The Best Employee Engagement Software for Frontline Workers

Although frontline workers make up the majority of the U.S. labor force, industry research shows that they’re less engaged overall than their desk-based counterparts. Frontline workers generally report a lower sense of well-being, believe they have fewer growth opportunities, and feel less recognized for their contributions.

The right employee engagement software for frontline workers should help you uncover and address these gaps in engagement with inclusive programs and incentives.

Here are five key considerations to help you choose the right vendor:

• Can you design easily accessible programs? Check for features that make engagement program(s) readily accessible to frontline workers. For example, prioritize platforms with mobile apps that integrate with your team’s communication tools. Email-free logins, code-based rewards redemptions, and offline recognition options are also key features that support deskless workers. 
• Support for managers. Various studies highlight the importance of managers in retaining frontline workers and boosting team engagement; Gallup’s research indicates that as much as 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by managers. With this in mind, prioritize an engagement platform that provides managers with the tools they need to succeed and helps you track manager engagement and the factors influencing manager sentiments. Look for manager dashboards, team-level controls, and analytics that show manager participation and engagement.
• Program customizations. The most effective engagement programs are tailored to strategic business goals. Look for a platform that lets you configure tailored programs—e.g., peer recognition programs that support your core values, a President’s Club that recognizes and rewards top performers, or a safety program that rewards people for following protocols.
• Rewards options. Platforms with built-in reward systems make it easy to incorporate incentives in your engagement programs. Some vendors support points-based and levels-based (reward tiers for milestone awards programs) systems for allocating rewards.
• Analytics and reporting. If you’re looking for actionable insights, consider a platform that offers more than just program participation metrics. To prove your program’s impact on engagement, you’ll need one that centralizes data across your engagement programs, combines participation metrics with employee listening data, and lets you analyze different cohorts (groups by age, tenure, department, etc.).

We’ve compiled a list of 5 employee engagement software solutions for frontline workers to help you find the right one for your needs. The tools we’re going to cover include:

1. Terryberry: Our employee engagement platform for frontline workers that lets you launch inclusive employee listening, rewards, recognition, and wellness programs in one place. You can use Terryberry to measure and quantify employee engagement, launch programs tailored to strategic objectives (such as driving retention), and build a business case for your program(s) with deep, centralized analytics.
2. iTacit: A frontline employee engagement platform for managing internal comms and providing workers with essential training and support.
3. Guusto: An alternative to Terryberry’s employee recognition software. Guusto lets you reward and recognize frontline workers and send gifts to third parties including contractors, vendors, and customers.
4. Beekeeper: An employee communication and engagement platform designed for frontline workforces. Beekeeper includes niche automation features such as payroll summaries and shift scheduling. You can pay to add on employee recognition.
5. CultureMonkey: CultureMonkey’s employee feedback tool helps you measure employee engagement and collect feedback from frontline workers.

1. Terryberry

Manage Employee Engagement for Your Entire Workforce from End-to-End

Terryberry lets you design and scale employee listening, recognition, incentive, and wellness programs from a single, centralized platform.

• Measure and quantify the factors impacting frontline employee engagement. Launch pre-designed, science-backed surveys with Terryberry’s employee listening tool and uncover trends across different cohorts. Track employee sentiments towards their managers, measure the impact of good leaders on retention, and compare engagement scores across departments, age groups, years of service, and more.
• Launch employee listening, recognition, and wellness programs tailored to strategic objectives. Tailor your programs to core values, cultivate manager-employee relationships, and proactively tackle employee well-being.
• Meet frontline employees where they work. Maximize participation by making your engagement programs conveniently accessible to frontline workers. Terryberry’s mobile app and integrations with MS Teams and Outlook make it easy for on-the-go employees to participate. Add passwordless login options for workers without corporate email addresses or choose from offline participation options (code-based redemptions, offline presentations, paper-based surveys, and more).
• Build a business case for your program with deep, centralized analytics. Measure the impact of your programs on employee engagement or retention. Capture granular insights such as the impact of recognition or managers on frontline employee engagement.

In the following three sections, we’ll show you how to measure employee engagement, take action with tailored programs, and measure the impact with Terryberry. We’ve helped thousands of companies launch employee engagement programs for their frontline workers, achieving measurable results:

• Nuna Logistics, the largest Inuit-owned heavy civil construction, earthworks, and mine construction contractor in Canada: achieved 91% manager engagement and a 68% increase in employee recognition.
• Amteck, a family-owned construction company with a team distributed across 13 states, achieved a:
  • 65% increase in employees articulating core values within 3 months.
  • 85% retention rate among employees with 10+ years of service.
  • 70% reduction in program administration time.
• Tidelands Health, the largest healthcare provider in coastal South Carolina, with over 2,500 employees, physicians, and volunteer partners: After implementing Terryberry’s Recognition Platform, employee engagement at Tidelands Health increased from 68% to 77% in the first year.
• The Co-op: Terryberry digitized the Co-op’s rewards scheme and rolled out a manager-led years of service recognition program to almost 70,000 employees. The number of colleagues celebrating their careers with a gift at Co-op increased from 1,000 to nearly 10,000 colleagues per year.

1. Measure Your Frontline Workforce’s Engagement with Science-backed Employee Listening

Terryberry lets you design and scale employee listening programs that engage frontline workers, helping you collect feedback, discover trends in employee engagement, and uncover actionable insights. For example, you can learn which groups are most likely to churn (and why), or measure and quantify the collective sentiments of frontline workers in a specific department towards leadership.

We designed Terryberry to help organizations design employee listening programs with strong foundations. These programs get three fundamentals right:

• They use the right surveys with the right cadence. For example, science-backed engagement surveys to measure employee engagement and eNPS surveys for churn.
• They make it easy for people to participate. You’ll need good participation numbers to get the most accurate representation of employee engagement across your organization.
• They reveal trends and actionable insights. Capturing these insights mostly comes down to choosing the right software and survey types.

Here’s how you can measure and quantify employee engagement, uncover trends, and inform your next steps with Terryberry.

I. Track and quantify engagement with our science-backed culture model

Our employee listening tool features a library with dozens of pre-designed surveys tailored to various needs and scenarios, ranging from tracking employee satisfaction to collecting feedback on specific initiatives and disaster response. You can measure employee engagement and its impact on retention using two surveys: our science-backed employee engagement baseline and eNPS surveys.

Our baseline survey, backed by I/O psychologists, was designed by three independent PhDs to measure and quantify the factors that impact employee engagement. They identified six of these factors—belonging, leadership, equity, purpose, empowerment, and well-being—which we refer to as engagement indicators.

The indicators collectively make up our culture model, which analyzes the positive and negative impacts of your company culture on employee engagement. For example, a positive sense of equity indicates that people feel recognized and believe they have opportunities to move up. In contrast, a low well-being score may indicate that employees are experiencing stress, burnout, or other challenges affecting their physical, mental, or workplace well-being.

The engagement baseline survey quantifies these factors using Likert scores. For example, a score of +20 in purpose suggests employees are strongly aligned with your company's vision. In contrast, a score of -5 in leadership indicates that weak manager-employee relationships are negatively impacting workplace engagement.

You can add more context to your findings using additional surveys. For example, eNPS surveys can help you identify which engagement indicators are contributing to voluntary employee turnover. After conducting eNPS and baseline surveys, you can find the culprit by checking which engagement indicator scores are negative for groups with low eNPS.

Similarly, let’s say your baseline survey results returned a low employee well-being score for one of your departments. You could follow up with a burnout and drill-down survey to investigate the root cause(s).

II. Interpret survey results with detailed analytics and cohort analysis

Our employee listening tool’s analytics dashboard lets you analyze data to uncover employee experience trends and understand the sentiments of specific groups, such as departments or branches.

You can use Terryberry’s participant filters to filter by age, department, gender, location, manager (i.e., the teams under them), tenure, seniority level, and more.

If you’re running a recognition program, you can also filter by “most recognized” and “least recognized” employees.

Uncovering trends specific to different cohorts can help you address gaps in employee engagement with tailored programs. For example, say you use the “seniority” and “department” filters to understand frontline manager sentiments, and discover they’re scoring low in eNPS, well-being, and empowerment. You conduct drill-down and burnout surveys to gain a deeper understanding, finding that managers need additional training, support, and more time off.

Here are some other ways you might use these filters to uncover trends:

• Compare eNPS and engagement indicator scores for employees with different tenures; e.g., 1, 3, 5, and 10 years of service.
• Measure “leadership” and eNPS scores of employees under different managers.
• Compare engagement indicator scores for employees across different branches.

III. Improve the user experience for program admins and survey respondents alike

Removing friction for both participants and program admins is key to getting the best results from your program. For example, let’s say you’ve made it easy for people to fill out the surveys, but you’re still manually processing and analyzing the data.

Consequently, there will be a long gap between receiving the responses and taking action based on them. A $3 billion heavy equipment company we worked with faced this exact problem: they collected feedback from workers across over 100 locations, but processing the data took anywhere from several weeks to months. They also lacked detailed analytics, making it difficult to uncover trends across their workforce.

Terryberry’s employee listening tool helps you remove both sources of friction by:

1. Automating administrative work. Our employee listening tool automates survey processing, allows you to schedule surveys and automate their distribution, and benchmarks your results (e.g., eNPS scores) against those of similar companies (by size, industry, and size + industry). We also automatically process data into analytics dashboards that you can use for cohort analysis and spotting trends.

Switching over to Terryberry’s employee listening tool helped the heavy equipment reduce its survey processing time to just a few hours.

2. Helping you maximize responses by:

• Working with you to create communications for your surveys, including initial messages, reminders, and follow-ups, using the best practices from our internal research.
• Distributing your surveys across online and offline channels (or both). For example, we can distribute them via our mobile app, generate links for managers to share over Teams or email, and even create paper-based surveys.

2. Launch Tailored Incentives, Recognition, and Wellness Programs

After you’ve uncovered the gaps in employee engagement, the next step is to address them with a tailored program. There isn’t a single “best” type of program to boost engagement; the right choice depends on your workforce’s needs and strategic objectives. It’s also worth noting that:

• Many organizations get the best results by launching various programs over time to meet different goals. For example, they might launch a years-of-service awards program to improve retention, peer and manager recognition programs to promote core values, and manager training and wellness programs to reduce burnout.
• If you compare two organizations with a similar “type” of engagement program, the program itself might look very different. Successful engagement programs are heavily customized to the organization’s workforce, needs, and goals. If you compared a construction company and a bank’s peer recognition programs, they might look very different. In fact, two banks may have very different peer recognition programs!

Although there are several types of engagement programs, the most impactful ones do share some core characteristics. They’re: 1) tailored to strategic objectives, 2) designed to motivate people with the right incentives, and 3) driven from the top down by leadership.

Below, we’ll take you through some of our customers’ frontline employee engagement programs designed around these fundamentals. We’ll explain how their programs are customized and what works well for them. Next, we’ll show you how to configure your own programs with Terryberry and secure similar wins.

How Amteck Drives Retention With a Tailored Years of Service Awards Program

Amteck is a family-owned construction company that boasts excellent employee retention rates, a notable achievement in an industry plagued by high attrition. Amteck’s leadership credits the company’s strong culture for its success in retaining employees. But, as Amteck expanded its workforce—to over 1,000 employees across offices in 13 states—people were losing their connection to the company’s core values and, by extension, its culture.

The program: We helped Amteck launch a years-of-service awards program to celebrate employees’ tenure and recognize them for demonstrating the company’s core values. The program:

• Was tailored to Amteck’s objective of promoting its culture. Employees are recognized on their service anniversaries for the core values they’ve demonstrated. Amteck saw a 65% increase in employees articulating core values within just 3 months of launching the program.
• Used custom incentives to recognize people. We designed and manufactured custom rings for Amteck’s program, with embedded gemstones that symbolize an employee’s years of service.
• Engaged leadership. Executives and senior leaders personally distributed rings on employees’ service anniversaries.

Amteck’s years of service awards program helped the company achieve an 85% retention rate among employees with 10 or more years of service. Using Terryberry’s recognition platform also reduced the program’s administration time by 70%.

How Tidelands Health Increased Engagement with Multiple Recognition Programs

Tidelands Health is the largest healthcare provider in coastal South Carolina with 4 hospitals, over 60 outpatient locations, and more than 2,500 employees.

The healthcare provider approached us with their goals of driving employee engagement by giving meaningful recognition. With our help, their new programs increased employee engagement by 9% in the first year alone, and they boast a manager participation rate that’s 14% higher than the average in the medical industry.

Tidelands Health’s HR team initially considered giving one-time recognition gifts to all its employees. Unfortunately, this program was costly, administratively demanding, and didn’t yield the results the company wanted. The healthcare provider concluded that an ongoing recognition program would be more effective for driving employee engagement.

 

“We could use our budget in a much more meaningful way to help us drive our engagement numbers. It would really be a beneficial mechanism going forward.”

- Jeremy Stephens, Associate VP of Human Resources

Tidelands Health now uses Terryberry’s recognition platform for multiple employee recognition programs, including:

• Milestone recognition programs that celebrate employees’ years of service, reward people for achieving performance goals, and recognize healthcare workers with nursing awards.
• A peer recognition program that allows employees to recognize each other for demonstrating Tidelands Health’s core values: people, service, quality, safety, finance, and growth.
• A manager recognition program that lets managers recognize and reward employees on the spot at their discretion (e.g., for going above and beyond in their work, demonstrating the company’s core values, or receiving exceptional patient feedback).

Tidelands Health’s recognition programs all use Terryberry AwardPoints, a system that awards people points when they’re recognized. For example, peers can award each other points for demonstrating core values, and managers have a fixed number of points to allocate. Employees can collect these points and exchange them in-platform for gifts of their choosing, thanks to Terryberry’s rewards platform.

How Moda Health Increased Workers’ Physical Activity with Terryberry’s Walker Tracker

Moda Health is a health insurance company based in Portland, Oregon, with over 1,400 workers. The insurance provider offers a comprehensive wellness plan for its employees, which includes fitness and mindfulness challenges.

When Moda Health approached us in 2016, they had been running an annual walking challenge since 2008 to promote wellness and charity fundraising. While the challenges did help employees improve their physical activity, participation and activity levels weren’t consistently improving. Additionally, program managers lacked detailed step and participation data, making it difficult for them to evaluate the challenge’s success.

We configured Terryberry’s employee wellness platform, Be Well, to help Moda Health increase its participation numbers and simplify the admin work. Be Well:

• Created a more inclusive program by allowing members to:
  • Engage in different forms of exercise. Our activity tracker converts different types of movement into steps.
  • Connect their different fitness devices and apps to conveniently track their steps.
• Motivated members to participate by making the program more interactive. Our challenge map included milestone markers and fun facts related to real-world destinations. This provided employees with regular encouragement and kept them engaged. Walker Tracker also emails employees their weekly step stats.
• Allowed Moda Health to launch more challenges, including team challenges. Walker Tracker’s simple interface made it easy for Moda Health’s team to launch and run activity challenges throughout the year. They introduced team challenges, which encouraged people to motivate their peers.

After launching the step challenge, employee participation increased by 210% in just 2 years.

Be Well is a part of Terryberry’s comprehensive employee wellness platform, which includes personalized well-being plans, training, expert-led well-being webinars, step and activity challenges, and our integrated rewards platform. Learn more about how Terryberry’s employee wellness platform helps companies build healthy habits in their workforce here.

How to Configure Your Tailored Employee Engagement Program with Terryberry

Terryberry helped companies like Tidelands Health, Amteck, and Moda Health launch tailored programs by configuring:

1. What people are rewarded for.

You can customize nominations, enable managers to recognize people on the spot, and configure automated milestones (such as for birthdays or years of service). For example, for Tidelands Health’s peer recognition program, we configured nominations to the company’s core values. This means employees are asked to select a core value when they recognize someone.

2. Who can nominate and reward people.

For example, you can (1) allow employees to award points to one another through a peer recognition program, or (2) create a workflow where employees can nominate one another for an award that requires approval from leadership. Terryberry also lets you allocate budgets/points to managers, which they can distribute to team members at their discretion.

3. How people are rewarded.

We’ve integrated Terryberry’s rewards platform into our engagement platform, allowing you to directly add incentives to your programs. There are two systems for configuring how people get rewarded:

• The points system: Companies like Tidelands Health use this system to allocate points to different programs. For example, peers can award each other points by recognizing one another, and you can allocate managers a fixed number of points to award in a specific period (e.g., per quarter).
• Recognition levels: This system involves creating levels corresponding to different price points—e.g., the first three levels correspond to $50, $100, and $150. When employees receive recognition, they can shop for curated rewards that match their level of recognition. Our customers typically use the levels system for milestone award programs, such as service anniversaries.

We don’t just support different types of reward systems, though. Terryberry’s integrated rewards platform also offers the largest selection of rewards in the market, with domestic and international fulfillment options.

Add Incentives to Your Program With Terryberry’s Rewards Platform

With Terryberry’s Rewards platform, you can easily add incentives to your program, place orders, and track spend and order fulfillment, all from our single, integrated engagement platform. We offer three categories of rewards:

• Custom awards: We’ve been proudly manufacturing heritage awards, including trophies, plaques, and jewelry, for over 100 years. These awards are a popular choice for milestone awards programs, such as Amteck’s years of service program.
• Terryberry’s Premium Rewards catalog: This selection enables you to create custom shopping portals for your employees. Companies with distributed workforces can also create region-specific portals (e.g., separate portals for workers in the U.S. and Mexico, taking into account each country’s purchasing power). You can include categories of your choosing in the shopping portal(s), ranging from electronics to travel and lifestyle rewards, merchandise from top brands, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and charitable donations.

  We’ve partnered with local fulfillment providers across over 100 countries to bring Terryberry’s Premium Rewards catalog to distributed teams, without incurring hefty customs and international shipping fees.

• Terryberry x Amazon Business: Thanks to our integration with Amazon Business (U.S.), you can access the largest selection of zero-markup rewards with nationwide, Prime-like delivery in the U.S.

3. Prove Your Program’s Impact with Deep, Centralized Analytics

Proving your program’s impact without centralized data is difficult because you’re limited to participation metrics. We’re not saying that these metrics aren’t helpful, but you need more data to present a compelling business case.

If your programs are tied to strategic objectives, participation data on its own serves as a good high-level indicator for gauging their success. For example, suppose you give managers a fixed number of points each month to award employees for demonstrating your core values. A 100% point allocation rate at the end of the month indicates that people consistently demonstrated these values throughout the month. That tells you something is working.

On their own, points allocation, employee participation, and manager participation don’t reveal the true impact of employee recognition on retention or the impact of your wellness program on employee wellbeing. Most employee engagement tools won’t help you measure this impact because they either:

1. Only support one type of engagement program, such as wellness or recognition. So, you only have one data set to work with per platform. Using different tools for each program leaves you with multiple, disparate data sets.
2. Facilitate multiple engagement types of engagement programs, but take a “modular” approach to analytics. In other words, the data is decentralized; recognition and listening data are available separately.

In contrast, Terryberry’s employee engagement platform centralizes data across your various programs, enabling you to measure their impact on one another. One of the biggest advantages of this approach is combining employee listening data with your Recognition or Wellness Analytics. So, for example, you can measure the impact of:

• Employee recognition on engagement by comparing the engagement indicator scores (collected via the baseline survey) of:
  • Your most and least recognized groups of employees. For example, maybe you find that “belonging” scores are higher for your most recognized employees.
  • Teams with managers who frequently give out recognition and teams with managers who don’t.

Comparing these scores doesn’t just show the impact of recognition, it also reveals the cost of inaction. For example, by not recognizing employees, you risk them staying disconnected from your company’s vision and leadership.

• Recognition on detractors: Compare the eNPS of (1) your most and least recognized employees, and (2) teams with managers who frequently recognize their employees and teams whose managers don’t.
• Your wellness program on employee wellbeing and retention: Compare the well-being and eNPS scores of groups that are highly participatory in your wellness program and those that don’t/rarely participate in it.
• Leader participation on employee engagement: Compare engagement indicator and eNPS scores of teams with highly participatory managers and teams whose managers hardly participate. You can also compare employee participation across these groups—e.g., is there a correlation between managers participating in your step challenge and their employees’ participation?

Launch and Scale Impactful Engagement Programs for Your Frontline With Terryberry

Schedule a demo with us and let’s discuss how to meet your employee engagement goals with Terryberry.

Note: For pricing inquiries, we provide a custom quote based on various considerations, including how you budget for the program. Our admin fees are 30-40% lower than the market average and we don’t charge markups on any rewards.

2. iTacit

iTacic is an employee training and communications platform designed for frontline employees. Its mobile-first learning management system (LMS) features an integrated course builder with materials for various types of training, including compliance and onboarding. You can also create custom learning paths for your frontline workers.

iTacit’s internal communications tool lets employees communicate across different channels, including mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. Workers can choose from social, video, intranet, and two-way communication options. The vendor also offers crisis communication functionality.

3. Guusto

Guusto is an employee recognition and rewards platform designed for companies with predominantly frontline employees. Unlike most recognition platforms, Guusto doesn’t offer a points-based rewards system, opting for a dollar-for-dollar redemption system instead.

The platform supports different types of employee recognition programs (milestone, on-the-spot, etc.). It also offers both online and offline recognition options, including QR and link-based rewards redemption and printed merchant gift cards. One of Guusto’s more unique features allows you to send gifts to third parties, such as contractors, customers, suppliers, and volunteers.

4. Beekeeper

Beekeeper is an employee communication and engagement platform designed for frontline teams. Workers can access all of Beekeeper’s key features through its mobile app and sign in using a QR code or single sign-on (SSO).

Companies can use Beekeeper to send out broadcast messages and real-time updates, with support for multiple languages. The platform also centralizes your resources and knowledge base, making vital information about schedules, onboarding, PTO requests, training, and payroll easily accessible to teams.

The Beekeeper app also lets employees:

• Check, swap, and take on new shifts right from their mobile device. Admins can create shifts and update schedules.
• Promptly access payroll summaries, reducing related inquiries.
• Refer candidates to the company. Employees also receive notifications about job openings.

Beekeeper’s employee recognition module is available as an add-on or by creating custom workflows.

5. CultureMonkey

CultureMonkey is a standalone employee listening tool for both frontline and back-office workforces. You can design your own surveys using the builder, or choose from the over 50 surveys included in CultureMonkey’s library.

Frontline workers can engage directly with CultureMonkey’s surveys via mobile, and the platform’s multi-lingual survey tool supports people from diverse backgrounds. The platform simplifies administrative work and automates reporting—its analytics show you the factors impacting engagement and the scores of specific survey results (plus participation numbers).

Engage Your Frontline Workers With Terryberry’s Employee Engagement Platform

Terryberry offers all the tools you need to measure, quantify, and drive employee engagement for your frontline workforce, including:

• Employee listening tools, with science-backed surveys and cohort analytics. Uncover your most and least engaged groups and the factors positively and negatively impacting engagement. Supplement your existing data with responses from additional surveys, and slice and dice the results to track different trends.
• Employee recognition, rewards, and wellness tools. Design, launch, and scale engagement programs tailored to strategic objectives—such as promoting core values, increasing retention, or reducing burnout. Choose from the largest selection of rewards for your program incentives, and ensure your budget is spent wisely with our points-based system.
• Centralized analytics. Measure the impact of your recognition, wellness, and listening programs on employee engagement and each other.

Terryberry brings your engagement programs to your frontline workers via a mobile app, integrations with the tools and devices employees use every day, QR codes and custom links, and offline rewards and recognition options.

Schedule a demo with Terryberry to discover how to engage your entire frontline workforce with impactful programs.