There are many tools companies can use to help support and improve employee experience (EX). Some focus on the basics, such as payroll, benefits, and compensation strategies. Others listen to employees, act on learnings, provide ongoing dialog and communications, and recognize employees in a meaningful manner. This roundup of new product releases touches on all those areas

Additionally, on August 1, Microsoft announced the commercial general availability of its Viva Goal module, previously introduced in May.

Cooleaf Launches New Survey Tool

Cooleaf introduced a new feature, linked to its pulse survey tool, which will allow customers to easily schedule and deploy eNPS surveys (employee net promoter score) on a regular basis, allowing for measurement, review, and trend tracking over time. Survey participation can be encouraged with Cooleaf Reward Points for anonymous survey completion.

According to Jess White, Senior Director of Customer Success, “Now that the eNPS survey is built into the Cooleaf platform, we can help our customers deploy the survey on a regular basis and benchmark results over time. Organization leaders and HR teams can filter that data by team or department and use it to drive their engagement strategy. When you combine that data with the engagement initiatives and tactics that Cooleaf provides, eNPS becomes a very powerful tool for improving company culture.”

KangoGift Upgrades Platform with Tools to Address Hybrid/Remote Challenges

KangoGift performed research of its global client base to uncover specific talent challenges and also analyzed more than 200,000 proprietary recognition and engagement moments from the last quarter of 2021 through the second quarter of 2022. The data assisted KangoGift in its efforts to enhance its platforms, and resulted in upgrades in the following areas:

• Tools to enhance emotional safety by allowing for greater support of employee/manager dialog
• Supporting employers and managers in recognizing the differences amongst employees and helping them to meet specific needs and expectations
• Leadership tools that help senior leaders benchmark best practices

“While best practices provide a starting point, the challenge is customizing them for each client so the information found will help our tools generate meaning and purpose. It is our belief and expectation that these enhancements will help increase employee engagement and satisfaction while making it easier for organizations to determine levels of employee satisfaction,” says Todd Horton, founder and CEO, KangoGift.

New Compensation Management Product Introduced by Lattice

Lattice has introduced a new product aimed at linking performance and compensation while easing some of the administration burden of less modernized compensation strategies. The newly launched Lattice Compensation aims to make pay strategies more clearly defined and fair. Additionally, compensation activities will be simplified on one secure platform, as a centralized hub

“When it comes to talent management and retention, compensation has always been a critical piece of the full picture,” says Cara Brennan Allamano, Chief People Officer at Lattice. “At Lattice, we want to help our customer’s power employee-centric, holistic People strategies – and Lattice Compensation is a natural evolution of that mission, bringing new levels of efficiency, clarity, and ease to a historically complex, error-prone, and labor-intensive process for HR teams.”

This new product allows for trackable workflows to be created that incorporate performance data and ratings, as well as other organizational data such as compensation ratios, pay bands, and team budgets. This better flow of data and connections between them helps to provide transparency to pay decisions and more clearly connect performance to compensation.

theEMPLOYEEapp Adds Social Functionality for Frontline Workers

Mobile app provider, the EMPLOYEEapp, has enhanced app capabilities to improve the experience for frontline workers. The new version will more closely resemble social media platforms workers are already familiar with. Additionally, there will be a larger variety of ways for two-way communications to occur, which is something workers have been craving.

“In the early days, our employee app focused on improving top-down communication between leadership and frontline workers,” says Amy Jenkins, Director of Client Strategy and Success at theEMPLOYEEapp. “However, client feedback and our own research show that employee expectations from internal comms are constantly evolving. With these new product enhancements, theEMPLOYEEapp is delivering an intuitive, middle-out, bottom-up engagement tool built on familiar technology used by the leading social media platforms. Frontline workers can join conversations with their managers and peers using their smartphones from anywhere, while internal comms teams can monitor the community, boost employee recognition, and much more.”

Additions to the app include thread commenting (enabling users and administrators to respond to an individual comment), @Mentions (allows users to @mention users in a post caption or comment, which can be leveraged for recognition purposes), and hashtags (gives content creators the ability to add a hashtag that can then be stored in a content management system and reused).

Vantage Circle and Paradiso Learning Solutions Partner on Engagement and Learning Management

Vantage Circle has formed a partnership with eLearning solutions provider Paradiso.  Vantage Circle’s AI-fueled employee engagement solutions include tools for rewards and recognition, discounts, employee feedback, and employee wellness. Paradiso offers learning management systems as well as course catalogs as eLearning products, course developments, and managed training services. The companies hope the combination of learning management and engagement will spur employee develop and an improved employee experience.

“We are sure that employee experiences will reach the next level in the LMS by partnering with Vantage Circle. Improving employee engagement within the LMS will be much easier with the partnership,” says Sachin Chaudhari, CEO of Paradiso Solutions. Partha Neog, CEO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle adds, “We look forward to partnering with Paradiso Solutions and revolutionizing the employee experience across organizations. We strive to provide the employees and the managers an integrated platform to leverage the employee engagement gap.”