Meet Andrew Martin

MangoApps is a well-known name in the internal communication and collaboration space, offering an all-in-one platform for employee intranets, communication, and task management. But for many organizations—especially those with deskless or distributed teams—it’s not always the best fit. Whether you're looking for a more intuitive interface, stronger mobile capabilities, or better support for real-time communication, you're not alone in your search.

In this guide, we break down the top 12 MangoApps alternatives to consider in 2025, based on usability, features, employee engagement, and scalability.

What to look for in a MangoApps alternative

Before diving into the list, here are the key factors to consider when evaluating alternatives:

• Mobile-first experience: If your workforce includes frontline or non-desk employees, you’ll need a platform that works seamlessly on mobile devices.
• Ease of use: Platforms with clean interfaces and intuitive navigation drive higher adoption across all levels of the organization.
• Real-time communication: Look for tools that enable instant updates, alerts, and chat, not just static content.‍
• Integration flexibility: Your platform should connect easily with tools like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Workday, and HRIS systems.
  
• Employee engagement tools: Polls, surveys, recognition features, and content targeting help drive connection and culture.
  
• Scalability and support: Whether you’re a company of 500 or 50,000, ensure the platform can scale with you—and that help is readily available.
  

Here are the best alternatives to MangoApps in 2025

#1. Blink – The all-in-one employee experience app

Best for: Enterprise organizations that want to streamline communication, drive engagement, and boost productivity.

Blink stands out as the most powerful MangoApps alternative — especially for organizations looking for a modern, mobile-first platform that actually gets used. Unlike traditional intranet tools that sit in the background, Blink puts everything your employees need into one intuitive app: communications, schedules, forms, HR systems, and more. With real-time chat, content targeting, newsfeeds, surveys, and recognition features, Blink doesn’t just inform employees — it activates them.

The platform is designed for engagement, boasting adoption rates of over 80% across industries like retail, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing. It also integrates effortlessly with tools like Microsoft 365, Workday, UKG, and ADP, making it a true hub for the digital employee experience. Plus, Blink’s admin tools give Internal Comms, HR, and IT full control over what content is delivered to whom — so you’re always reaching the right people with the right message.

For companies tired of legacy platforms that don’t connect with modern workforces, Blink is a clear upgrade.

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#2. Staffbase

Best for: Large enterprises that want to build branded employee apps.

Staffbase specializes in custom-branded employee communication apps, with a strong focus on top-down messaging and internal news delivery. It’s a good fit for enterprises with a strong emphasis on company-wide updates, although some users find its collaboration features limited compared to more integrated platforms.

#3. Unily

Best for: Enterprises seeking a polished intranet with strong SharePoint integration.

Unily delivers a sleek and customizable intranet experience, particularly suited to companies already using Microsoft tools. It shines in content publishing and brand personalization, but may require a significant implementation timeline and budget.

#4. Simpplr

Best for: Companies looking for an intranet focused on content discovery and employee engagement.

Simpplr offers a modern, AI-powered intranet designed to help employees find the information and people they need quickly. Its strengths lie in personalization, integrations, and employee feedback tools, though smaller teams might find it more than they need.

#5. Haiilo

Best for: Social-first communication and employee advocacy.

Haiilo blends internal communication with social sharing, making it a great option for organizations that want to empower employees to become brand ambassadors. It supports news distribution, surveys, and analytics, but collaboration tools are more limited.

#6. LumApps

Best for: Organizations embedded in the Google Workspace ecosystem.

LumApps integrates deeply with Google tools and offers features like personalized news feeds, social communities, and knowledge management. It’s well-suited for content-heavy communication but may not be ideal for frontline teams.

#7. Jive

Best for: Enterprises looking for a community-driven intranet.

Jive is a mature platform known for its collaboration and knowledge-sharing capabilities. It supports employee communities and forums but may feel outdated compared to newer, more agile platforms.

#8. Igloo Software

Best for: Mid-size businesses seeking a flexible digital workplace solution.

Igloo offers pre-built templates, collaboration tools, and strong document management. It’s a solid choice for knowledge workers but lacks the modern mobile experience many organizations now require.

#9. Workvivo

Best for: Organizations prioritizing culture, recognition, and employee social engagement.

Workvivo turns your intranet into a social space where employees feel more connected to their company. Its strength lies in fostering real-time interaction and transparency. Many teams choose it to reinforce culture and encourage engagement beyond standard top-down messaging. It’s engaging and user-friendly, though companies may need to pair it with additional tools for workflows, operations, or integrations.

#10. Happeo

Best for: Google Workspace-centric companies wanting a fast, social intranet.

Happeo blends social features with knowledge sharing and is known for its fast deployment and Google integration. It’s ideal for remote or hybrid teams who need an intranet without the complexity.

#11. Speakap

Best for: Deskless workforce communication, especially in retail and hospitality.

Speakap is built for frontline teams and focuses on secure, real-time updates. It’s easy to use and offers role-based content delivery, though it lacks the depth of features found in all-in-one platforms like Blink.

#12. Interact Software

Best for: Enterprises wanting a structured, content-rich intranet.

Interact offers strong content management, personalization, and search capabilities. It’s geared toward knowledge sharing and compliance-driven industries but may not offer as fluid a mobile experience.

Final thoughts on choosing a MangoApps alternative

If you're searching for a MangoApps alternative that delivers better engagement, faster communication, and a user experience your employees will love, Blink should be at the top of your list. While other platforms have their strengths, Blink combines everything you need — mobile access, real-time updates, integrations, and workforce-wide engagement — into a single platform that scales with your business.

76% of workers say they enjoy working collaboratively. But workplace collaboration isn’t just good for team members. It’s also good for your organization.

That’s because, when your teams are pulling in the same direction, there’s less wasted effort, greater productivity, and better business results.

These days, collaboration is a little more complicated than it used to be. Many employees work remotely or on a hybrid schedule. There are also hard-to-reach frontline employees to consider.

In 2024, organizations are having to be more intentional about employee collaboration — and they’re turning to tech tools to bring dispersed teams together.

Collaboration in the workplace may be changing. But it’s still as important as ever. Here, we take a look at the benefits of workplace collaboration, along with the role tech can play in creating a collaborative ecosystem.  

What does collaboration look like in the workplace?

Workplace collaboration involves team members working together to achieve a common goal. It relies on empathy, active listening, conflict resolution, and accountability.

But it’s not just about team members working together on a big project. Or giving the standard monthly update on company developments. Collaboration is much, much more than that.

The most collaborative organizations make collaboration part of their company culture. It’s a mindset of openness and transparency. A place where all employees engage in effective communication and are ready and willing to help one another.

Employee collaboration might mean liaising with engineering, marketing, and sales teams to launch a ground-breaking new product. Or simply helping your co-worker get the photocopier working again.

In any form, collaboration is about sharing information and knowledge. About willingly offering support. And about combining employee strengths to get the best results each and every day.

Nowadays, there’s another key element to collaboration in the workplace — technology. In the wake of remote working and higher employee expectations with regard to tech, collaboration has gone digital.

Organizations use digital tools to facilitate employee collaboration even when teams don’t work face-to-face. They use tech, like project management software, employee apps, and real-time communication tools.

This is helping to maintain collaboration among desk-based teams, at home and in the office. It’s also supporting dispersed frontline workers to collaborate at work, too.  

The Blink employee app helps frontline and desk-based employees work better together. Take a look at our platform features to find out more.

Why is workplace collaboration important?

Collaboration is good for business. It ensures that your employees, like cogs in a well-oiled machine, are all working together. There’s more momentum and less friction. So you find it easier to achieve organizational goals.

Collaboration within teams helps those teams to function more effectively. Cross-functional collaboration is important too. Team-working across different departments helps to remove workplace silos and get all teams on the same page.

Workplace collaboration is also good for employee motivation and morale.

With easy and effective communication, the workplace becomes a happier place to be. And when employees operate as a team, helping each other to achieve tasks, the workplace becomes more caring and supportive.

Collaboration clearly makes a difference to employees. A 2022 Corel report into team-working revealed that:

• 41% of employees have left their job or would consider leaving their job due to poor collaboration at work
• 64% of employees say that poor collaboration costs them at least three hours per week in productivity
• 78% of employees say that leadership could be doing more to promote collaboration within the organization

Collaboration ties in with employee engagement, the employee experience, productivity, and employee retention, making it a really crucial component of any workplace. 

8 benefits of collaboration in the workplace

Let’s take a closer look at what workplace collaboration can do for your employees and organization. Here’s what you can expect when your employees routinely collaborate with one another. 

Improved employee engagement

Employees who feel they belong within an organization are 5.3 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work. And employees who get enough information to do their job well are 2.8 times more likely to be engaged. 

Workplace collaboration brings employees together. It gives them need-to-know information, and aligns everyone behind company goals. 

This creates a sense of community and purpose, which fuels employee engagement. Collaboration leads employees to feel more satisfied in their work and more loyal to your company.   

Increased efficiency

When teams collaborate, they share information. Teams pool resources and people power. Employees who work together closely can share workloads and responsibilities.This enables teams to complete tasks more quickly. It also reduces the chance of duplicated work.

This efficiency frees up time in the workday. It helps managers to make workloads more manageable, while creating the time and employee headspace for even more creativity and collaboration.

Knowledge sharing

Imagine a company that fails to share its collective knowledge effectively.

Teams spend their time researching topics that other teams understand in depth. Employees repeat the same mistakes because there’s no one sharing their hard-earned insights. You fail to establish best practices. And employees are in a constant state of catch-up.

Now imagine the opposite. A company where knowledge is shared seamlessly between co-workers, teams, and departments. There’s no gatekeeper and collective knowledge is easy for everyone to access.

The latter scenario makes for a more successful organization. It helps you build a more knowledgeable workforce. And it saves a heap of time — because your people aren’t separately pursuing the same lines of research.  

Stronger relationships

Good employee collaboration relies on strong workplace relationships. And it helps to develop them, too.

When teams collaborate, they communicate regularly. They work together towards a shared goal. They also develop trust and mutual respect as they share ideas and rely on each other’s support.

By developing these strong relationships, your organization gets better at collaboration going forward. You create a culture of psychological safety, where people feel comfortable speaking up about their ideas, mistakes, and concerns.  

Strong workplace connections also improve the employee experience. With Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report revealing that 20% of employees experience a lot of loneliness at work, nurturing workplace relationships has never been more important.

Better decision-making

When you make decisions as part of a team, you leverage the knowledge, perspective, and experience of each team member. You involve the people who are directly affected by the decision — and those who are responsible for implementing it.

Making decisions as part of a team means assumptions are challenged and everyone has a sense of buy-in. You make informed and balanced decisions that are more likely to garner company-wide support.

For example, in a recent webinar, we heard from the team at the Capital District Transport Authority (CDTA) in New York. They realized they needed new tech to improve internal communication at the organization.

When deciding on the right tech solution, they took a cross-functional approach. They involved communications, IT, and HR teams, along with leadership. They also consulted the workers who’d be using the new tech.

By collaborating in this way, the CDTA was able to choose a modern intranet that met everyone’s needs and enjoyed excellent levels of adoption.

Enhanced problem-solving

We all know the proverb. “Two heads are better than one.” And when it comes to problem-solving, you’re much more likely to come up with creative and effective solutions when working as part of a team.

Collaboration brings people with different viewpoints together. This diversity helps teams to approach a problem from multiple angles — and come up with a variety of potential solutions.

It also minimizes blind spots. Because there are people with lots of different perspectives involved, it’s less likely that some element of the problem or its solution is overlooked.

Stronger employee development

The practice of collaboration helps to develop employee soft skills, like decision-making, problem-solving, communication, conflict resolution, and creative thinking

When you have a culture of knowledge sharing, co-workers can also learn from one another. They can pick up new skills and information from the people they work with. Employees are organically coached by more experienced members of the team.

This informal learning can take place within teams and across departments. Successful cross-departmental collaboration enables workers to get a better understanding of different areas of the business.

Boosted productivity

As we’ve already seen, good teamwork is linked to:

• Improved employee engagement
• Knowledge sharing and employee development
• Increased efficiency
• Stronger relationships and communication

All of these things support workplace productivity. Employees have access to the resources, skills, knowledge, and relationships that help them perform at their best.

Collaboration also improves accountability. When employees are involved in planning, decision-making, and problem-solving, they’re more motivated to work hard and make a success of the initiative or project.

The role of technology in workplace collaboration

It used to be that collaboration could take place informally in the office.

Co-workers could share ideas as they made coffee in the break room. Or as they walked to the elevator together. There were plenty of face-to-face meetings where people could work together to solve problems and make decisions.

But things have changed. In recent years, technology has played a much bigger role in team working.  

Firstly, thanks to the pandemic, remote working became much more widespread. While some organizations are encouraging people back to the office, a sizable proportion of employees still spend part of their working week working remotely.

In the UK, figures for 2024 show that 40% of workers spend at least some time working from home. In the US, 41% of employees whose jobs can be done remotely work a hybrid schedule.

Secondly, employee expectations around workplace tech have increased. With intuitive tech at home making life easier and more convenient, employees now expect the same digital experiences in the workplace. This goes for frontline employees, too.

Frontline employees — working shifts, in isolation, or on a busy shop floor — haven’t always had the same opportunities for teamwork as their desk-based peers. But with organizations now focusing on frontline employee engagement and retention, this is something that employers are looking to rectify.

To involve all employees in workplace collaboration — no matter their location or schedules — we have to be intentional. We also have to use the right technology.

Here are a few tools that support collaboration in the modern, digital workplace.  

Real-time communication tools

When teams are working away from the office, real-time communication tools are an employee collaboration essential. You need a way for co-workers to communicate seamlessly, sharing information as if face to face.

We know that many deskless workers conduct conversations on personal apps. But this type of shadow IT poses security risks. It also fails to enhance collaboration and employee engagement as successfully as a dedicated communication tool, run with the oversight of your managers.

So providing employees with messaging and video conferencing tools is a must. You need software that facilitates 1:1, group, and company-wide chat.

Project management software

Projects have lots of moving parts. And — particularly for non-office-based teams — it can be hard to visualize project tasks and progress without project management software.

This type of software acts as a centralized platform for planning and executing projects. It keeps all files, discussions, and tasks in the same place, ensuring nothing gets lost and everyone is aware of their responsibilities.

Project management software is particularly useful for remote and hybrid teams. But it can still come in useful for purely office-based teams.

Streamlined communication, workflow automation features, file organization, task visibility, and real-time updates are useful for teams wherever they may be working.

Employee apps

For employees who don’t spend their day at a desk, an employee app is another vital workplace collaboration tool.

As Ian Gordon of Elara Caring said to us in an interview:

“Being a frontline worker can feel like you're on an island by yourself, and the solutions that you need must be quicker and more succinct. You can't spend a lot of time signing in and navigating. You need to get to your answer now.”

Apps, like Blink, fit Gordon’s description. They’re intuitive to use and available on employee smartphones. They also make it quick and easy for employees to complete tasks, whether that’s sending a message to a co-worker, checking the latest policy documents, or filling in a safety report.

Employee apps support collaboration for time-poor frontline workers. They help them build connections with co-workers, share their frontline insights, and keep up to date with company news, improving the employee experience in the process.

A resource hub

Whether it’s on your company intranet or an employee app, a digital resource hub is another useful tech tool for employee collaboration.

A resource hub allows co-workers to share files and work together on them. It also acts as an internal knowledge base.

Here, employees can find best practices, company policies, and FAQs. If they have the appropriate permissions, they can also add their own insights to the hub, tagging documents so employees can find them easily.

AI and automation

AI and automation tools are also playing a role in employee collaboration. They’re providing time savings that give team members more opportunities for collaboration. And they’re supporting collaboration in other ways, too.

Companies are using this tech to automatically tag resource hub documents so users can find what they’re looking for more easily. AI is producing better resource hub search results.

AI is also supporting employees in their use of data. With automated data analysis and predictive analysis, AI is giving employees a sound basis for their collaborative problem-solving and decision-making efforts.

Some organizations are also using AI to facilitate communication between different departments. For example, technical teams are using it to translate complicated documents for non-technical co-workers. 

This is helping to close the communication gap between departments and ensure that everyone has the information they need to collaborate effectively.  

In summary

Workplace collaboration has changed dramatically over the past decade. But it’s still a key indicator of business success.

Collaboration supports workplace productivity, communication, and business results. It leads to better problem-solving and decision-making.

It also supports your employee retention and engagement efforts by making your workplace an open and supportive place to be, improving the employee experience.

Face-to-face collaboration is trickier than it used to be. But with the right tech solutions, you can champion collaboration in your organization, no matter where your employees spend their work days.

Blink has everything you need to bring collaboration to your desk-based, remote-working, and frontline employees. Our mobile-first employee app provides:

• Real-time communication via 1:1 and group chats, plus the company news feed
• A resource hub, where employees can access company documents and forms
• Deep integrations with the project management tools you already use
• AI support that supports better workplace communication

With Blink, you also get all the tools you need for better internal communications and employee engagement.

Why not book a demo to see Blink’s modern intranet in action?

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In her 2+ years at Blink, Ai has been instrumental in driving innovation and efficiency through data, analytics, and strategy. Her passion for problem-solving and building from the ground up has left a lasting impact by supporting Blink's growth and empowering our customers to engage with their frontline teams more effectively.

Which Blink office do you work out of?

London.

What is your position at Blink?

I’m the Director of Revenue Operations at Blink, a role focused on empowering every team to work more efficiently and effectively by providing data, analytics, and strategic guidance while streamlining processes to eliminate friction.

At Blink, RevOps also oversees Business Intelligence. Recently, we launched an external analytics product that offers our customers valuable data and insights to enhance their engagement with frontline employees. Data is truly at the heart of the business, both internally and externally, and I’m proud and excited to be part of it. 

How long have you been at Blink?

Over 2 years!

What initially attracted you to join Blink?

At the start of my career, I worked in finance and business planning for a big company in Japan. Six years ago, I moved to the UK to join a portfolio company of the Japanese multinational I was working for at the time.

That experience marked my first exposure to the startup world, and I loved it. Working in London with a diverse team and encountering different ways of thinking was exhilarating. Since then, I’ve stayed in the startup ecosystem and made London my home. My career has spanned various areas, including finance, strategy, and data analytics, but my true passion lies in using data to identify and solve problems. RevOps has been the perfect fit, allowing me to take ownership of not only strategy and direction but also ensuring that great strategies are operationalised with the most effective cross-functional processes.

So, why Blink? Back then — and still today — two things stood out to me.

First, the business potential was, and remains, enormous. So many companies need effective tools for frontline communication. It’s a new and largely untapped market, which makes it challenging, but that’s exactly what excites me. Being part of a company with vast growth opportunities is incredibly motivating.

Second, especially after Covid, I wanted to do work that felt meaningful. We spend so much of our lives working, and I wanted to channel my energy into something I’m passionate about — something that makes a positive impact. Frontline workers often lack the tools to optimize their work, connect with colleagues, or access information from their employers. They’re too often left behind. I joined Blink because I believe it can change that, and I’m proud to contribute to a mission that benefits society in a tangible way.

What's a project you are proud of from your time at Blink?

I’m proud and excited that at Blink, you often need to create things from scratch — and have the opportunity to do so. As the first RevOps hire, I experienced the rewarding journey of building from zero to one. But the challenge doesn’t stop there; nothing is ever truly complete. Once you’ve accomplished one goal, you realize there are always more opportunities to explore and tackle.

I’m also incredibly proud of my team. It’s growing, and I’m surrounded by talented team members I respect. Although this is still the smallest team I’ve ever been part of or led, the impact we’re delivering to the business is the greatest I’ve achieved so far.

How would you describe the company culture at Blink in three words?

High-bar, customer-centric, and collaborative. 

I chose high-bar because we set high expectations for the quality of our work and the caliber of people we welcome to our team. With the current competitive industry landscape, we can’t succeed by doing ordinary work, and I believe we uphold excellent standards to bring out the best in ourselves.

We’re also customer-centric, with a mission to support not only our customers but also customers’ employees, frontline workers. 

Lastly, we’re collaborative. With limited resources, teamwork is how we achieve more. We’re a fun, intelligent team, and I love how we balance ambition with genuine support for one another at Blink.

What’s one thing you’re excited about for the future of Blink?

I’m excited about the possibility of creating a new market for ourselves. A great example is Slack — before it existed, we didn’t even realize we needed it, but now it’s become the norm, even a verb! “I’ll Slack you!” has become part of everyday language. I believe Blink has the potential to become just as indispensable for frontline companies and their users, setting a new standard in the industry.

Can you tell us about a recent initiative or program launched at Blink that you found particularly exciting?

Two things stand out to me. First is the continuous launch of new features such as Communities, Stories, Voice and Video, Live Streams, and more. It’s truly remarkable, especially given the relatively small size of our product and engineering team. I feel confident that we’re making a meaningful impact in our industry and delivering real value to our customers.

The second is the progress we’ve made with data initiatives. For example, the launch of Advanced Employee Intelligence in August has opened up significant opportunities for revenue expansion while providing tangible value to our customers. This combination of innovation and impact makes it an exciting time to be at Blink.

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A 2022 Gallup report on the work environment found that businesses with engaged employees have 23% higher profits than companies with “miserable workers”. Such businesses also see lower absenteeism and higher customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, Gallup’s 2023 report goes on to tell us that only 23% of employees are actually engaged. 

The solution? Effective employee engagement strategies designed to help you create a better company culture, reduce staff turnover, and eventually boost your company’s profits. 

But before you can do any of that, you need to know how to measure employee engagement, and what measurement methods really work. 

Once you have the tools to measure engagement, you’ll have a solid foundation for improving your engagement levels and reaping the benefits that highly engaged employees bring.

What to do before you start measuring employee engagement

Understand your workforce

Each employee is different with their own unique preferences, needs, and motivations. As such, it's important to get to know your teams well — their needs, challenges, and everything in between — so that you can tailor your employee engagement strategy to work best for them.

Start by getting to know your workforce better: who they are, how they work, and what currently gets in the way of them engaging. 

For example, there is often a huge digital inclusion gap between frontline staff and their desk-based coworkers. This gap makes it very hard for frontline workers to engage with their organizations and roles – and even harder for business leaders to get to know them in the first place.

This is where engaging your first-line managers becomes crucial. By enabling first-line managers with the skills and tools to get to know their teams, you have a hotline directly to your frontline – and their engagement preferences.

It’s also important to consider the types of metrics you use for your specific workforce. Desk-based engagement metrics may not accurately reflect the engagement levels of people working in frontline roles. Transit, healthcare, logistics, or manufacturing workers (to name a few) will often have different requirements, channel preferences, and motivations for engagement than other employees.

Therefore, it's essential to understand the specific engagement requirements of your staff, track tailored engagement metrics, and create strategies to address them.

Agree on engagement goals and outcomes 

Once you know your workers’ needs, it is important to agree on engagement goals and outcomes with other stakeholders in your organization. This could involve gaining the buy-in of senior management, employee representatives, or other key stakeholders. 

Clearly defining your goals and desired outcomes will help ensure that efforts and metrics used to improve engagement are focused and aligned with your overall business strategy. Goal and outcome KPI could include:

• Goal: Increase employee retention by 10%
• Outcome KPI: Employee retention rate
• Goal: Reduce employee turnover by 25%
• Outcome KPI: Voluntary resignation rate
• Goal: Drive employee satisfaction by 15%
• Outcome KPI: Employee satisfaction survey or ENPS scores

By taking these steps before measuring employee engagement, you can ensure that you have a solid understanding of your workforce, metrics that reflect your business objectives, and clear engagement goals to achieve. 

There are a number of metrics and methods that can help you gauge a holistic view of employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall engagement in your company, 10 of which we’ll dive into in more detail below.

10 ways to measure employee engagement

Both survey and non-survey methods are available methods to measure employee engagement. Typically, it’s best to use a mix of both to get a holistic overview of employee engagement.

How to measure engagement with survey methods

Surveys help you reach a considerable number of employees at once. 

Running employee surveys can be a time-consuming, paper-filled process, but it’s still a great starting point for building the foundation of your employee engagement efforts. And with modern Employee Survey tools now available to streamline the whole process, it needn’t be such a laborious task.

Here are three survey measurement methods you can implement:

1. Annual employee engagement surveys

An annual employee engagement survey measures employees’ experience, motivation, and passion for their job and organization. It reveals how your employees go about their daily jobs and what you can do to improve their engagement on a large, long-term scale.

You can use these surveys to get ideas on areas for improvement and a basis for new recommendations and goals. 

Similarly, you can use employee surveys to evaluate your company’s culture and see whether the desired cultural values are practiced among desk-based and deskless employees. 

However, employee engagement surveys are only effective if you conduct them correctly. 

Here are four best practices for conducting employee surveys:

• Use a mix of survey questions: Ask both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. This helps your company collect the most insights into employee engagement without overwhelming respondents.
• Leverage mobile apps: Paper surveys don’t cut it. They’re time-consuming since you wait for employees to return the survey papers before you can analyze them, and they’re often disregarded by employees completely or inaccessible by teams that are not in the corporate office, such as frontline teams. Digital surveys take far less time to create and share, and the response is almost instant. So, create surveys that employees can complete from their personal or corporate devices from any location. 
• Share employee survey results: Share the survey findings with your office and your frontline workers and let them know what actions you’ll take. Managers and leadership need to assure employees that they’re listening and taking into consideration the feedback received. 

Identify the best time(s) to survey employees: It might be smart to run your survey during slower periods of work, so that employees have enough time to devote to the survey. Similarly, there’s solid advice to avoid conducting surveys during high-stress periods or bonus season. Such periods skew the survey results and give an unrealistic picture of everyday employee engagement and satisfaction.

2. Pulse engagement surveys

Employee pulse surveys allow you to send more frequent survey requests to your teams. Instead of the annual snapshot of data you gain from once-a-year surveys, pulse surveys let you measure employee engagement levels in real time.

This short survey format allows your teams to provide quick feedback on any aspect of the job or organization, from team dynamics and workflows to company policies and leadership. It’s a great way to learn more about what’s working for your employees on a daily basis and identify what could be improved. 

Pulse surveys are much shorter, providing less data than annual surveys but offering real-time insights into employees’ current feelings about the workplace and their job satisfaction.

As such, pulse surveys can be incredibly effective at identifying any sudden decreases or increases in employee morale and engagement, helping you spot them and take action quickly.

You can also tailor pulse surveys to navigate different occasions and identify trends in employee engagement year-round, instead of just once a year. For example, you could send a survey after an important organizational announcement or when there’s been a period of major change.

However you choose to use them, regular pulse surveys are a great way to measure employee engagement and ensure your workforce feels heard.

3. Employee net promoter score (eNPS)

Chances are your organization is already using the net promoter score (NPS) to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. The same metric can also be used internally to measure employee engagement.

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) provides a solid basis for understanding employee engagement and loyalty in a cost-effective way. By tracking the eNPS scores over time, you can identify trends in employee engagement — which can help you understand how the changes you implement affect staff engagement. 

Expert tip: On its own, eNPS is not the most effective way to measure engagement.eNPS it tells you the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’ of an employee engagement score. Only measure employee engagement via eNPS if you can follow it up with more detailed methods, such as employee engagement surveys.

Further methods for measuring employee engagement

4. Implement an employee app with analytics features

Many leaders aren’t aware of the reasons behind the lack of engagement and increasing turnover rates in their business — especially frontline managers. Due to the nature of frontline organizations — varied work environments, conflicting shift patterns, and a historical reliance on paper — it is more difficult to engage with frontline workers and even harder to measure their engagement levels. 

As such, employee feedback and surveys don’t always provide the response rates you want, and employees don’t always provide insights you can act on.

To address this, you can implement an employee engagement super-app like Blink to create a digital space that invites a multidirectional, real-time conversation where frontline workers (and their desked counterparts) can speak directly to management — and to each other.

You can also use this technology to measure the outcome of their work environment and assess how your workers engage with your content, interact with other teammates, and participate in company-wide conversations. 

For instance, Blink offers Frontline Intelligence — an integrated analytics tool that measures employee engagement by tracking:

• Content metrics: See how your workers interact with posts, files, or pages you share. You can track important metrics such as reach, impressions, likes, comments, and link clicks. 
• Communication flows: View how many team members communicate with others using the employee app. Visualize the growth in communication and changes in relationships over time to keep a tab on your organization’s employee engagement.
• Internal trends: Get an overview of trending posts and topics in the employee feed to understand which content performs best and when.

This allows you to uncover who your promoters of engagement are, and who’s in line with your company’s mission and values. You can capture the insights that aren’t explicitly communicated to you – and integrate that into your next steps.

This data can help you detect feelings of disengagement early on and do a root cause analysis before they become a serious problem, affect productivity and quality of work, and increase your turnover rate.

Ensure that you also measure the adoption rate for your employee app. A high adoption rate can be indicative that your employees are engaged in their roles and understand the value that a new tool is bringing to the business. You may see differences in app usage trends between the office and frontline workers. If that is the case, add questions surrounding employee app usage in the next employee survey. 

If you’re looking for an employee app that’s designed for frontline organizations, check out Blink. This all-in-one platform gives:

• Frontline workers access to the people, processes, communications, and applications they need to do their jobs — all through their corporate or personal devices. 
• Leaders access to the data they need to improve the employee experience in meaningful ways.

5. 1-1s

1-1s are one of the most effective ways to measure employee engagement. 

These meetings allow you to have meaningful conversations with each of your team members about their performance, goals, and satisfaction levels. They also give employees an opportunity to provide honest and constructive feedback about their work environment, so that they can help influence real, positive change within the organization.

1-1s can be used as a more informal and frequent performance review, and they can give you detailed insights into the current state of employee engagement. By keeping track of these meetings over time, you can identify any sudden drops or increases in engagement, and take action accordingly.

6. Performance reviews and feedback meetings

As a more formal 1-1 process, performance reviews and regular feedback meetings can be used to make critical decisions on employee compensation, necessary training, and proposed career development. But you can also use them to gauge and measure employee engagement. 

Highly-engaged workers are more likely to perform well in their jobs. Gallup found that engaged workers are 18% more likely to have above-average employee productivity. 

To effectively gauge your employees’ performance and improve engagement, develop a continuous feedback process so that employees know how they’re doing and what’s expected.

Here’s how you can implement a reliable feedback process:

• Create a list of opportunities when employee feedback can give you critical insights into how your company operates, such as at the close of onboarding and recruitment or during quarterly and annual performance reviews.
• Use various methods and strategies to collect feedback to keep employees engaged and get the most relevant answers for the situation.
• Implement engaging and constructive conversations between managers and employees at least once every two months. Ensure managers are practicing active listening and that they are actually implementing change based on the feedback. 

7. Exit interviews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMZ89C2tYHw&ab_channel=HRUniversity

Exit interviews are an important component of any employee engagement strategy. They provide invaluable insight into the reasons why employees choose to leave your company, and can help you identify areas that need improvement in order to keep your best talent.

Some example exit interview questions to ask could include:

• Why are you leaving the company?
• What was the motivation behind your decision to search for a new job?
• Can you identify the factors that had a positive or negative impact on your ability to succeed in your role?
• Based on your experience, do you have any recommendations for onboarding new employees?
• How did you feel about the management of your role?
• Did you feel appreciated by your team, supervisors and/or managers?
• What were the most enjoyable aspects of this job?
• What was the most challenging aspect of this job for you? 

Not all employees are willing to offer honest feedback during an exit interview, so consider implementing a post-exit survey where you can ask more detailed questions about employee satisfaction and engagement while the person is still employed at your organization.

This allows you to better understand the motivations behind each employee’s decision to leave and take action to prevent similar situations from occurring in the future. 

If you want to stay two steps ahead of the exit interview, however, stay interviews can be a potentially transformative addition to your employee engagement strategy. Currently deployed by only 27% of US HR decision-makers, stay interviews help you understand how well your current employees’ expectations are being met when it comes to meaningful connections.

How to measure employee engagement through key metrics

8. Internal communication receptiveness

Effective internal communication can be used to bridge the gap between managers and employees, build trust in the workplace, and boost employee engagement. But it’s not enough just to communicate –  you need to measure how your employees actually react and respond to the content you share.

That’s where key metrics come in. From employee app usage data, to the amount of content employees interact with or create, there are a number of metrics that can give you valuable insights about employee engagement.

You can measure receptiveness to your internal communication by tracking how much of your content is consumed, whether it’s posts or newsletters.

Specific metrics like post likes and response rates, message opens, and even file analytics can tell you how receptive your teams are to internal communication efforts. If you’re using a super-app like Blink, you can track these metrics over time to monitor how well your internal messages are being received.

The data from these analytics can give you the confidence you need to leave certain channels of communication behind. If frontline workers are not engaging with email — or don't even have access to it! — then waste no more time sending email comms, for example. An accessible mobile tool like Blink can pave the way for greater internal communication receptiveness by giving everyone equal access to messages, wherever they log in from.

9. Voluntary turnover rate

If an employee voluntarily resigns from an organization, it’s voluntary turnover. 

Voluntary turnover is on the rise. According to the Institute of Corporate Productivity (i4cp) and Fortune’s global survey of 1,195 respondents in Q1 of 2022, 77% of large organizations experienced high voluntary turnover in 2021.

To calculate the voluntary turnover rate, divide the number of employees that voluntarily left your company by the average number of workers you had during that period.

These are the top reasons of voluntary turnover outlined in Microsoft’s 2022 Work Index report:

• Personal well-being or mental health (24%)
• Work-life balance (24%)
• Lack of confidence in senior management or leadership (21%)
• Lack of flexible work hours or location (21%)

In other words, a high voluntary turnover rate means your workers struggle to stay engaged with the company due to a lack of support and direction. 

If you notice high voluntary turnover, conduct a voluntary turnover analysis to know the exact cause:

• Check for trends: Compare your voluntary turnover rate to the previous period and look for possible trends and early warnings. For instance, if you see many employees leaving after two years, it may be due to a lack of career advancement opportunities. And if you see new hires leaving within the first year, onboarding might be the issue.

• Gather employee feedback: Collect qualitative data from surveys and exit interviews to determine why employees leave your organization.
• Prepare an employee turnover report: Translate the voluntary turnover data into monetary value. That’ll help you follow up with different departments and levels of hierarchy and develop an actionable plan to increase retention rates. 

Analyzing the voluntary turnover rates for the first year is especially important since new employees represent a lot of pure cost. A time-to-productivity analysis can tell you when an employee’s productivity has risen to a point where their contribution outweighs their cost. 

For example, if the average threshold productivity occurs at the six-month mark, any employee who leaves before that incurs a financial loss to the company.

10. Employee absenteeism rate

Absenteeism is the habitual failure to come to work or stay there during working hours, and it is often unplanned and unannounced.

It’s important to differentiate unexcused absences from legitimate ones, and to be aware of the disruption that absenteeism can cause to your organization. That’s because it will negatively affect anyone working with this individual and undermine trust between employees and management and the employees themselves.

A high employee turnover rate is a strong indicator that your company needs to make adjustments before this behavior impacts your workforce’s productivity and relationships. Absenteeism is often also a reflection of poor management, so your managers must be aligned on the appropriate policies and be upskilled to develop their leadership abilities. 

To measure the absenteeism rate, divide the number of unexcused absences in a given period by the total workdays. Multiply the result by 100 to get the absenteeism rate for that period.

As a rule of thumb, an absenteeism rate of 1.5% is considered healthy. Employees do fall ill and request time off for various reasons, so you shouldn’t expect a rate below 1.5%.

However, an absenteeism rate above 2% indicates issues. Your workers may be burnt out, feeling disengaged, or in conflict with their peers or supervisors. 

The best way to prevent employee absenteeism is to intervene early. 

Develop an action plan by:

• Asking your managers to arrange regular check-in meetings, especially with underperforming employees. 
• Implementing flexible work policies for employees struggling with personal issues. 
• Getting your managers to address the problems between workers who are having conflicts.
• Ensuring management forms meaningful connections with employees and their leadership style receives positive feedback.

Comparing employee engagement measurement methods

How not to measure employee engagement

Measuring employee engagement incorrectly often leads to unreliable results and an inaccurate view of how well your team is doing. Common mistakes when it comes to measuring engagement include:

1. Not setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which can provide you with measurable goals to strive for. Without these, it can be difficult to determine whether the changes you've implemented have had a positive or negative impact on your employee engagement levels.
2. Relying on just one method to measure engagement, such as employee surveys. This can not only be a problem that stops you from capturing the full image of engagement for your employees but can also lead to the overuse and over-reliance on surveys to measure engagement.
3. Ineffective methods of communication. If you rely on a communication channel that employees aren’t engaging with today — like an intranet — then you're highly unlikely to capture the richness of data that you need. That’s why we would always recommend an employee super-app over a back-end intranet.

What to do after you have measured employee engagement

Whatever your employee engagement metrics and methods show, it’s important to note that engagement is not an activity, project, or initiative. It's an outcome you earn from consistently offering value to your business.

Remember: as trends continue to change, so will employee expectations. Keep your finger on the pulse of employee engagement levels within your organization and take swift action where necessary.

There are many digital tools to keep a tab on employee engagement. However, the best solution is one that’s designed specifically for your employees, and can provide all of these solutions in one place. 

If you have a frontline-focused workforce, check out Blink. Blink offers interactive employee surveys, cutting-edge content analytics, and intuitive communication tools to measure and actively improve employee engagement.

Blink provides a solution to fixing the broken feedback loop and filling the knowledge gap between leadership and frontline workers.

Old intranets all sound the same.

Out of date, out of sync, out of tune. A corporate soundtrack of forgotten logins, stale pages, and “Is anyone actually using this?”

This year, Blink is changing the track. We’ve been recognized in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Intranet Packaged Solutions — not just anywhere in the grid, but as a Challenger.

For us, this isn’t just a placement. It’s a remix. For the industry. For the intranet. For every employee who’s ever thought, “Why is this so hard to use?”

Why the Gartner Magic Quadrant matters

If you’re in HR, comms, IT, or procurement, you already know the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ - to us, it’s one of the most influential industry reports in technology.

Every year, Gartner independently evaluates vendors on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision - then categorizes them as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, or Niche Players.

This Quadrant has become the go-to reference for organizations choosing their next digital workplace partner.

We’re proud to debut as a Challenger. But more than that, we see it as a validation that the world is ready for a more human way to work.

Why Blink? Why now?

We built Blink on a simple belief: Work should feel connected.

In a world overflowing with tools but starved of real connection, we’re creating an intranet that people actually want to use. One that unites the CEO’s town hall with the shop floor shift briefing. One that gets frontline and office workers on the same wavelength.

Why we believe Blink was recognized

🎧 Sales and customer alignment: We deeply understand buyer pain points, backed by strategic partnerships with industry leaders like Workday.

🎧 Financial and product strength: Robust growth, an agile roadmap with continuous innovation, and a reliable product strategy built for the future keep Blink ahead of the curve.

🎧 We go beyond software: With specialized onboarding teams, strategic rollout support, and a dedication to long-term success, we’re not just a platform — we’re a true partner.

🎧 From mobile to total experience: Our platform empowers every kind of worker with personalized microapps, powerful social features, and communications that actually cut through.

Challenger energy: More than a position - a mindset

For us, being a Challenger isn’t just about where we land on the grid. It’s about how we move through the world.

We don’t believe “good enough” intranets should do the trick. We don’t do stale or static. We remix the intranet into something dynamic, modern, and centered on people.

Because what good is an intranet that no one uses?

We’re obsessed with adoption: ensuring employees actually engage, communicate, and thrive on the platform. That’s why Blink is designed with every kind of worker at heart, driven by a people-first approach to innovation.

That’s what it means to challenge the status quo. That’s what it means to Blink.

What’s the rest of the market saying?

The intranet packaged solutions (IPS) market is evolving rapidly, moving from static, web-only sites to dynamic, multichannel platforms that are central to the digital workplace.

What used to be dusty web-only portals are now vibrant, multi-channel hubs that power communication, engagement, knowledge, and culture. Today’s IPS offerings go far beyond document repositories - they’re incorporating AI assistants and supporting integrations with Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft 365, and other leading business systems.

As Gartner puts it, intranets are once again a priority investment as organizations transform their digital workplace, reduce IT complexity, and seek consistent, people-first employee experiences.

Intranets are no longer just “nice to have” - they’re necessary parts of a modern business infrastructure. They’re becoming critical hubs for productivity, connection, and culture across both office-based and deskless workforces.

This isn’t evolution - it’s inflection. And Blink is leading the remix.

Spinning the future of work

For us, being named a Challenger is a milestone. But it’s also just the intro track.

We’re already dropping new hits:

• Broadcast-quality live streaming that gives every employee a front row seat

• Blink Assist, our AI-powered copilot for content creation and communication

• Analytics that actually matter, surfacing predictive insights into how people engage
• “Save for later” offline access, so work doesn’t have to stop when the WiFi does
• Modern social features like Stories that drive adoption and give Instagram a run for its money

Our vision is simple: The future of work should feel intuitive, inspiring, and essential - not invisible. Blink exists to unlock that.

This isn’t just recognition - it’s our statement

We’re not here to play quietly. We’re here to remix the intranet.

Named top Challenger by Gartner, chosen every day by the world’s most ambitious organizations, and powered by a people-first mission - this is only the beginning.

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Employee retention is the art of holding onto your staff once you’ve hired them.

And, in 202w, it’s more important than ever.

Why?

Because companies are finally waking up to the competitive advantages of being a "people" company. A "churn and burn" approach to hiring results in poor customer service.

This is an issue, because customers are placing increasing value on good service. With smartphones, it’s easier than ever to find a competitor company to buy from. Or in the case of consumer goods, to avoid the shop altogether and order online.

Before we start.

You can hold onto employees (more or less) by treating them well. Listening to their concerns, and providing them with a few incentives to stay put.

If you’re an HR professional or a CEO, you don’t need us to tell you that.
What you might find useful is an in-depth guide to employee retention in the modern workforce.

How to maximize your employee engagement efforts. And make sure there were no stones left unturned in creating the most comprehensive guide... we asked some industry-leading experts to contribute.
We’ll cover:

• Detail on the importance of employee retention today.
• How to build effective employee retention strategies.
• The exit interview, and how to turn it into your secret employee retention weapon.

Let’s begin...

Why is employee retention important?

Employee retention means "treating your employees right"; it’s an end in itself, not just the means.

From an ethical standpoint, no company should mistreat their employees. Meeting your colleagues’ basic needs and providing them with a safe and stimulating workplace? It's the right thing to do for its own sake.

But it’s more than that.

Attracting talent to your company—and keeping it once you’ve found it—has so many advantages. According to Herzberg's famous Two-Factory Theory, employee retention and employee motivation are interdependent. You can find out more about this in the Vantage Circle HR blog. A strong employee retention strategy will:

• Reduce operating costs.
• Improve customer service levels.
• Allow you to out-compete your competitors for the best people.

The cost of high employee turnover

Hiring and firing is expensive.

Eye-wateringly expensive, to be precise. Think six to nine months salary as a conservative estimate.

Then you need to consider the impact of not having someone there to do that person’s work. That could slow down a massive project. Cause higher overtime costs as existing staff pick up their work. Or just lead to a reduction in staff morale as they struggle with increased workloads.

Companies tend to get the importance of this for salaried positions and execs. but there’s often a bit of a blind spot when it comes to their non-desk workforce and the real cost of losing an employee.

Sure, replacing a senior-level manager is more expensive than replacing a bus driver. But what happens if your bus drivers’ morale becomes so low that two or three quit per month?

It all adds up.

"Losing talented staff can also have emotional consequences on those who stay. Effectively reducing productivity by decreasing morality and motivation," says Rochelle van Rensburg of the Ezzely Blog.

"Maintaining essential talent is therefore mission-critical to organizational effectiveness for all these reasons. Staff retention puts companies ahead of their competitors, by reducing recruiting and re-skilling costs. But more importantly, by keeping the top performers, which results in all of their specialized knowledge and expertise remaining in-house."

Your mobile workforce interacts most with customers. They are the public face of your company. So, their happiness will reflect in the level of service they give your customers.

Happier, more engaged employees deliver better customer service. They also build up a bank of operational knowledge over time. This helps them respond to queries quicker and more effectively than a steady stream of new hires ever could.

The importance of employee retention in 2020

An active employee retention strategy is more important than ever.
There are two key reasons for this:

Firstly, it's never been easier for customers to look elsewhere if they feel that your levels of service don’t match their expectations. We live in an age where any information you want is available via a few taps of a smartphone screen.

Dissatisfied with a hotel stay? Booking.com can recommend thousands of others.

Bad experience in a taxi? A quick Google gets you all the phone numbers of other local firms.

Poor customer experience at a theme park? TripAdvisor lists other attractions.

You get the idea.

Despite this, customers still want to be loyal. Millennials want to stick around if your brand fits in with their personal values. Don’t throw away this loyal market.

Secondly, it's never been easier to browse jobs via online jobs boards. If your workforce isn’t happy they will move. Don’t assume that they will sit in their job miserable because there aren’t any other options.

Reasons why employees leave and reasons why managers leave aren't always the same.

Your competitors may be waking up to the benefits of being a "people company." They'll more than happily snap up the staff you can't keep.

The best employee retention strategies

A strong employee retention rate is crucial to remain competitive. How you go about doing this is worth examining in some depth.

Remember - you are an employee too! As you create your employee retention strategies, keep asking yourself, "would I be happy with this?" or, "does this seem reasonable to me?"

Here are a few points you’ll need to cover when creating an employee engagement plan. Remember, the employee experience starts before the first day at the interviewing stage. To set each new starter up for success, getting the onboarding right is crucial. Want to learn more? Check out the Definitive Guide to Onboarding.

Let's quickly touch on the foundation of any working relationship: trust. As Kayla Lopez from the recruitment firm Viqtory.com reminds us. "If your employees trust you and the organization they tend to embrace the workplace; this begins before the employee is even hired. Transparency is something that we need to willingly support to gain trust. A workforce that trusts you will be engaged, a workforce that is engaged will retain. Trust is the foundation of all strong partnerships."

Now for the details...

Pay well

We’ll start with the basics.

If your pay rates don’t match with your competitors’, you’re going to have a bad time keeping hold of your high achievers.

Take a quick look at what your competitors pay for equal positions. Try and build a league table of what similar companies to you pay, and where you rank. Glassdoor is a good starting point.

Aiming for the absolute top is ideal if you can afford it, but you don’t have to offer the best salary offer out there. There are plenty of other ways to encourage your staff to stay put (more on that below), as long as you can land in the middle of the table. For someone working in a frontline job, it is difficult to give your best at work knowing you could get $5.00 per hour more for the same job elsewhere. (Even if there’s free pizza every Friday).

It’s also worth noting that even a generous wage packet won’t persuade your employees to stay if you’re otherwise a nightmare to work for.
Consider this step the cornerstone of all your employee engagement efforts. Not enough by itself, but essential in building something lasting and meaningful.

Give competitive benefits

You might not be able to take it to Silicon Valley levels. (Free three-course meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner, unlimited holidays, and puppy creches).

You can offer a benefits package or a performance bonus scheme tailored to the size of your business, your budget, and your business objectives. The key is to prioritize benefits that would have a tangible difference to the lives of your employees. Add the fancy stuff on if you have money to spare.

Think about:

• Childcare vouchers: we’re all aware of the struggle to find affordable childcare. Help your workforce with their work-life balance (and keep it diverse—most of the people who end up quitting jobs for childcare reasons tend to be women) by offering vouchers to help with the cost.

• Health cover for employees and dependents: an absolute must if you're US-based, although even if you live in a country which has some form of universal health care, giving employees the opportunity to go private is very appealing.

• Flexible working: if the type of work you do accommodates it, flexible working is like gold dust to your staff. A "work your hours however you want" policy helps people manage childcare commitments, fit in dentist appointments, and reduce the stress of trying to juggle work and life commitments.

• Lunch program: Most of the lunch break is spent buying, prepping or reheating food. Offering a tasty and healthy in-house solution, such as the online canteen Smunch, allows your employees to capitalize on their break time and share a meal together. Ultimately, this will improve your company culture and cross-departmental communication as well.

Once you’ve got the basics sorted, some nice-to-have options include:

• Above average PTO allowances
• Free gym memberships and cycle to work programs
• Personal development funds

Develop a feedback culture to empower employees

Your employees know their workplace better than anyone else. Make the most of it.

If your employees feel involved in shaping their workplace and consulted on major decisions then they will be reluctant to leave it.

The key to this is to carry regular, easy-to-complete employee engagement surveys so you know exactly what the mood on the ground is and how to improve it.

Employees will hold an enormous amount of goodwill towards a workplace that listens to their concerns and acts on them. Equally, they will reserve a special sort of resentment for those that send out survey after survey, only to ignore the results.

It’s essential to have a solid plan in place for your employee engagement surveys, or they will backfire spectacularly.

Key pointers

• Small, regular surveys are better than long, annual ones. Only giving your employees one chance per year to raise issues will result in bottled up frustrations spewing out come survey time. Not only does this result in surveys that skew unhelpfully negative, but it also means that your HR team will face an uphill struggle
• Another point about designing surveys that you can respond to effectively: keep it targeted. Focus each of your quick-answer surveys on a specific area—facilities onsite, for example, or about relationships with line managers.
• Use short answer questions: "yes/no" or "on a scale of 1-5" formats make it easier for people to respond immediately. Long-form feedback can be helpful, but having lots of long-answer text boxes on your survey will put people off completing it. A good compromise is to have an optional "any specific comments" box at the end of the survey.

When you’ve processed the surveys, share the results and shout about what you’re doing to act on feedback. Employees will appreciate the transparency, and it’s important to signpost what you’re doing to address the concerns they raise—or they won’t bother to participate in future surveys.

Try and create a "feedback culture" in your company by encouraging people to come forward with suggestions for improvements any time they want. Surveys highlight pain points as they are reactive; an anonymous suggestions box (either digital or real-life), on the other hand, will bring out the more innovative side of your workforce.

These suggestions might be small—a new way of organizing the break room fridge, or the introduction of free coffee Mondays—but the opportunity to improve the workplace in this way will work wonders for your wider staff’s sense of allegiance to it.

Make your workplace a fun place to work

If your coworkers are your friends, spending time at work doesn’t seem so taxing.

This is where the fun stuff comes in—the away days, lunchtime yoga, the free breakfast bar, the Christmas party...

If you have a mobile workforce, don’t forget to include them, too! They might not be in the office that often, so having regular get-togethers or breakfast clubs when shifts change is a great way to build a sense of belonging.

Obviously, base these activities on what your own workforce would like, but some ideas include:

• Regular lunchtime sports clubs (running, yoga, five-a-side, badminton are good starting points)
• Away days and team-building weekends.
• Semi-regular opportunities for free food. Depending on the size of your team, you could offer lunch on the company each Friday, pizza parties when teams hit their targets or just because
• Big events like Christmas parties and family fun days. If you run awareness weeks for things like diversity, mental health and stress, why not run some exciting events for these too?
• Recognition of key milestones. If there are particularly busy periods throughout the year (like the Christmas rush for anyone working in retail or hospitality), put on an event to recognize the hard work your employees put in. This could be a full-on party, or simply just giving your staff the nod to take off after lunch on a quiet day.

This step does, however, come with a big flashing warning sign that says: don’t bother doing any of these without doing the steps listed above first.

Because these are fun and exciting, and sound super trendy when you put them on your Careers page, people often use them in place of paying a decent wage, or offering flexible working hours, or acting on employee feedback.

The exit interview - your employee retention secret weapon

One of the best ways of figuring out what’s going wrong with your employee retention efforts is asking your colleagues when they leave.

Seems counter-intuitive, and rather frustrating, doesn’t it?

And in some ways, it is. No amount of collecting and aggregating exit interview data, tweaking your employee engagement plan and making changes in your company to reduce employee turnover will change the fact that, for that particular employee, your efforts weren’t enough. For HR people and line managers, that stings sometimes.

Still, if you can take your losses on the chin, this is a real opportunity to do better for your colleagues, and identify and fix any major issues that push people to leave.

There are three main reasons why exit interviews are so effective at flagging up things that need to change:

The employee is leaving so won't hold back

Regardless of how many times you reassure your colleagues that your pulse surveys are anonymous and that helpful suggestions are encouraged, they will still be a little suspicious.

The worry that surveys aren’t really anonymous, or that speaking out about a key workplace bugbear will get them labelled as a troublemaker, will be a constant thorn in the side of your employee retention efforts.

(As a side note, if this attitude is pervasive then it might be time to take a look at your workplace culture. A little reticence is natural. An all-encompassing dread of speaking up might indicate something a little more sinister).

The exit interview is a different kettle of fish. They’re leaving. There are no raises or opportunities for promotion in the pipeline. This is their opportunity to "tell it like it really is."

Listen, even if you think they’re being unfair and bitter.

Problems brought up during exit interviews tend to have weighed heavily on an employee’s decision to leave. In other words, they’re big issues you need to address urgently.

Get the whole picture

Multiple exit interviews help build up a better picture of life on the ground.

Of course, there’s always the chance that one particular employee just, for whatever reason, didn’t have a good time.

That’s where keeping data from previous exit interviews comes in.

For example, if an employee complains about their line manager being unbearable, it might just be a clash of personalities. Equally it could be because that line manager is difficult to work for and too demanding. It’s difficult to say without further info.

So. Run some analytics.

How many other employees from that line manager’s team have left over the past year?

Did they say anything in their exit interviews?

Have they been flagged to HR for anything previously?

If so, you might want to investigate further.

This is why it’s important to conduct an exit interview for every single person that leaves the business. If you restrict it to management positions, people based in HQ, or full-time workers, you’re missing key sets of data that could be useful in improving your employee retention strategy.

Find out what went wrong

An exit interview, conducted well, helps you identify wrong turns in your employee journey map.

You’ll probably have some sort of employee journey map already.

You might call it something different. We’re referring to the plan you make that starts at the hire phase and ends with the offboarding phase when the employee leaves. This normally includes guidelines for each stage they go through with your company. For example:

Hiring:

• Offer letter and contract sent
• Start date agreed two weeks in advance

Onboarding:

• First day: tour of premises, fire safety, welcome coffee or lunch
• First six weeks: all e-learning to be completed

You get the idea. Here's a basic template you could expand on:

(Source: Trends in Employee Journey Maps)

The exit interview provides an excellent opportunity to ask your employees about various stages in this plan, to see whether they’ve been carried out to your expectations.

Ask specifically, and don’t be afraid to go right back to the start of their employment. Whether they felt welcomed in their first weeks, for example. If they were given clear and regular feedback on their performance, and compare that to your notes on how your employee journey should pan out.

It could be that, despite your meticulous efforts in planning it, your employee journey map isn’t being adhered to by managers in the wider organisation. This could be why your employees are leaving - this map provides guidelines on how to make sure people feel safe, supported and included at work. If people don’t follow it you’re going to have problems.

Your employee journey map is important. If it isn’t being followed, you need to correct that as soon as you can. Exit interviews are the best way to do this.

How to conduct an employee retention interview

Be flexible around your employees needs

If a lot of your workforce are remote or mobile, don’t insist on a face-to-face interview at HQ.

There are several free video calling apps available, so why not make use of them? An employee is more likely to feel comfortable talking to you if you’ve made accommodations for their situation.

If they’re more comfortable talking to you, they’re more likely to be honest with you, and that’s exactly what you want.

Don’t make it overly formal

Go for a relaxed vibe. Making things too formal will only stifle conversation.

If you’re conducting a face-to-face interview, it’s a nice touch to provide some sort of refreshments; hot drinks and a pastry, maybe. The employee will appreciate the gesture, and it will encourage a more conversational feel, which is exactly what will get them to open up.

Identify the specifics to touch on

You will know, from previous exit interviews if there are any particular pain points in your employee experience.

Ask about them. You’ll then be able to establish:

• Whether these are still issues
• What progress you’ve made on them, and how effective your efforts to tackle them have been.

...But allow them to express their opinion too

If the structure of the interview is entirely created by you, you could miss something important.

By allowing employees space to expand on their own concerns, you give yourself the opportunity to pick up on potential issues that aren’t on your radar. Sure, a lot of this could be specific to that particular individual, but you should investigate nonetheless—otherwise you’ll never know whether it’s the iceberg tip of something bigger.

Remember: your relationship with the employee isn't over

People leave for all sorts of reasons—not all of them negative.

You might want to leave the door open for talented employees, in case they want to return at some point. Also consider that talented former employees can be great source of referrals.

These can be your company’s cheerleaders, even after they’ve left. A good exit interview can make this relationship. A poor one can ruin it.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that the employee leaving has been less than stellar. In this case you should see the exit interview as a chance to smooth things over, and divert potentially negative Glassdoor reviews or social media mentions.

Final thoughts

To summarize:

• An employee retention strategy is important because it makes your employees happier. Happier, more engaged employees perform better in general, and deliver better customer service.
• The cost of employee turnover is measured in increased operational costs and decreased institutional knowledge.

Bearing this in mind, the question you should be asking yourself isn’t "can we afford to expand our employee retention efforts?"

It’s "can we afford not to?"

An engaged, happy workforce with a low churn rate isn’t just a nice thing to have.

It’s not just something you can boast about on your Careers page.

It’s a competitive advantage—and people are only just waking up to this fact. Because now more than ever, people value good customer service. If you can provide that, you’ll have a serious head start on your competitors.

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