $5 USD per user per month, plus the cost of employee rewards.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.8/5
- G2: 4.8/5
5. WeThrive — best employee app for mental health support
WeThrive is an employee engagement platform focused on the mental health of your workers. It helps you create surveys to check on employee wellness and take action to safeguard it.
The app’s mental health and wellbeing survey helps you to identify the root causes of stress, burnout, and anxiety. An easy-to-use feedback dashboard segments results by team, location, department, tenure, and manager so it’s easy to see where improvements need to be made.
The app also uses feedback data to suggest wellbeing actions for your managers so it’s easy to decide the next steps.
Pricing
Pricing is available on request.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.7/5
- G2: 4.6/5
6. Culture Amp — best employee engagement app for performance management
Culture Amp is an employee platform built around employee feedback and analytics. It also has some excellent performance management tools.
You can use 360-degree feedback to find out how employees are doing. You can use goal-setting functions to align employee work with company strategy. And you can use 1-on-1s to encourage meaningful communication between managers and employees.
With tools that support regular coaching and feedback, Culture Amp aims to provide organizations with everything they need to build a culture of continuous improvement and high employee engagement.
Pricing
Pricing is available upon request.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.7/5
- G2: 4.5/5
7. Workvivo — best employee app for large, multi-lingual organizations
Workvivo is owned by Zoom. It’s a desktop intranet that comes with a user-friendly employee app.
There are lots of community and social features for employees to engage with. You have the option to live-stream company updates in real-time. And, with Spaces, users can create their own community groups
For large organizations with employees who speak a range of different languages, Workvivo has some particularly useful tools. The auto-translation feature allows you to easily translate posts into a user’s preferred language. There’s also the option to auto-translate video subtitles.
Pricing
Pricing is available upon request.
Reviews
- Capterra: 4.7/5
- G2: 4.8/5
6 advantages of an employee engagement app
The best employee engagement software meets employees where they are. These days, that tends to be on their smartphones. And that’s why employee mobile apps are an increasingly popular choice.
Apps are inherently engaging and very easy to use. In fact, 53% of frontline workers already use messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for work-related conversations.
When you replace those apps with your own user-friendly employee app, you make communication more secure — and make it a key part of company culture, too.
Here are six other advantages of mobile-first employee engagement tools:
1. An employee app reduces costs and improves profitability
Construction giant Caterpillar found increasing engagement helped save $8.8 million at one of its European factories in just one year. The company also improved customer ratings and increased profits by $2 million.
Gallup research shows that Caterpillar’s cost savings aren’t an anomaly. They looked at thousands of teams and found that highly engaged businesses experience:
- A 43% decrease in employee turnover
- A 10% improvement in customer satisfaction
- An 18% uptick in sales
- A 23% increase in profitability
Employee engagement has a big impact on a company’s bottom line. So an employee engagement app tends to have a high return on investment.
2. An employee app improves communication without adding to the noise
An employee app streamlines company communication by putting everything in one, searchable location.
A social-style news feed. Employee surveys. Messages from management. With an app, teams know exactly where to go to get the information they need.
Managers also get the tools they need to highlight critical messages and ensure employees read them.
3. You connect every member of your workforce — including those on the frontline
To make a success of employee engagement, you need to take every member of the workforce with you. That includes those hard-to-reach employees working on the frontline of your organization.
Deskless workers get the raw end of the deal in terms of engagement tech. Only 10% of frontline workers say they have high access to the tools, tech, and opportunities they need to connect and advance in their workplace.
But these workers are in greatest need of engagement intervention. Deskless employees are less trusting and engaged, and more likely to experience burnout than their desk-based peers.
An employee app ensures frontline workers aren’t excluded from company comms and culture. You take engagement beyond the office and a desktop computer and put it in the palm of every employee’s hand.
A good app is also easy and intuitive to use. It enjoys high rates of user adoption. So by using an employee app, you make engagement tech more accessible than ever to all employees.
4. You make work more engaging and efficient
The best employee engagement apps put the most effective engagement tools in one, single place. You give employees access to the things we know help to improve employee engagement:
- Training and development
- Recognition
- Two-way communication and collaboration
- Feedback opportunities
You also remove friction and frustration from the work day. Because employees can access all the comms, tools, and resources they need via your employee app, they become more efficient and productive.
Employees can get on with doing their jobs to the best of their ability. Managers save time thanks to improved communication channels and employee self-serve resources. That translates into increased levels of staff satisfaction.
5. Employee engagement apps support frontline safety
Employee engagement makes for better workplace safety and fewer workplace accidents. According to Gallup, companies with high engagement experience 64% fewer safety incidents than those with low levels of engagement.
An employee app supports frontline safety because workers have all policy documents and safety procedures at their fingertips. They also have a direct line to managers, so it’s quick and easy to report safety or maintenance concerns.
6. Managers get access to data and analytics
When employees engage with your organization via an employee app, managers get access to valuable user data and analytics.
They get insight into how people are using the app and how they’re engaging with company communications. They get to know what engagement looks like for different teams, locations, and managers. Use an app with great integrations and you get insight into how employees are using other workplace tools, too.
The best employee engagement apps present this data in a way that is easy to understand and act upon. So your teams have everything they need to make employee engagement improvements going forward.
Does your company need an employee engagement app? 3 key questions
Staff engagement apps aren’t the best fit for every company. You can figure out if your organization would benefit from this by answering the following questions.
Do we have a communication channel that reaches everyone?
Effective internal communication is the foundation of engagement. So you need a reliable communication channel for all employees, particularly when there’s a time-sensitive update to share.
Email may not be a viable internal communication strategy if some workers don’t have email addresses. Getting managers to make phone calls and send text messages takes up a lot of time. Paper notices up on a board are easy to miss.
If you have a patchwork of different communication channels, an employee mobile app is a great streamlining tool. It saves your comms team time — because they have fewer comms channels to maintain. And it makes communication more efficient, relevant, and reliable.
Are employees treated equally?
Fairness is really important for employee engagement. If an employee feels like someone else is getting preferential treatment, it’s unlikely they’ll bring their A-game. So when it comes to opportunities for engagement, it has to be a level playing field.
Use surveys to find out if frontline staff and office workers enjoy the same level of engagement and the same access to company comms, culture, and connection.
If some workers are feeling overlooked, an app can help you treat employees equally. Ditching a two-tier engagement strategy means everyone feels valued and like they belong.
Do we need to lighten the load for managers and HR teams?
When there isn’t an easy way to share company policies, resources, and comms, managers and HR teams often end up acting as gatekeepers. Employees have to ask for the information they need, which adds to the HR and management workload.
An employee app removes this bottleneck by allowing employees to access relevant information for themselves. They can view their schedule and vacation time. They can read the most recent safety policy and get details of the next company social event.
HR and management spend less time answering the same questions. And employees — with resources in the palm of their hands — feel more engaged with the organization.
Final thoughts: The best employee engagement apps
An employee engagement app can be a game-changer when it comes to your employee engagement strategy. Whether you’re a small office with a few dozen employees or a multinational corporation with hundreds of stores, the best employee engagement apps help your workers feel more connected.
At Blink, we’re passionate about helping companies connect with their frontline employees. And our frontline employee engagement solution will help your workforce thrive in 2024 and beyond.
Blink’s employee app offers the same great features across mobile and desktop. A company newsfeed, recognition, secure chat, surveys, analytics, and more. So your teams have everything they need to improve employee engagement — along with staff satisfaction, productivity, and retention.
If you want an all-in-one frontline employee engagement solution, get started with Blink today!
Employee engagement apps FAQs
What are staff apps?
Staff apps are mobile apps that help employees with their work tasks. They may include time tracking, scheduling, messaging, and shift-swapping features.
Employee engagement apps go a step further. They include features designed to improve employee engagement, communication, and connection.
Use an app for employee engagement and you strengthen the relationship between individual employees and the company. You also improve your overall team engagement, boosting employee retention.
How do you engage employees on apps?
There are a few key ways to keep employees engaged with an app:
- Use push notifications for timely announcements and company news
- Encourage employee interaction with features like forums, chats, and polls
- Offer rewards or recognition through points, badges, and leaderboards
- Make it easy to access important company information like employee handbooks and contact lists
- Ensure managers are engaging in two-way conversations with employees
Why is an employee app an essential tool for frontline teams?
An employee engagement mobile app is an essential tool for frontline teams because it helps them stay connected wherever they’re working. They don’t need a desktop computer or a company email address to connect with company culture and co-workers.
With an app, frontline workers can easily access company news, contact lists, and important documents. Apps also provide a direct way for managers to give feedback and recognition, and for employees to ask questions and get support.
An app for employees is a cutting-edge addition to any employee engagement strategy.
What are some disadvantages of using Slack?
Slack is a popular corporate communication tool. But it doesn’t offer the same features as an employee engagement app.
On Slack, it can be difficult to keep track of conversations across different channels. It’s easy for important messages to get lost in the chaos. In addition, Slack doesn’t provide the full suite of features offered by employee engagement platforms, like Blink and Officevibe.
Top employee engagement apps include features dedicated to measuring employee engagement. Think surveys, polls, and reports. Unlike Slack, they have everything HR and comms teams need to measure and improve employee engagement.
