So, you’re looking for a solution to manage your employee experience. It’s a big undertaking — and we’re here to help.
What is the employee experience?
The employee experience is an employee’s total experience at your organization. It encompasses every point from onboarding to exit, including career growth, productivity, company culture, and relationships with peers, managers, and leadership.
In short, your employee experience is everything. Which is why it’s critical to find the solution that supports your organization’s needs, vision, and employees.
What can an employee experience platform do for you?
An employee experience platform brings each of the integral pieces of the employee experience — including goals and OKRs, employee recognition, feedback, performance conversations, incentives, and employee surveys — into one place. With all these elements in conversation together, your workforce becomes aligned and connected. And you have radical transparency into the result.
Our employee experience platform buyer’s guide walks you through the key questions you should ask at every step of your consideration process so you can confidently choose the employee experience platform that best serves your company.
- Pre-Planning: Outline current challenges and goals for changing your process
- Evaluating Options: Use our detailed questions list to find the features you need
- Decision & Purchase: Use our checklist to make the right choice
Pre-planning: What to do before beginning your search
The employee experience at each company is unique, with its own needs and challenges. Before you evaluate solutions, it’s important to understand the challenges you currently face in your employee experience, and what your desired outcomes are for your new system.
Evaluating options: Vendor and business fit
With your goals and needs clear in your mind, it’s time to evaluate solutions. We’ve compiled a detailed list of questions to ask vendors to help you confidently choose the right platform.
Questions about the vendor
Remember, this isn’t just a one-time transaction. The vendor you select will be your employee experience partner through onboarding and beyond.
They should not only provide an easy-to-use platform, but also help with program design, collaborate with your internal teams about change management, and offer ongoing support to refine your program over time. Ask:
- How will you help support my organization’s unique mission, vision, and goals?
- How will you help us prioritize our employee experience?
- What is your point of view on performance management (which we at WorkTango approach as Employee Success)? How do you support employee performance programs and processes?
- What is your internal adoption rate of your platform? How do you use it internally?
- How many customers do you have, and what is their average tenure?
- What is your customer retention rate?
- In what ways do you enable your customers to learn and share best practices from each other?
- How do you measure, monitor, and ensure customer satisfaction?
- What makes you stand apart from your competitors?
Evaluating Options: Platform and features
Questions about the platform and features
Your pre-planning worksheet helped you identify the metrics you want to change: Now it’s time to dig into the functionality of the solutions that will help you get there.
Recognition
Why it matters: The #1 reason people leave their jobs? Lack of recognition and appreciation. Recognition is key to employee engagement and productivity — and the more public, specific, and immediate it is, the better.
What you’re looking for: Social recognition that can be given across all levels of the organization to create a lasting culture of appreciation.
Ask:
- What is the process for giving recognition?
- Who can see recognition? Can others comment on or boost recognition?
- Do you use a points-based approach for recognition? Why?
- Who can give recognition using your platform? Who can receive it?
- How does your recognition platform promote or support a company’s core values?
Rewards
Why it matters: Employees who feel their organization’s rewards meet their needs are 7x as likely to be engaged as those who don’t. Use a strong rewards program to drive employee engagement.
What you’re looking for: A robust, customizable rewards catalog with no hidden markups or penalties.
Ask:
- Do your rewards have markup? If so, are they at or above cost?
- What sort of variety is included in your rewards offerings? (e.g., gift cards, experiences, donations, products, etc)
- How can rewards be customized to fit my company values and culture? (e.g., team rewards, local merchants, mentoring, etc)
- Does your platform support service awards and other milestones?
Goals and OKRs
Why it matters: Transparent company-wide goals — and individual goals that clearly support them — are key to aligning and driving your business.
What you’re looking for: A goal process that is intuitive and easy to use, and offers transparency and tracking across all levels.
Ask:
- How many steps does it take for an employee to set and update a goal in real-time?
- What visibility do employees have into organizational goals, peer goals, and team goal progress?
- How does your platform enable HR executives to track organizational and individual goals over time?
- What is the process for approving new goals? Closing completed goals?
Conversations
Performance reviews (Check-Ins) and 1-on-1s (Sync-Ups)
Why it matters: Performance conversations are key to coaching and connection — you want a platform that facilitates them to help you boost employee engagement.
What you’re looking for: A flexible, easy-to-use solution for managers and employees that allows scheduling, review, and access to past check-in notes.
Ask:
- What types of performance conversations does your platform support? How are they distinct? How would you use each one?
- Describe the process for requesting/completing a performance Sync-Up or Check-In.
- Can managers access past Sync-Up notes before employee performance Check-Ins?
- How have your customers used performance reviews to improve employee performance?
Feedback
Why it matters: Feedback is key to employee development and establishing a company-wide growth mindset.
What you’re looking for: Make sure the vendor’s feedback feature is easy and appealing to use, and the feedback itself is actionable and stored for appropriate use.
Ask:
- Describe the process for requesting feedback in your platform.
- Who can see feedback given in the platform?
- How does your platform encourage or promote feedback requests?
- Can managers access past feedback notes in performance reviews?
- What kind of feedback options does your platform support? (e.g., Start, Stop, Continue, Feed Forward, Strengths & Opportunities, etc)
Incentives & gamification
Why it matters: A platform is only as effective as its adoption rate. Ask your vendor what options they have to drive desired employee behaviors and get the most out of their platform.
What you’re looking for: A simple, appealing system that allows employees to earn points, badges, or other incentives for activities like staying healthy, completing surveys, and more.
Ask:
- Do you offer any incentives, behavior boosts, or other gamification?
- Describe the process for creating an incentive for employees who complete safety training.
- Describe the process for the employee of redeeming that incentive.
- How do your incentives support adoption of your platform?
Employee surveys
Why it matters: Engagement surveys are key to learning what’s happening on the ground for your employees — and either fixing or celebrating it.
What you’re looking for: Customizable survey options with clear insights reporting and the ability to store responses over time.
Ask:
- What kind of surveys do you offer?
- Describe the process for creating and sending a custom questionnaire.
- How do your customers gain insights from responses to your survey tool?
- Does your platform allow admins to store and track survey responses over time?
Insights & reporting
Why it matters: You can’t measure what you can’t track. You’re investing in your employee experience — it’s critical to know how and where you’re moving the needle.
What you’re looking for: Look for admin dashboards that allow for easy tracking and actionable insights.
Ask:
- What reporting capabilities are available in your system?
- Does your platform allow admins to share reports across the company?
- What sort of visualization of data and insights does your platform offer?
- How do insights from different features work together?
- How can a customer track overall usage of the platform?
Configurability
Why it matters: Your EX solutions should fit your organization — not the other way around. Your company’s culture and needs are unique, so make sure you can customize your platform accordingly.
What you’re looking for: The ability to make the platform your own — and reflect your organizational culture, brand, language, and values.
Ask:
- What options exist to change the platform visually (colors, logo, etc) to reflect our organization’s visual brand?
- What options exist to change the names of specific features or elements in the platform?
- Does your platform allow for modular addition of features and functionality?
- Does your platform include widgets?
Integrations
Why it matters: You’ve invested in your existing solutions already (and your employees are comfortable using them). Your new tool should work with and empower your existing ones, rather than conflict and slow things down.
What you’re looking for: The platform can easily integrate with your existing solutions and software.
Ask:
- What products does your technology integrate with?
- Which integrations do you plan to add in the future?
- Which data is important for your company to see across your technology stack?
- How does your company select its API integrations?
- How do you keep your customers’ information secure?
Support
Whether you go for something simple or for all the bells and whistles, a platform is only useful if you know how to use it.
Get the most out of your investment: Ensure that your vendor of choice offers clear implementation and ongoing support.
Ask:
- What change management support can I expect during the onboarding experience? After?
- What are the greatest challenges your customers experience during and post-launch, and how do you support them?
- How do you set your customers up for success using your platform?
- What educational resources do you offer customers for using and getting the most out of your platform?
- What internal adoption rate do your customers see post-launch?
Decision and purchase: Time to make the right choice
Have you narrowed it down to a few great options? Fantastic.
Run through our checklist before you commit:
- Make sure pricing is transparent — you know exactly what you’re spending, and why
- Look for positive customer testimonials, case studies, and awards
- Ensure your vendor of choice is a long-term partner who offers valuable analytics and ongoing coaching/guidance
- Make sure you have internal buy-in from movers and shakers key to adoption
- Good to go.
At WorkTango, we’re revolutionizing how the world’s most forward-thinking companies engage and inspire their people. We offer the only Employee Experience Platform that enables meaningful recognition and rewards, supports alignment through goal setting and feedback, and offers actionable insights through employee surveys.
