Employee Engagement Software for Manufacturing: 6 Options

Various tools fall under the category of employee engagement software, ranging from surveying tools to recognition software and learning management systems.

Regardless of the category, there are some universal considerations when choosing employee engagement software for manufacturing, namely:

• Support for non-desk workers: While engagement platforms aim to be industry-agnostic, some are better suited for industries with large deskless workforces, including manufacturing. Email-free logins and mobile apps are table stakes here. Beyond these, check for any additional features or services that support your frontline workforce, such as code-based redemption for rewards and offline recognition options.
• Program customization: Can you tailor engagement programs to specific objectives and add incentives? For example, can you design safety programs that reward people for following proper protocols, or recognition programs that encourage people to uphold the company's core values?
• Data and analytics: Look beyond basic participation statistics. Can you use filters to analyze different cohorts—departments, age groups, levels of seniority, tenure, etc.? Does the platform centralize data across your different engagement programs?
• Pricing models: Upfront pricing isn’t the only consideration. Look for hidden fees, usage-based pricing, and markups (for rewards and incentives). Many engagement platforms include rewards systems; check if they charge upfront for points or if you only pay for the points people redeem.

In this article, we cover different categories of employee engagement software for manufacturing businesses, including:

1. Terryberry: Our integrated employee engagement platform that includes employee listening, rewards and recognition, and wellness solutions in one place. You can use Terryberry to uncover the factors impacting employee engagement and retention, launch tailored engagement programs, and measure the impact of these programs with deep, centralized analytics.
2. iTacit: An engagement platform for designing custom learning and development programs for your frontline, managing internal comms, and automating repetitive HR tasks. 
3. CultureMonkey: A comprehensive employee listening tool for capturing employee sentiments and feedback, and benchmarking your engagement scores.
4. Bonusly: A rewards and recognition platform for on-the-spot employee recognition. 
5. WorkMates by HR Cloud: An engagement platform with employee surveys, recognition, and HR operations (recruiting, onboarding, communication) tools. 
6. Guusto: An alternative to Terryberry’s employee recognition software. Although Guusto doesn’t support employee listening or wellness, its rewards and recognition platform includes features that support frontline workers.

 

1. Terryberry: A Fully Integrated Employee Engagement Platform

 

Terryberry helps growing manufacturing companies develop tailored employee engagement programs to support frontline and desk workers.

With Terryberry’s employee engagement platform, you can:

• Discover and quantify the factors impacting employee engagement at your company with science-backed surveys. Terryberry’s employee listening tool includes a library with dozens of pre-built surveys, including science-backed engagement surveys. You can schedule surveys in advance, automate follow-ups, and distribute them conveniently to frontline workers.
• Drive employee engagement with tailored rewards, recognition, and wellness programs. Launch programs tailored to strategic objectives, such as instilling core values, cultivating manager-employee relationships, or helping people feel more energized at work.
• Measure the impact of your programs and take further action. Terryberry’s deep, centralized analytics reveal the impact of your programs on employee engagement and retention. Identify engagement gaps that affect specific groups (such as departments, seniority levels, or age groups) and take action with personalized programs.
• Make participation easy for your frontline workers.
  • The technology: From code-based logins to offline redemption, Terryberry’s engagement platform includes various features that support deskless and offline workers.
  • Program design: Our team works with you to understand your unique needs, workforce culture, and company setup. If your frontline workers have mobile devices and consistent internet access, our mobile app with code-based logins can connect them to your program. But businesses with more offline workers may consider options like (1) service awards programs with offline recognition, (2) a kiosk that employees can use to log onto your engagement platform.

In the next three sections, we show you how to design, launch, and scale tailored employee engagement programs with Terryberry.

 

1. Start with Science-Backed Employee Listening

Before we discuss how to capture actionable insights with an employee listening tool, let’s consider the ideal outcomes. Your employee listening program should reveal:

• The factors impacting employee engagement positively and negatively. Do your workers feel supported by their managers and peers? Are they integrated with your company’s culture? Do they share your vision and feel a strong sense of purpose?
• The cohorts affected by these factors, and to what extent. Some employee engagement gaps are organization-wide; e.g., maybe your growing workforce is losing touch with the company’s core values. Other gaps are cohort-specific. Maybe they’re only impacting people of a specific seniority, tenure, age group, or department.
  In the manufacturing industry, where industry research reveals engagement gaps across seniority levels and between deskless and desk workers, analyzing cohorts is crucial to creating a culture that supports people equally.
• The impact of these factors on retention. Are people motivated to stay because of your company’s leadership? Are some groups churn risks because they don’t feel a strong sense of purpose or belonging? How much is each sentiment impacting retention—and can you quantify it?

Here’s how Terryberry’s employee listening tool helps you get the answers you need:

Launch Ready-Made Surveys to Capture Sentiments

Terryberry’s survey library contains dozens of pre-designed surveys for specific scenarios. You can capture people’s sentiments towards their peers or specific initiatives, gauge their overall well-being, collect feedback about disaster response, and more. For measuring employee engagement specifically, you’ll want to start with the engagement baseline survey.

The baseline survey, backed by I/O psychologists, measures employee engagement across six indicators—belonging, leadership, equity, purpose, empowerment, and well-being—that form Terryberry’s culture model. In collaboration with three independent PhD researchers, we developed the culture model to help organizations measure, quantify, and predict employee engagement.

 

 

Each engagement indicator impacts specific outcomes. For example, a strong sense of purpose and confidence in leadership drive retention, while well-being and equity keep people motivated and boost performance. The engagement baseline survey includes 38 questions and quantifies each indicator using a set of Likert scores, which can be positive or negative.

For example, let’s say you score +20 in leadership, -5 in wellbeing, and 3 in purpose. Here, leadership is positively impacting engagement, wellbeing is holding you back, and there’s room to develop people’s sense of purpose.

You can also measure the impact of these factors on retention by combining these scores with eNPS:

 

 

The baseline survey provides an overall picture of how engaged your workforce is and the factors that impact engagement. In the next section, we’ll show you how to identify trends from these insights specific to different groups—such as people in the same department, or employees with similar tenure.

 

Maximize Survey Participation with Better Distribution Your survey analytics will only accurately reflect the sentiments of your entire workforce if everyone fills them in. Terryberry’s team works with you to maximize survey participation. We’ll: Help develop the communications for your survey, including initial messages, reminders, and follow-ups. Distribute these surveys across offline or online channels, or both, depending on your workforce’s needs. For example, we can generate links for your frontline workers (no emails required), send push notifications via our mobile app, or use paper-based surveys.

Cohort Analysis and Automated Follow-Ups

After running your initial surveys (such as the baseline survey), the next steps are to:

• Identify patterns: For example, are leadership scores significantly higher in some departments than others? Is eNPS lower for a specific minority segment—e.g., women aged 25-36 in the sales department? 
• Capture more context: We mentioned how you can combine eNPS with engagement indicator scores to measure the impact of these indicators on retention. You can also add more context using other surveys (like employee satisfaction surveys). For example, let’s say you want to investigate the cause of a low well-being score. You can run (i) the employee wellbeing drill-down survey, and (ii) the burnout survey.

Terryberry’s survey analytics dashboard comes with filters—including tenure, department, seniority, age, etc.—for cohort analysis. In the manufacturing industry, statistics reveal that employee engagement is frequently disproportionate between frontline and back-office employees and across seniority levels.

Here are some examples of insights you can collect using different filters:

• A comparison of employee engagement indicator scores for desk and deskless workers.
  Using the “department” filter, you can analyze two segments:
  • (i) Departments with predominantly deskless workers (e.g., Production, QA, Engineering, Safety)
  • (ii) Departments with predominantly desk workers (e.g., IT, Corporate Support, Accounting & Finance)
• Differences in employee eNPS by years of service. For example, you could compare eNPS for employees with three, five, and ten years of service.

The engagement indicator dashboard automatically displays high-level trends, such as your highest and lowest indicator scores. It also benchmarks your eNPS against the average eNPS of companies (i) in your industry, (ii) of your company’s size, (iii) of companies in your industry of your size.

 

 

You can schedule drill-down and follow-up surveys with Terryberry’s employee listening tool to capture additional insights or track changes in scores after taking action (e.g., if eNPS scores have improved after six months of running a recognition program).

Our listening tool uses Terryberry’s internal research to recommend the best dates for follow-up surveys.

 

2. Launch and Scale Tailored Employee Engagement Programs

The most impactful engagement programs are built on solid foundations: they’re tied to strategic objectives, use the right incentives, and are driven by leadership. The best employee engagement software helps you get these fundamentals right.

Some companies approach us when their engagement programs just aren’t delivering. They often have challenges like:

“We’ve got an employee safety program that’s mostly just symbolic. We ask people to follow protocols and hand out badges. There’s no way of knowing what’s working and where we need to improve.”

“We tried a years of service awards program, recognizing people for their tenure. It wasn’t driving cultural change like we wanted. As we expand across locations and our team grows, people are losing their connection to our core values.”

Whether you’re improving an existing program or launching your first one, here’s how to build solid foundations with Terryberry:

 

Tailoring Your Program to Strategic Objectives

Some types of engagement programs fulfill specific needs better than others; for example, wellness programs aimed at improving employee well-being, or manager recognition programs designed to make people feel valued by their managers.

Most companies we work with start with recognition programs (and they might introduce more engagement programs, such as wellness, down the line) because they’re effective for shaping culture. For example:

 

Amteck

Amteck, a family-owned construction company, sought to instill its core values throughout its workforce.

While the manufacturing industry traditionally suffers from high turnover, Amteck’s strong culture helps it maintain excellent employee retention rates. But as its workforce expanded across several locations (the company is currently at around 1k employees across offices in 13 states), Amteck’s leadership realized people were losing their connection to the company’s core values.

With Terryberry’s help, Amteck launched a years-of-service awards program that recognized employees for demonstrating the company’s core values. On these service anniversaries, leaders also award custom jewelry, featuring colored gemstones that symbolize the recipient’s years of service.

 

The Co-Op

The Co-op wanted to celebrate staff members from their 1st year anniversary through to 15+ years of service, recognizing and rewarding people for their hard work.

Through employee listening, Terryberry uncovered that Co-op’s staff valued timely and personalized recognition from their line managers. So we helped the Co-op launch a line manager recognition program that celebrates employees’ service anniversaries.

Like Amteck and the Co-op, you can develop programs tailored to strategic objectives using Terryberry’s 360 engagement software by configuring the platform to specify:

1. What people are rewarded for: You can customize nomination and approval workflows, and/or create automated milestones to specify how people are recognized. For example:

 

 

• To reward people for demonstrating core values: Customize nomination workflows so that managers and/or peers (depending on who’s allowed to nominate) can choose which core value they’re recognizing someone for. 
• For service anniversaries: Create milestones for each year of service you’d like to celebrate (e.g., The Co-op celebrates 1 through 15+ years of service).

2. Who can nominate and reward people: You can limit rewards and nominations to managers/senior leaders, or create peer recognition experiences, where employees can nominate each other and award points (these can be redeemed for rewards).

 

 

3. How people are rewarded: Thanks to Terryberry’s integrated rewards system, you can add incentives to your engagement program without leaving the platform, using:

• The points system: You can allocate points for nominations. For example, maybe someone gets 10 points each time they’re nominated, and 200 points for every tenth time they’re recognized. Terryberry also lets you allocate managers a set number of points to award in a specific period (e.g., per quarter), at their discretion.
• Recognition levels: The levels system is an alternative to the points system. Here, you can create recognition levels corresponding to different price points—e.g., the third level corresponds to $100. Now, employees who receive Level 3 recognition can choose from a curated selection of rewards at this price point. The levels system is a popular choice for years-of-service programs—companies usually create a level corresponding to each service anniversary.

When designing your engagement program, it’s crucial to plan around maximizing participation. Your program can only perform well when people are actively engaged. Below, we discuss how to make your engagement programs inclusive and incentivize participation with Terryberry.

Motivating People to Participate & Making Your Programs Inclusive

Maximizing participation in your engagement program requires you to: (1) choose the right incentives, and (2) ensure the program is easily accessible to everyone.

For manufacturing companies, (2) requires planning how to facilitate frontline workers. They’re always on the floor or on the go, usually don’t have corporate emails, and may not have consistent internet access. At Terryberry, we offer different options to facilitate frontline employees, depending on your needs:

• A mobile app and code-based login: Employees can access Terryberry’s engagement platform right from their mobile device—no corporate emails necessary. We’ll generate custom codes that managers can distribute to their teams.
• Offline recognition and redemption experiences: We can create physical presentation kits for rewards distribution or generate links or QR codes that offline employees can use to redeem rewards.

We offer three categories of rewards to cater to different needs:

• 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 years of service anniversaries. You can choose to include physical presentation kits to make recognition moments extra special.
• Terryberry’s Premium Rewards catalog: Create custom shopping portals for your employees by selecting specific rewards categories from our catalog, ranging from electronics to travel and lifestyle rewards, top-brand merchandise, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and charitable donations.

  If your workforce is distributed internationally, Terryberry’s Premium Rewards catalog allows you to send rewards to teammates abroad without incurring hefty international shipping fees. We’ve partnered with local fulfillment partners across over 100 countries.

• Terryberry x Amazon Business: Unlock the largest selection of rewards in the market, with zero markup, and get Prime-like delivery across the U.S. with Terryberry’s Amazon Business (U.S.) integration.

3. Build a Business Case for Your Program

 

Decentralized data is the main barrier preventing businesses from accurately measuring the impact of their engagement programs. Because most engagement platforms either:

1. Only facilitate one type of engagement program, such as listening or recognition, or learning and development. So, their analytics leave you with a single data set. If you’re using one tool for each type of engagement program, you’ll have multiple, disparate data sets from each platform.
2. Support multiple engagement types of engagement programs, but the data is decentralized. You’ll have, say, disparate sets of employee listening data and recognition data.

In both cases, you can’t accurately measure the impact of your recognition program on employee engagement or the impact of your wellness program on recognition. In contrast, Terryberry’s employee engagement platform centralizes the data across your engagement programs. For example, let’s say you combine Terryberry’s Recognition Analytics with employee listening data. You can measure the impact of your recognition program on employee engagement and retention:

• The impact of employee recognition on engagement: Compare the engagement indicator scores of your most and least recognized employees. For example, you might find that “belonging” scores are higher for your most recognized employees.
• The impact of leader participation on employee engagement: You can compare two cohorts—the teams of leaders who are highly participatory and those who aren’t—and compare retention and engagement indicator scores.
• The impact of recognition on detractors: You can compare:
  • eNPS of your most and least recognized employees.
  • eNPS of teams with managers who frequently give recognition, vs teams with managers who don’t.

If you’re running multiple engagement programs, you can capture even more context by combining data across them. For example, let’s consider a scenario where you’re running employee listening, recognition, and wellness programs, and you want to track employee wellbeing. Maybe your data reveals:

• A positive relationship between recognition and retention. Your most recognized employees have higher eNPS scores.
• Your most recognized employees have lower well-being scores than their less-recognized peers. So you check the data from Terryberry’s employee well-being platform, and learn that your most recognized employees participate the least in these programs.

Now, you can run additional surveys—such as wellbeing and burnout—to learn why your most recognized employees score low in wellbeing. Perhaps you find they’re experiencing burnout due to additional responsibilities they’ve taken on.

Centralized analytics are the key to creating a convincing business case for your program. You can approach management with specific learnings (and the data to back them up) like:

“Our retention program is increasing a sense of purpose in our employees and improving net retention scores. It’s helping us retain our top performers (most recognized employees). Here are the numbers…”

Similarly, you can also identify gaps in your existing program and make the case for launching supporting, cohort-specific programs. For example:

“Our most recognized employees don’t feel a strong sense of equity. What could be causing this? Do they believe there’s no room for promotions? Let’s launch a drill-down survey for these employees and come up with a plan to address the root cause.”

Pricing: Pay for What You Use

 

 

We’ve taken several steps to keep our pricing fair and transparent, including:

• Maximizing the dollar-for-dollar value of money you spend on rewards: Terryberry charges zero markup on rewards you purchase. For international orders, we’ve partnered with local fulfillment providers across more than 100 countries to save you from hefty international shipping fees and tariffs.
• Redemption-based pricing: Some platforms charge you the moment you award an employee with points. We don’t. We only charge you for any redeemed gifts, meaning that if an employee leaves before spending their points, you won’t be paying for unused points. 
• Zero hidden fees and market-friendly admin fees: Our admin fees are typically 30-40% below the market average.

2. iTacit

iTacit is an employee engagement solution that automates HR tasks, facilitates on-the-go communication, and provides frontline employees with training in one place.

The vendor’s main offering is a mobile-first learning management system (LMS) designed for deskless workers. It lets you design personalized learning paths, track employees’ progress, provide compliance training, and create your own courses. The vendor lets you upload your own course content, add external content, or purchase courses directly from iTacit.

iTacit also offers:

• An internal communication tool designed for hybrid teams. Employees can communicate across mobile devices, tablets, and desktops using social, video, intranet, and two-way communication features. You can segment communications (e.g., by role, location, or department) and use iTacit’s analytics to see which roles are most engaged with your comms, top-performing posts, etc.
• Onboarding and employee listening tools. You can use iTacit’s automated workflows for onboarding new hires, and the platform’s Voice of Employee (VoE) software lets you design and launch pulse surveys.

Pricing

iTacit offers custom plans depending on the modules you choose and the number of employees you have. You can contact them for a quote.

3. CultureMonkey

CultureMonkey is an employee listening platform that lets you design and launch various surveys, and measure the insights you collect from them. You can choose from over 50 ready-made surveys in the platform’s library, or design your own using the survey builder.

The platform’s survey analytics give you an overview of the factors contributing to employee disengagement, including a heatmap that displays scores for specific survey results (e.g., work-life balance, leadership). The heatmap also includes a breakdown of eNPS and participation scores, and insights captured from surveys.

While CultureMonkey’s platform is well-rounded for understanding employee experiences and sentiments, it doesn’t include tools for taking action. You can’t use it to launch tailored engagement programs, such as recognition, incentives, and wellness programs. Additionally, since CultureMonkey’s platform only includes survey analytics, you can’t use it to measure the impact of any other engagement programs.

Pricing

Contact CultureMonkey for a custom quote.

4. Bonusly

Bonusly is a rewards and recognition platform that lets you create manager, peer, and milestone recognition programs. The platform’s rewards catalog includes thousands of incentives, including gift cards and cash-out options. You can also use Bonusly to schedule announcements and bundle incentives into them.

Bonusly also offers tools that help managers connect with their team members, including ones for scheduling 1:1 meetings, setting goals, and tracking progress. With the click of a button, the platform generates performance recap reviews that give an overview of recognition, feedback trends, and progress.

Although you can launch recognition programs with Bonusly, it lacks employee listening capabilities. Consequently, you can’t use the platform to measure employee engagement or the impact of your programs on it.

Pricing

Bonusly has three plans with different features, starting at $2 per seat, per month.

Further reading: Bonusly Alternatives: 6 of the Best Tools to Check Out

5. WorkMates by HR Cloud

WorkMates by HR Cloud includes both internal communication and employee engagement capabilities. You can use the platform to broadcast company announcements, create group channels, and manage internal comms, employee advocacy, and crisis communication. WorkMates employee engagement features let you launch polls and build surveys, recognize people’s contributions and milestones, gamify participation, and reward employees.

While WorkMates is a well-rounded engagement platform with extensive features, it falls short in measurement and analytics. WorkMates lacks a culture model for measuring engagement, and the platform doesn’t integrate recognition analytics with employee listening data.

Pricing

WorkMates has three plans:

• Recognition
• Essential
• Premium

The Recognition tier includes recognition and rewards features. The Essential plan includes analytics, birthdays, anniversaries, and other features such as polls and custom analytics. The Premium plan includes all of WorkMates’ recognition, listening, onboarding, and HR operations features.

You can contact WorkMates for a custom quote.

6. Guusto

Guusto is an employee rewards and recognition platform designed for companies with large frontline workforces. Like Terryberry, the vendor supports offline recognition with passwordless login, TV displays, QR and link-based rewards redemption, and the option to print merchant gift cards.

With Guusto, you can send rewards to anyone—not just employees—including contractors, retirees, and customers, too (meaning it can also serve as a corporate gifting tool). Unlike many other recognition software providers, Guusto doesn’t support a points-based rewards system; instead, it offers dollar-for-dollar redemption.

Pricing

Guusto’s paid plans start at $125 per account per month for a top-down recognition program that includes milestones, birthdays, onboarding, and manager rewards. The Essential and Premium plans support peer recognition programs; their pricing starts at $2.50 and $3.50 per seat, per month, respectively.

Build a highly engaged workforce with Terryberry’s unified employee engagement platform

Terryberry’s engagement platform provides all the tools manufacturing companies need to measure employee engagement, take action with tailored engagement programs, and track impact and ROI. Our highly configurable platform is designed to engage both frontline and desk-based workers, featuring a mobile app and offline surveys, recognition, and redemption capabilities.

Unlike other engagement platforms that offer disparate data, Terryberry centralizes the data across your engagement programs, accurately displaying their impact on employee engagement—and on each other. If you’re ready to drive employee engagement with impactful, inclusive programs, schedule a demo with Terryberry.