Employee survey providers: A comparison to help you make the right choice

Why companies conduct employee surveys

Before we look at the various employee survey providers, we should understand why companies invest in employee surveys at all.

There are actually many different reasons for gathering employee feedback:

• Measuring satisfaction and engagement remains at the centre of many surveys. Companies want to find out how employees are doing and which factors promote or hinder their engagement. These engagement drivers can be precisely measured and improved through targeted surveys.
• Change management and transformation support have gained particular importance in recent years. Companies use regular pulse surveys to track the progress of change processes and make course corrections early.
• Research-based knowledge generation is becoming increasingly important. Modern surveys help identify burnout risks, recognise stress factors and measure the effectiveness of wellbeing programmes.
• Evaluating and developing leadership quality is another central reason for gathering feedback from within the company. 360-degree feedback enables the systematic development of leadership skills and measurement of the impact of leadership on team success.
• Finally, employee surveys can also create a solid data foundation for strategic HR decisions. In an era where data-driven decisions are becoming increasingly important, employee surveys have evolved into a valuable component of companies' People Analytics.

Employee survey providers: All options at a glance

The landscape of employee survey providers is complex and diverse. Each option has its justification – what's crucial is that it fits your specific needs. Here's an overview:

Option 1: Do nothing

The simplest option is not to conduct the survey at all. The disadvantages outweigh here, although doing nothing can be legitimate in certain cases.

Advantages:

• No immediate investments or efforts required
• No risk of disappointed expectations among employees
• Focus on other HR priorities possible

Disadvantages:

• Alienation of employees and greater distance between company or management and employees
• Early detection of problems like burnout very difficult or impossible
• Increased risk of turnover and declining productivity
• Missing data foundation for strategic (HR) decisions

Best use scenarios: This option is primarily suitable for very small companies (under 20 employees) where other intensive feedback formats are established. In all other cases, the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages.

Option 2: General survey tools

General survey tools are tools designed for any kind of surveys. These tools allow the conduct of simple surveys and are often already available in companies or easy and cost-effective to acquire.

Concrete examples: Microsoft Forms (often included in Office 365), Google Forms (free), SurveyMonkey

Advantages:

• Cost-effective or even freely available
• Quick setup
• High flexibility in survey design

Disadvantages:

• Surveys must be designed and created from scratch
• Time-consuming manual analysis of results
• No automatic action recommendations or benchmarks

Best use scenarios: Ideal for smaller companies (20-100 employees), first pilot projects or very specific, one-time research questions with limited budget.

Option 3: Traditional employee survey providers

This category includes established service providers for employee surveys with decades of experience and scientifically founded approaches. These providers have often developed a specific survey methodology and sell the conduct and evaluation of surveys as a service.

Concrete examples: Willis Towers Watson, Korn Ferry

Advantages:

• Long-standing experience and proven methodology with validated questions
• Detailed statistical analyses and reports
• Industry benchmarks and comparison data

Disadvantages:

• Long, often cumbersome surveys
• Reports often very theoretical and not practice-oriented
• Slow response times – weeks to months until result report and feedback to employees
• High costs and little flexibility for adjustments
• Focus on management and HR as users, little direct benefit for teams

Best use scenarios: Companies that want to regularly measure a variety of employee KPIs or primarily need benchmarking and compliance documentation (e.g., for ISO certification).

Option 4: Feedback modules in HR suites

Many companies already use comprehensive HR systems which are employed for personnel administration, payroll, time tracking and other core HR functions. These often also include feedback modules for conducting employee surveys.

Concrete examples: SAP SuccessFactors, Workday

Advantages:

• Integrated into existing HR infrastructure
• Unified data management
• Cost efficiency through already existing licence

Disadvantages:

• Often limited and poorly specialised feedback functionalities
• Low user-friendliness and poor user experience
• Focus on compliance and documentation rather than insights
• Little flexibility in adapting to specific needs
• Requires time from HR and management for working with results

Best use scenarios: Companies that already use an HR suite and primarily want to measure KPIs or need compliance documentation (e.g., for ISO certifications).

Option 5: Specialised employee engagement platforms

These platforms specialise in increasing employee engagement through continuous surveys and data-driven insights. They often include modules for employee surveys, performance management, goal setting, professional development, etc.

Concrete examples: Leapsome, Officevibe

Advantages:

• Modern, user-friendly interfaces
• Continuous pulse surveys instead of occasional large surveys
• AI-powered insights and automated action recommendations
• Comprehensive analytics and dashboards

Disadvantages:

• Often high implementation and training efforts
• Standardised approaches with limited cultural adaptation
• Focus on management dashboards, less on team empowerment
• Complexity through extensive feature sets can overwhelm
• Requires time from HR and management for working with results

Best use scenarios: Companies that want minimal effort in conducting regular, automated surveys, don't need individual adaptations and primarily want to collect and visualise data.

Option 6: Modern bottom-up tools

A new category of employee survey providers focuses not only on gathering feedback and continuously collecting data, but also on directly empowering teams to independently implement improvements and shape their collaboration and work environment. Our tool Pulse Feedback is an example of this category.

Concrete examples: Pulse Feedback, Joineer

Advantages:

• Very quick implementation of feedback into concrete measures
• Bottom-up approach promotes personal responsibility and engagement
• Simple, intuitive operation without training
• Promotion of a constructive feedback culture and climate of trust and psychological safety
• Relief of central HR resources through decentralised responsibility

Disadvantages:

• Less suitable for collecting a large number of KPIs simultaneously, as focus is on few questions per survey
• Additional solution that must be integrated into existing tool landscape
• Openness of decision-makers to a modern approach necessary

Best use scenarios: Modern, agile companies (50-2000 employees) that want to promote personal responsibility and local improvements. It’s particularly useful for organisations aiming to foster a constructive feedback culture.

Making the right choice: Decision support for your company

After this overview of the various employee survey companies, the question arises: Which approach best fits your organisation and your needs? Here are 5 concrete questions you can ask yourself to make the right choice.

Do you primarily want to measure KPIs and collect data or promote engagement and enable changes?

If it's about conducting established and scientific standard surveys, regularly measuring KPIs and having no great demands on individualisation, traditional employee survey providers or specialised employee engagement platforms are the best solution, depending on the use case also the feedback modules of HR suites.

If you don't just want to measure and create decision-making bases for decision-makers in top management, but want to enable noticeable improvements throughout the company, then modern bottom-up tools are the right choice for you. Because conducting the survey is less than half the battle. The purposeful translation of results into concrete, effective measures is much easier and more effective with bottom-up approaches than with all other approaches.

How large is your company?

Companies under 50 employees often benefit most from very simple, cost-effective tools. For medium to large companies (50-2,000 employees), specialised employee experience platforms or modern bottom-up tools are usually optimal. For large corporations (2000+ employees), the robustness of traditional providers or comprehensive HR suites can sometimes be advantageous.

How large are your time and technical resources?

Free or very cheap tools require little budget but a lot of time and expertise. If you have both and high demands on survey individualisation, general survey tools can be the right choice. In most cases, however, it's worth benefiting from the dedicated functions, automation and expertise of specialised tools and service providers.

How much individualisation is important to you?

Can you live well with a standard solution or do you want to make adjustments, e.g., to survey content or frequency of surveying. General survey tools and modern bottom-up tools enable you great individualisation, standardised approaches from traditional providers, HR suites and employee engagement platforms only to a limited extent.

How much time do you have for implementation?

If you need quick results, general tools or bottom-up tools are ideal (few days to weeks). Traditional employee survey providers can also usually start quickly, but usually need several weeks for delivery of the result report. Specialised platforms need weeks to months for implementation depending on company size.

Are you unsure which provider best fits your company?

• Which approach is most purposeful for my company?
• What pitfalls must I consider?
• How do I best weigh the pros and cons of the various approaches?

We're happy to answer your questions about selecting the right provider – with concrete tips and experience from our practice.

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Conclusion: The path to successful employee surveys

Selecting the right provider is more than a technology decision – it fundamentally determines whether your employee survey leads to real improvement or fizzles out as an "HR initiative".

Our analysis shows: Traditional large surveys still have their place in companies of all sizes, but often suffer from low practical relevance. General survey tools are cost-efficient but require considerable internal expertise. Modules from HR suites offer simple integration, but often at the cost of user experience.

Specialised employee engagement platforms offer many features but can overwhelm through complexity. The emerging bottom-up approach shows promising results by anchoring feedback directly where change must take place: in the teams themselves.

Employee feedback only creates value when it leads to concrete measures. Klein et al. showed as early as 1971 that employees are frustrated when their opinions are not used. Modern providers therefore go beyond pure data collection and support organisations in the step from data to insights and concrete actions.

The future belongs to employee survey providers that don't just measure, but empower – teams, leaders and entire organisations to live feedback as a continuous improvement process. In an era where agility and personal responsibility are decisive competitive advantages, this cultural change becomes a necessity rather than a nice-to-have.

The choice is yours: Do you primarily want to measure data and metrics with your employee surveys or achieve action-oriented insights and effective changes? Depending on your answer, your decision for the right provider for your employee survey will become clear.

Literature

Klein, S. M., Kraut, A. I., & Wolfson, A. (1971). Employee reactions to attitude survey feedback: A study of the impact of structure and process. Administrative Science Quarterly, 16(4), 497-514.

Pendell, R. (2018, August 28). 10 ways to botch employee surveys. Gallup Workplace. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/240197/ways-botch-employee-surveys.aspx