Offering an amazing digital employee experience used to be easy — or, at least, it used to seem straightforward. You could just rent out a downtown office space with great natural lighting, buy some modern-looking desks and comfy chairs, set up a snack bar and a ping pong table, and it would be hailed as the ideal organisation to work for.
But the switch to hybrid and remote working changed things. For many, their “digital workplace” has become their workplace. How can you ensure a great employee experience while your team members work from their favourite coffee shops or the comfort of their own homes?
Realistically, providing hybrid flexibility has become part of the “experience” that employees now expect. However, making that employee experience positive requires the deliberate creation of a digital workplace experience — remotely managing how employees interact with your company, its resources, their coworkers, and management. This is exactly what an employee experience platform is built to deliver.
Suggested reading: For more details on the future of hybrid working, check out our new eBook — Solving the Employee Experience Crisis.
What is an employee experience platform (EXP)?
An employee experience platform is a tool designed to improve how employees interact with all of the applications, resources and digital assets they use. It makes it easier to communicate, collaborate and connect by creating a personalised hub that puts everything employees need in one place. The goal of an EXP is to improve your team’s experience throughout their journey in your organisation and ultimately improve employee engagement.
Although an EXP greatly benefits remote and hybrid employees, it’s more transformative than that. Even in the office, most tasks are now digital. An employee experience platform closes the gap between in-office and WFH employees, creating a single digital workspace that is consistent for everyone. Overall, an EXP will help you:
- Increase engagement
- Streamline applications, preventing application overload
- Improve business alignment
- Improve team collaboration
- Integrate with your existing tools, making work easier
Here, we’re going to look at the leading employee experience platforms on the market, and how you can use each to improve your digital workplace.
Suggested reading: Learn more by reading our blog: ‘What is an Employee Experience Platform‘?
Best employee experience platforms you can use in 2023
HulerHub
HulerHub stands out because of its simplicity and stunning visual presentation. It brings the sophistication of consumer-grade technology to the workplace, providing a personalised access point for all your work resources. Using slick and information-rich Smart Tiles, Huler makes it simple to find what you need, at a glance. Custom dashboards can be personalised by employees and administrators, ensuring that the right information is presented clearly. Employees can access apps, files, links, message boards, newsletters and more with a single click.
Key features:
- Customised dashboards: With HulerHub, you have access to four core dashboards: Featured, MyTiles, Workplace and My Library. Each can be customised by both users and administrators, making it even easier to share relevant, timely content, information and tools across your business in just a few clicks.
- Personalised collections: Improve access to resources and share information within your organisation and externally. For example, you could share onboarding folders with employees who don’t have a login yet, share campaign assets with colleagues using a dedicated collection, or curate your own L&D resource collection. Collections aren’t limited to work-related content either. You can use them to stay up to date with the news, keep track of your favourite recipes, or store quick links to your most-used websites and apps.
- Dynamic search: The platform helps you find anything in seconds. Its dynamic search function uses keywords to sift through the files and links, so you can find the right resource even if you don’t know its exact name.
- Notification centre: HulerHub makes it easy to stay on top of updates within the platform, notifying users about new and updated content. This allows users to navigate directly to exactly what they need without having to jump around to other channels, like Slack, Teams or email.
- Dashboard insights: When you have administrator control, HulerHub shows you dashboard insights so you can understand how your team is using the platform, see what they engage with the most, and discover opportunities to improve employee experience.
Lattice
Lattice helps you improve your team’s experiences through customisable employee management. The platform focuses on reviews, feedback, and employee recognition, integrating performance management features directly into the platform, helping you get the most out of your employees.
Key features:
- Surveys and feedback: The platform sends out targeted people surveys so you can collect data and identify improvement opportunities. Its library offers a good variety of question templates but you can also include custom questions in your surveys.
- Actionable insights: With Lattice, it’s easy to find out what keeps your employees engaged and discover which of your actions have a powerful impact on their performance. The platform transforms the feedback you collect into actionable insights, so it’s easy to see how your staff’s personal goals align with the goals of your organisation.
- Goal and sentiment tracking: Lattice gives you an opportunity to assess your team’s mood, concerns, goal progression, and other criteria relevant to your business.
WorkTango
WorkTango enables you to bring your team together through constant feedback, communication, and goal tracking. The tool encourages your employees to express gratitude toward their coworkers and helps managers reward productive individuals.
Key Features:
- Goal tracking: WorkTango helps you create individual, team, department, and company goals. Employees and teams can collaborate to achieve certain goals, and everyone can see which goals are on track and which aren’t.
- Employee recognition: The platform enables you to create a culture of appreciation. Your team members can show recognition with reward points or tokens, and exchange the reward points they earn for gift cards, merchandise, charitable donations, and more.
- Improved communication: WorkTango paves the way to better conversations. Your staff can schedule one-on-one or one-to-many conversations with anyone in your people directory and send automated calendar invites. Conversation participants can record notes, and they can reference their records in other meetings.
Workvivo
Workvivo helps you improve company culture with simplified communications, public employee recognition, and real-time updates. The platform makes it easy to interact with your coworkers, including those working in departments you rarely get in touch with.
Key features:
- Multimedia communications: Workvivo enables your team members to communicate via multimedia messages. They can send each other recorded videos, livestreams, podcasts, news articles, and links. Employees can join different discussions and post updates to keep the conversations rolling.
- Personalised interface: With Workvivo, you can personalise your activity feed and integrate your favourite tools.
- Workplace insights: Workvivo enables you to send out surveys, polls, and pulse checks to collect feedback. The platform interprets the collected data and gives you insights into employee engagement.
Microsoft Viva
Microsoft Viva helps you foster a culture of growth and development. The platform encourages employees to make learning a part of their day-to-day lives, balance productivity and wellbeing, and organise their workspace.
Key Features:
- Learning hub: Microsoft Viva enables your team to access all the educational content they need with ease. The platform creates a centre of learning in Microsoft Teams where your employees can discover and share new resources, and track their learning progress.
- Communication and collaboration: Your employees can find everything they need to do their jobs in one place — conversations, news, files, ideas, and people. They can jump into existing conversations, collaborate to finish projects, and praise their coworkers.
- Actionable insights: Microsoft Viva offers actionable insights on team culture and helps you improve productivity while prioritising employee wellbeing. The platform provides personalised recommendations so you and your staff can do your best work.
Unily
Unily enables you to deliver better digital experiences to your employees. The platform creates a centralised location for all the tools in your software ecosystem and simplifies your communication.
Key Features:
- Simplified communication: With Unily, you can reach all your team members without difficulty. The platform enables you to create automated workflows with the help of pre-configured templates, so you can send out email blasts and improve your internal communication.
- Targeted experiences: The tool helps you meet the specific needs of each employee with digital workplaces that are tailored to their role, location, and preferences.
- Employee recognition: Unily helps you create a culture of recognition with custom badges, celebrations, and peer-to-peer rewards.
Simpplr
Simpplr helps your team members communicate and collaborate. The platform acts as a central portal to your tools, files, and messages, and facilitates cross-department collaboration. As the name would suggest, it’s simple to use. More than other platforms on this list, Simpplr pitches itself as a modern intranet — although, this realistically applies to all EXPs.
Key Features:
- Customised feed: Simpplr allows your employees to customise their feed based on their interests. They can follow topics, websites or people, and the platform recommends similar content.
- Smart search: The platform helps your employees find people, websites, files, and more with a keyword-based search. The app’s search feature goes through all of its integrations to find the right results.
- Performance measures: Simpplr enables your team members to measure their performance based on their engagement and goal progression.
Culture Amp
Culture Amp enables you to build a positive work culture with peer-to-peer feedback, surveys, and powerful insights. The platform comes with ready-to-use surveys that are designed to help you identify improvement opportunities.
Key features:
- Template library: Culture Amp offers 30+ customisable survey templates you can use to understand employee experience and engagement. You can customise the surveys to your company’s specific needs.
- Useful insights: The platform collects feedback, survey, and performance data and turns it into insights. You can use the insights to discover which actions can help you boost employee engagement.
- Communication and collaboration: Culture Amp helps your team communicate and collaborate. Employees can set goals, attend one-on-one meetings, and participate in 360-degree feedback surveys.
Jostle
Jostle acts as a one-stop portal for your organisation’s resources. The platform helps boost your team’s engagement with simplified communication and customised feeds.
Key features:
- Employee feedback: Jostle helps you gather data for your important decisions. The platform enables you to share polls with all the members of your organisation and get feedback from your colleagues.
- Personalised feed: Make sure that your news is not lost in the clutter. The tool helps you pin announcements to your staff’s feed, so they can spot them quickly.
- Targeted updates: Jostle allows you to share updates with your team members. You can send company updates to segmented lists, such as employees working in a certain location, those belonging to a department, and so on.
Drive employee engagement with technology
Like other employee engagement tools, employee experience platforms help you build a community where your team members feel heard and valued. They encourage employees to provide feedback and their insights enable you to make data-driven business decisions that increase employee engagement. Most importantly, they simplify access to critical digital resources, helping you streamline an increasingly complex digital workplace with simple experiences.
In the context of hybrid working, and other workplace trends, your digital workplace has never been more important. EXPs help you thrive in this context and provide consistent digital experiences — no matter where or when someone is working.
We built HulerHub to deliver a sophisticated employee experience solution in a package that looks good and gets the job done. Although all of the solutions on this list will help you upgrade your digital workplace experience, HulerHub does so with style. But don’t take out word for it, book a demo and see it in action today.
