5 Best Employee Engagement Software for Aged Care in 2025

Employee engagement software for aged care helps you address the sector’s biggest challenges in driving engagement and retention, including burnout, cultural gaps, hectic schedules, and skills gaps. Unlike generic solutions, aged care-specific engagement platforms are designed to:

• Support your unique objectives and workforce setup. You can tie programs to specific outcomes—such as celebrating patient feedback, recognizing people for picking up shifts, and motivating caregivers to support their well-being.
• Uncover the factors impacting engagement and retention across specific cohorts—including the motivations and sentiments of caregivers, registered nurses, canteen staff, administrative teams, and the rest of your workforce.
• Empower managers by helping them track engagement across their teams, close feedback loops, recognize and reward team members on the spot, and support employees in their day-to-day.
• Simplify program administration. These solutions automate all the time-consuming, repetitive tasks involved in managing engagement programs—including approval processes, tracking budgets and expenditures, and rewards fulfillment.
• Centralize data and provide actionable insights. They feed participation and engagement data across your engagement programs—revealing specific insights, such as the impact of employee recognition on retention.

In a Hurry? Here Are the 5 Platforms We’ve Featured

1. Terryberry: A complete employee engagement software platform for aged care that combines employee listening, recognition, rewards, and wellness tools. Aged care facilities use Terryberry to measurably improve retention and engagement, achieving results such as a 50% decrease in new hire turnover.
2. Relias: An end-to-end workforce management system with role-specific recruiting, learning and development, and performance management tools for aged care and healthcare organizations.
3. QGenda: A scheduling and workforce management system for reducing repetitive HR work and ensuring caregivers are at the right place at the right time.
4. VelocityEHS: An environment, health, and safety (EHS) system that provides aged care and healthcare facilities with various tools to ensure safety and compliance.
5. OnShift: A dedicated senior care workforce management system for schedules, swapping shifts, managing overtime, and ensuring compliance. OnShift also includes a native applicant tracking system (ATS) and basic employee recognition and rewards tools.

1. Terryberry

End-to-End Employee Engagement Software for Aged Care

Terryberry’s employee engagement software helps aged care facilities reduce employee turnover and burnout, drive cultural change, celebrate special moments together, and recognize key milestones.

You can:

• Launch engagement programs tailored to your strategic objectives—such as improving retention, promoting core values, and encouraging safety protocols. Terryberry’s platform lets you configure incentives, nomination and approval workflows, milestones, participation options, manager controls, and more.
• Capture feedback, benchmark employee engagement, and predict turnover. Use our science-backed employee engagement surveys to measure and quantify engagement and uncover trends across different groups. Terryberry’s survey analytics combine engagement and retention insights, showing you which groups are at risk of churn and why.
• Bring your programs directly to your employees. Workers can fill in surveys, give recognition, access personalized well-being plans, or redeem rewards right from Terryberry’s mobile app. Terryberry removes friction for frontline workers with password-less logins and various offline participation options (code-based redemptions, offline presentations, paper-based surveys, and more).
• Empower managers with engagement tools and automation. Terryberry supports managers with:
  • Automated alerts, reminders, and approval workflows.
  • Quick and simple options for rewarding and recognizing employees.
  • Real-time visibility into their budgets and expenditures.
  • Insights into their team’s engagement and eNPS scores.
• Rewards. Add incentives to your engagement programs without leaving the Terryberry platform. Choose from the largest selection of rewards in the market or get custom awards manufactured for special milestones.
• Measure your programs’ ROI and impact. Terryberry centralizes program metrics and employee listening data, allowing you to quantify each program’s impact on retention and engagement across different groups.

In the following sections, we’ll show you how to:

• Launch programs that drive your strategic objectives—covering specific examples of programs our customers have used to increase retention and engagement.
• Measure engagement and retention in your organization, and understand the sentiments and motivations of different teams and groups.
• Prove your program’s impact on engagement and retention across different groups.

Launching Your Goals-Driven Employee Engagement Programs

We can tailor Terryberry’s employee recognition software to support your broader objectives with organization-wide programs and more specific needs with smaller, niche programs. For example, we can design:

• Tailored milestone recognition programs to reduce new-hire turnover or to nominate people for industry awards, such as the DAISY or AHCA Noble Caregiver Award.
• Peer recognition programs that encourage employees to recognize and support one another, such as covering shifts or maintaining a clean and safe facility.

For each program, Terryberry lets you configure:

• What people are recognized for. This could be for service anniversaries, receiving outstanding patient feedback, or promoting core values. The objectives you sent define your program’s broader impact—for example, rewarding people for covering each other’s shifts encourages teamwork.
• Who can nominate and reward people. You can assign managers budgets to use at their discretion, allow peers to award each other points, and set up custom nomination panels for industry awards.
• Your program’s rewards—and how people can access them. Our rewards system is built into Terryberry’s engagement platform, allowing you to add incentives, order rewards, and track budgets in one place. The points system is the most common option for adding incentives to your program—employees receive points when they’re recognized, and they can redeem them for their desired rewards.

1. Manager Recognition Programs: Start with Top-Down Recognition

Manager recognition programs help your facility’s leaders motivate their teams, reinforce your workplace culture, and reward people for positive outcomes.

With Terryberry, you can periodically allocate points budgets (e.g., monthly or quarterly) for managers to spend on recognition.

Depending on the permissions you grant them, managers can:

• Recognize employees on the spot for preconfigured goals. Examples could be covering extra shifts, performing a safe transfer, helping out a new hire, or following protocols after an incident.
• Award points at their discretion. If you allow this, managers can spend points as they see fit—e.g., to reward a new hire for successfully completing a difficult task, or to buy a retirement gift for an employee.

Once your program is set up, managers can recognize and reward employees on the spot and broadcast these moments for everyone to see. For example, let’s say a caregiver receives exceptional patient feedback. The employee’s manager can upload the feedback, recognize and reward the employee, and broadcast the announcement on Terryberry’s shared culture hub.

 

 

Terryberry’s dashboards also help managers keep track of budgets, unused points, and team recognition (most and least recognized employees, most common reason for recognition, etc.)

2. Milestone Recognition Programs: Increase Retention and Loyalty

With Terryberry, you can set up both organization-wide milestone programs (such as birthdays and service anniversaries) and ones specific to different groups (e.g., new hires).

We’ll walk you through three common types of milestone programs used by aged care facilities to show you how Terryberry manages them.

#1. Years of Service Awards Program

While the main objective of these programs is to build loyalty and increase retention, they can also support secondary goals. For example, you can promote core values by recognizing employees on their service anniversaries for the ones they’ve demonstrated over the year(s).

When you’re adding incentives to these programs, you can:

• Tailor different types of rewards to each year of service. For example, the “recognition levels” system lets you set up different rewards tiers corresponding to each service milestone—maybe employees can choose from the $50 rewards tier on their first anniversary and the $150 one on their fifth.
• Allocate points for each milestone (e.g., 200 for the first year, 600 for the fifth), which employees can exchange for gifts.

#2. New Hire Milestones Program

We helped an aged care facility (with over 13,000 employees) address one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: new hire turnover. Although the provider already had a years of service program in place, new hires would leave before their first anniversary. After getting work experience, they leave at the 1-year mark.

So, we designed a program with shorter milestones to integrate new hires into the company’s culture—and reduced new hire turnover by 50%. The program included custom milestones for a new hire’s first day, week, month, as well as 60 days, 90 days, and six months. These milestones were related to specific goals and outcomes, such as completing onboarding and training.

#3. Industry-Specific Awards with Nomination Panels

We can configure Terryberry’s nomination and approval workflows to support industry awards that require facilities to nominate someone—such as the AHCA Noble Caregiver Award or the DAISY. You can:

• Specify who can nominate colleagues (e.g., managers only, peers, specific job titles) and have people include a reason for their nomination.
• Create an approval workflow—e.g., where senior leaders or practitioners make the final call.

3. Peer Recognition Programs: Empower Your Employees and Support Microcultures

While every team in your facility is responsible for its success—including caregivers, canteen staff, cleaning and safety teams, clinicians, human resources (HR) and operations teams, etc.—most employees don’t regularly see cross-team contributions.

Peer recognition programs break these siloes and unite your whole workforce around a shared vision. They make employees responsible for driving engagement and amplifying your goals. Employees can recognize their peers for covering shifts, following safety protocols, demonstrating core values, helping other teams, and more.

Setting up peer recognition in Terryberry follows a similar process to manager recognition programs—you can allocate a fixed budget for the program and specify a fixed number of points for each nomination.

For example, maybe employees earn more points for following safety protocols than covering a shift. Many aged care and healthcare organizations tie nominations to core values—for example: people, service, quality, safety, finance, and growth.

Once your program’s live, peers can recognize each other on Terryberry’s shared “culture hub” for everyone to see. Depending on your configurations, managers and/or other employees can also “boost” posts to award the recipient extra points.

 

 

While peer nomination programs are usually deployed organization-wide, we’ll tailor them to support the microcultures of different teams. For example:

• Various teams may value different types of support: covering shifts means a lot to caregivers, while compliance teams appreciate help with preparing documentation. We can personalize nominations for each team, and keep more organization-wide options such as “going above and beyond” or “demonstrating a core value.”
• Teams may already have their own recognition set up, such as a bulletin board for shoutouts, high-fives, and displaying the “Caregiver of the Month.” We support these microcultures in different ways. For example, for the “Caregiver of the Month” program, we can configure:
  • A nomination program in Terryberry, where team members nominate someone via our mobile app.
  • Allocate rewards for the winner (e.g., give them points or allow them to choose a gift from a specific rewards tier).
  • Broadcast the bulletin board on the culture hub each month, showing the “Caregiver of the Month” photo.

4. Motivate Your Workforce with the Largest Selection of Employee Rewards

Terryberry lets you add incentives to any of your engagement programs and tailor the rewards that employees can access. We offer:

• Custom awards. This includes a selection of plaques, trophies, and jewelry. We’ve been manufacturing heritage awards for over a decade and they’re a staple for years of service awards programs.
• Terryberry X Amazon Business. Our partnership with Amazon brings the largest selection of zero-markup rewards in the U.S. market and Prime-like delivery to your engagement programs.
• Terryberry’s Premium Rewards catalog. This catalog includes various categories of rewards, including electronics, lifestyle, travel, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, charitable donations, merchandise, and more. You can pick and choose categories to include in your employees’ shopping portals.

Employee Listening: Track Employee Engagement and Predict Turnover

Terryberry’s employee listening tool can help you identify:

1. The factors that positively and negatively impact engagement in your organization—and their root cause. For example, are employees struggling with fatigue or burnout? And if so, why?
2. How these factors impact different groups. While each employee has their own sentiments and motivations, Terryberry can help you uncover trends across various groups. For example, employees from a specific department may be more prone to churn because they don’t feel connected to leadership.

We help you uncover these actionable insights using:

• A combination of surveys specific to your needs. Terryberry’s library includes dozens of surveys, including eNPS and science-backed engagement surveys, as well as scenario-specific ones, such as integration or disaster response surveys.
• Powerful analytics. Our survey analytics dashboard preserves people’s anonymity while helping you uncover trends across various groups, including departments, facilities, job titles, and more.
• Tools to maximize participation. Strong participation numbers offer more accurate results and ensure every group is represented. We make it easy for your busy, frontline workers to participate—via our mobile app, QR and link-based surveys, and even paper-based options. Our team also helps you build out effective survey communications and determine the best time to schedule follow-ups.

For example, let’s consider the aged care industry’s biggest challenge—frontline turnover. The U.S. median turnover rate for nursing assistants is particularly high, at 99%. To uncover which groups are prone to churn and why, you’d start by running employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys across your organization.

After the responses are in, Terryberry automatically processes the results and feeds the data to our analytics dashboard:

 

Here, you use participant filters to analyze different cohorts—including locations, departments, job titles, years of service (tenure), seniority levels, gender, team members that share a manager, and more. For example, the dashboard shown filters results by location. You can see that short-term retention (0–6 months) is stronger in New York and Louisiana.

You can mix and match the participant filters here to uncover different trends—e.g., comparing retention across different seniority levels or job titles (such as caregivers and canteen staff). But the results don’t tell you why these groups are prone to churn—that’s where Terryberry’s engagement baseline survey comes in.

The baseline survey is exactly what it sounds like: a survey (backed by I/O psychologists) used to measure and quantify engagement across your organization. It’s based on Terryberry’s culture model, which uses six indicators to measure employee engagement and retention:

 

 

These indicators—belonging, leadership, equity, purpose, empowerment, and well-being—collectively measure the overall impact of your culture. For example, employees who score low in empowerment feel they lack support in their roles—potentially due to a lack of training or resources.

The baseline survey returns a set of six Likert scores (which can be positive or negative) corresponding to each engagement indicator. For example, a score of 20+ in “belonging” suggests employees are strongly integrated in your company’s culture.

The scores are displayed in our survey analytics dashboard, and you can use the participant filters to uncover trends in engagement. For example, maybe frontline managers score lower in employee well-being than their teams.

Terryberry’s analytics dashboard combines the results from your baseline and eNPS surveys, allowing you to slice and dice this data and uncover actionable insights. For example, you can filter by groups with the lowest eNPS scores, and then measure the engagement indicator scores across each group.

For example, your lowest-eNPS group in the compliance department may score low in “belonging,” while caregivers have low “well-being” and “empowerment” scores. These results indicate that each group faces different challenges that contribute to turnover.

Next, you can use additional surveys from our library (or design your own) to identify the root causes. For example:

• Integration, belonging drill-down surveys, and employee satisfaction surveys to investigate why the compliance group’s “belonging” scores are low.
• Job satisfaction, empowerment drill-down, burnout, and well-being drill-down surveys to find out why “empowerment” and “well-being” scores are low for caregivers.

Employee Wellness: Proactively Support Employees’ Physical & Mental Well-being

While any employee may struggle with their well-being, care workers are particularly vulnerable because their jobs are physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding. To make sure your workforce has the right support, it’s important to continuously collect feedback about their sentiments and overall well-being.

Employee listening can help you identify which groups are currently struggling with their well-being, and why. The next step is to bridge these gaps by taking relevant action, such as updating PTO policies, providing on-demand mental health support, or hiring additional temporary workers to balance workloads.

Wellness platforms offer a two-fold benefit here: they can address specific root causes and also proactively support employee well-being before employees struggle with significant challenges or burnout. This is where Be Well, Terryberry’s wellness platform, comes in.

Be Well supports employees’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being with:

• Wellness and activity challenges. Choose from our predesigned challenges—including steps, activity, hydration, and sleep—or have custom challenges designed around your wellness objectives. Be Well motivates teams to build healthy habits together, featuring leaderboards, custom incentives, in-app discussion options, and personalized performance metrics.
• Tailored well-being plans. These support each employee’s specific needs, such as improving sleep cycles, staying hydrated, managing workplace stress, or improving their nutrition.
• Expert-led wellness seminars and on-demand support. Featuring over 150 audio guides covering 40+ mental health topics, Be Well offers on-demand support for mental health. You can also schedule expert-led trainings to support groups of employees with specific, shared challenges.
• Detailed Wellness Analytics. Track employee participation, performance across different challenges, and the impact of your programs on recognition, engagement, and retention.

Measure Your Programs’ Impact and Uncover Gaps with Terryberry’s Centralized Analytics

After your programs go live, Terryberry’s participation metrics can help you track their performance, including:

• Overall participation, to see how much of your workforce is engaged in each program. You can further break down these metrics by cohort to view the participation rates of specific departments, job titles, seniority levels, and other relevant groups, and identify any underrepresented groups.
• Your most and least engaged groups, such as your most and least recognized employees, or managers who give the most recognition and those who rarely give out recognition.
• Points allocation, which helps you track budgets and measure how well your goals are being met. For example, let's say you launch a peer recognition program tied to core values. If a particular team or facility uses up 100% of their allocated monthly points, it means employees are regularly demonstrating these values.

While participation metrics are a high-level indicator of your programs’ performance, they don’t:

• Prove the impact of these programs on engagement and retention—e.g., you can’t measure the impact of manager recognition on employee “leadership” and “purpose” scores.
• Help you identify gaps. For example, maybe your wellness program is increasing retention for some teams, but not others.

Terryberry helps you measure the impact of each program on engagement, retention, and other programs by combining participation metrics with employee listening data, such as engagement indicator scores and eNPS.

For example, let’s say you want to measure the impact of employee recognition on retention and specific engagement indicators. From Terryberry’s centralized analytics dashboard, you can compare the engagement indicator scores and eNPS of:

• Your most and least recognized employees.
• Employees whose managers give frequent recognition vs. employees whose managers rarely give recognition (or don’t at all).

You can further investigate the impact of your programs on specific groups using the participant filters.

 

Get Started With Terryberry

Terryberry combines employee listening, recognition, wellness, and rewards into a single, integrated platform. Unlike many other providers, we only bill you upon redemption for our employee rewards—meaning you don’t pay for unused points. Our admin fees are also 30–40% below the market average.

 

 

Schedule a free demo to discover how Terryberry can help boost engagement and retention across your facility.

 

2. Relias

Relias is an end-to-end healthcare workforce management solution that provides tools for recruitment, employee performance management, compliance, learning and professional development, patient engagement, reputation management, internal communications, and managing employee feedback. The platform helps aged care facilities manage essential day-to-day operations. It also helps boost employee engagement and retention by helping you:

• Source and hire best-fit talent. Relias offers a nurse-specific advertising and recruitment platform that lets you tap into over 80% of the U.S. nurse population. Relias’s healthcare recruiting system has over 350 role-specific, validated assessments across 40 specialty areas designed by specialists, including clinicians, psychometricians with content, and industrial psychologists. The platform helps you hire the right fit by assessing candidates’ knowledge, skills, behavior, and competencies, and correlating their scores to on-the-job performance.
• Deliver tailored onboarding. You can design tailored, self-paced onboarding with personalized learning paths for nurses and careworkers.
• Support employees with industry-specific learning and development opportunities. Relias provides CE and CME solutions to provide clinicians with training to meet license requirements and develop their skills. The platform also features a built-in healthcare LMS with a repository of expert-led, industry-specific courses.
• Evaluate employees with role-based assessments, competency evaluations, and skills checklists.

3. QGenda

 

QGenda is a healthcare workforce management platform system that helps aged care facilities, hospitals, clinics, and medical groups reduce scheduling issues, automate administrative work, and ensure caregivers at the right place, at the right time.

The system offers:

• On‑call management: Get real-time visibility into schedules and instantly find the right on-call providers with intelligent search functionality. Contact them via text, phone call, or email.
• Advanced scheduling: QGenda’s predictive technology helps providers create cost-effective schedules—in seconds—that balance workloads with patient needs and demand.
• Time & attendance tracking: QGenda supports automated time tracking and brings scheduling, time, and attendance together in one place, with real-time synchronization. The platform also supports integrations with payroll processors to ensure accuracy.
• Credentialing & compliance: Track caregivers’ credentials and make sure only qualified staff are scheduled.
• Analytics & forecasting: Uncover gaps, forecast future needs, and reduce your reliance on expensive temporary labor by optimizing resource planning.
• Mobile access: Staff can view schedules, swap shifts, request time off, and more from their phones.

4. VelocityEHS

 

VelocityEHS is an environment, health, and safety (EHS) system that helps organizations manage workplace safety, operational risks, compliance, and environmental initiatives. The system helps health and safety, IPC, and risk & compliance teams in aged care and healthcare facilities manage:

• Safety, with dedicated solutions for incident management, inspections, audits (for internal and third-party requirements), job safety analysis, trainings, and more.
• Operational risk, with tools for identifying and evaluating all types of hazards, implementing and verifying risk controls, and coordinating and standardizing risk management activities.
• Environmental compliance, with solutions to ensure compliance for air emissions, waste storage and disposal, water quality, and more.
• Chemical safety, with a cloud‑based system that connects staff to chemical safety information during inspections or emergencies.

5. OnShift

 

OnShift is a workforce management and employee engagement platform built specifically for senior care. It helps aged care and senior living facilities reduce employee turnover, control labor costs, ensure compliance, and improve resident care quality by making staffing and HR processes more efficient.

The platform offers tools for:

• Talent acquisition and onboarding, including a healthcare-specific applicant tracking system (ATS), mobile-friendly career portals, and automated communications, background checks via a PSBA-accredited organization, electronic onboarding, and detailed reporting.
• Aged care workforce management, including scheduling, shift swapping, labor management and cost controls, overtime management, mobile-first employee communication, and real-time visibility into staffing levels across facilities.
• Employee engagement, including staff survey tools, performance monitoring, and basic recognition and rewards tools.
• Compliance and reporting, including payroll-based journal (PJB) reporting for CMS compliance, credential tracking, and audit-ready documentation, and analytics for monitoring staffing patterns.

OnShift also integrates with payroll management and HRIS systems, simplifying payroll processing.

 

Fight Churn & Bring Your Workforce Together with Terryberry

Terryberry’s employee engagement solution helps aged care facilities:

• Understand their workforce’s sentiments and needs with science-backed employee listening programs, automated survey processing, and powerful analytics.
• Design tailored recognition programs that boost retention, bring teams together, and reward top performers.
• Proactively support their workforce’s well-being with challenges that build healthy habits, expert-led wellness seminars, and mental health support.

Ready to boost engagement and retention? Request your personalized demo today.