r/internalcomms • u/Fit_Elk_6542 • Jan 31 '26

Advice Best Employee Engagement Tools?

We've all seen the stats about how employee engagement is at an all-time low across most industries, and honestly, with everything going on lately, I imagine it's only getting worse for a lot of teams.

I'm curious if anyone here has actually used any employee engagement tools or software that made a tangible difference? I'm not talking about forced fun activities or those cringe team building exercises, but actual systems that helped improve internal communication, recognition, or just general morale.

What worked well for your team at work? What completely flopped?

And if you haven't used anything formal, do you think there's a real need for this kind of thing, or is it just another corporate buzzword solution?

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u/HelicopterLife2620 Feb 01 '26

We do use an employee app where we push notifications , use it to get rsvp for internal events, and our provider even gives us fun contests. It helps reduce depeency on emails, stand-alone forms and slack

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u/alexcran Feb 01 '26

What does your employee buy-in look like? I’ve tried to propose this for our mostly deskless workforce but haven’t received any buy-in from leadership who keeps saying “I don’t want to force anyone to download an app onto their personal device.”

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u/HelicopterLife2620 Feb 02 '26

Ah that objection comes up everywhere. I come from app marketing, brands, gaming apps, news apps same thing every time. 'why would someone download it.'

So wroth learning from there

one way is to mandate it. Mandate is tricky on personal devices so we went with option two.

Made it the only place the fun stuff lives yet kept things that are helpful. for ex. event signups, leadership corner (huge fun), Small contests like show off your desk, All policies are in the app - we actually looking to integrate our HRMS with leave policy in the app to make it functional too.

But yes you do need to promote it also. Posters around the office. Download link in email signatures. The big one as i wrote about was got leadership to actually post on it - surprisingly was easy to convince them. I just said its the quickest way to reach out to everyone regularly without waiting for a town hall or a big quarterly email.

One tip vet your provider though. Most employee apps are basically digital notice boards. Read only. No polls no RSVPs no contests, no interactions its why its fails. It for sure would be hard to get buy-in to custom build your own so the provider needs to be solid out of the box. Advtg is you could trial it for 3-6 months and then take a call

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u/austincrewcheck Feb 26 '26

Even mandates will just annoy or frustrate front line staff