Collaboration

4 key tools for building a supportive company culture

Gather feedback, track trends, and take actionable steps with these workplace culture tools

Author: Ben LuthiApril 1st, 2019Illustration by Robert Samuel Hansen

Like crafting an artistic masterpiece, creating the perfect company culture could take years to achieve. But with the right tools and a vision of the company culture you desire, it’s possible. The good news is that it’s already known what employees want.

According to a Slack study about employee engagement, 87% of employees say transparency is a sought-after company value. What’s more, 17% of survey respondents from our International Work Perceptions report say being respected and admired at work is what matters most to them.

Having a list of the desired company culture elements is one thing; cultivating that culture is another. You’ll need ways to bridge the gap between vision and results. Luckily, there are tools for gathering feedback from employees to make sure you’re on the right track.

Create a positive and transparent company culture with these feedback tools

Chloe Hamman, lead people scientist at Culture Amp, says managers should focus on giving employees a connection to leadership, support in growth and development, and a say in how things are done. “If those things aren’t there, people will tend to walk away or leave organizations,” Hamman says.

By asking the simple question, “What do you need from us?” using the following tools, you can get valuable feedback to cultivate the best company culture.

1. Culture Amp

Culture Amp is a platform that helps measure and improve employee engagement as well as facilitate feedback. It also has an app integration that can provide automated surveys during onboarding, exit and other important milestones.

“We have a solid philosophy behind every single survey we do,” says Hamman. “We’ve done thorough research and use good science to come up with questions for customers.”

Leaders can use this feedback to assess how they’re supporting their people at every stage of their development and gain insight into how to improve. Culture Amp also provides benchmarks from similar organizations to show you how you’re doing and allows you to track your progress toward company culture development over time.

Companies will need to contact Culture Amp for pricing.

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Install
Install Neko by Culture Amp on Slack
  • Neko delivers survey invitations, friendly reminders, and announcements regarding employee feedback
  • Neko helps you collect and share data and insights to help you improve your culture, develop your people, and succeed in business

2. Simple Poll

Simple Poll makes it easy to collect feedback from your team in a matter of minutes in Slack.

It could be something as simple as figuring out the best time to meet or something more collaborative, such as asking for the team’s thoughts on a recent announcement, goal progress or other important conversations. You can also allow the poll feedback to be anonymous if necessary.

Unlike with Culture Amp, you won’t get premade questions for feeling out your company culture, so you’ll need to have a pulse on your workers’ pain points to come up with your own questions. They also aren’t automated, so you’ll need to create your own schedule for how frequently you want to ask for feedback.

The basic version of Simple Poll is free. But if you want more than 100 votes per month, more than 10 options in each poll or other important features, it costs $49 per month.

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Install
Install Simple Poll on Slack
  • Allows you to create native simple polls right within Slack
  • You can also create anonymous polls where the identity of the voters will be hidden

3. Polly

Polly is an app that allows you to create polls directly in Slack. It provides several free templates from which you can choose, including “First 30 Days on the Job,” “All-Hands Meeting Feedback” and “Quarterly Employee Engagement Survey.”

And instead of having you type out the poll’s parameters, you’ll get a pop-up box with various settings. You can make polls anonymous, allow multiple votes and private comments, and give voters the chance to add their own options.

Pricing options range from $50 to $500 per month, based on how many responses per survey you want, access to analytics and more.

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Install
Install Polly on Slack
  • Collect and measure feedback at scale on all of your workflows in Slack
  • Create your own surveys in minutes or grab a survey template from the Polly library
  • Access robust features and functionality to collect rich data you need from the right people at the right time

4. Officevibe

Officevibe offers employee engagement software with prebuilt questions to help you gather anonymous feedback as often as you’d like. You can set up the frequency and questions for surveys, and Officevibe will do the rest. Just be mindful of the cadence of company culture questions—too often can get annoying, but too infrequent can make it feel like an afterthought.

You’ll be able to see feedback immediately, measure satisfaction and other trends, and allow employees to submit praise for one another. Survey data and engagement metrics will help you get a clear picture of your team’s overall health and happiness. Plus, you’ll get recommended tactics to strengthen your team based on the lowest-ranking metrics.

For single teams, Officevibe is free. If, however, you have multiple teams and want cross-team analytics and other premium features, pricing starts at $4 per user per month.

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Install
Install Leo (Officevibe Bot) on Slack
  • Leo measures team satisfaction in real-time through weekly Pulse Surveys
  • Leo also share anonymous employee feedback with managers in a private channel as soon as it's available
  • Receive actionable feedback on how to improve organizational culture

Next steps for company culture development

As you start defining and growing your company culture by using these tools, don’t ignore the feedback you get. Workers will notice if you do. On the flip side, Hamman says, “Don’t try to boil the whole ocean. Just choose one to three areas you want to prioritize.”

Then take actionable steps to make meaningful improvements in your workplace culture in those areas. This process can take time, but it will make a big difference in improving employee retention and satisfaction.

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