Tinypulse vs Culture Amp vs Clarity Wave

Forbes defines employee engagement as "the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals." Engaged employees create better customer experiences, increase profits, need less delegation, and are generally happier. Building a company culture that nurtures employee engagement is not always easy to do. In the world of big data and algorithms, however, measuring and tracking employee engagement is not only possible – is not only easy – but can also itself become an integral part of creating an engaged culture.

This article reviews three popular employee engagement software solutions: TINYpulse, Culture Amp, and Clarity Wave, their pros and cons and what makes them different.

Each of these programs uses routine employee surveys to measure levels of happiness, frustration, aspiration, and burnout. Surveys of this nature have long been used by social scientists to measure everything from levels of depression in a society to a population's physical health. Modern software has taken these tools and modified them to become a resource for today's employers.

In this article we will review:

Product Comparison

The following three Employee Engagement Software products are designed to help business owners, managers, HR department leaders, department supervisors, and employment market analysts assess trends in employee experience. Information gathered through these systems can be used to enhance or even transform company culture.

TINYpulse — TINYpulse was an early entrant into the employee satisfaction monitoring software industry. The current version of TINYpulse shows the maker's sustained commitment to providing state-of-the-art data collection and analytic tools. Its highly intuitive user interfaces and powerful analytics are key values.

Culture Amp — Like TINYpulse, Culture Amp features both pulse surveys (routine weekly or other periodic one- or two-sentence surveys) and deep dive data collections (lengthier surveys conducted at milestone points throughout a worker's employment). Additional surveys include onboarding and exit information-gathering surveys. The action-oriented feedback format presents management teams with interpreted information as well as basic data.

CLARITY WAVE — Like its competitors, Clarity Wave allows for 360° feedback – a kind of feedback in which employees comment not only on the company and management, but also on their peers. It is exactly this kind of feedback– that which encourages growth and develops a person's emotional intelligence – that helps employees feel emotionally engaged in their workplace.

*Software features and pricing may change.

Breaking it All Down

Below is a comparison of the significant features and benefits offered by each of these three engagement survey software platforms.

Price

TINYpulse — TINYpulse platform starts from $5 per month per user, paid in advance for one year of use. This is higher than Clarity Wave's highest priced program. Comparing the features provided and frequency of use allowed, which is comparatively limited, the price becomes higher than Clarity Wave's, but compares well with Culture Amp for companies with fewer than 75 employees. Rating: 3

Culture Amp — Culture Amp's subscription starts at $4,500 per year and includes use of the software platform and associated training classes. So, for companies with 20 employees, the price is $18.75 per user per month. And, for companies with 200 employees, the price is only $1.88 per user per month. For larger companies, pricing is a strong value for a solid program. But, for companies with fewer than 75 employees, the price is highest of the three programs in the price comparison.  Rating: 2

Clarity Wave — Prices are $4 per month per employee, up to 500 employees. For 500 to 1000 the price per employee drops to $3.50 and from 1000 to 2000 it drops again to $3 per user per month. Anything beyond 2000 employees is charged at a flat additional $1.00. The overall value, as well as the stable and comparatively low price, makes the program very competitive. Rating: 1

Employee Portal

A user-friendly portal empowers every employee to be heard and to participate. It provides them with personal access to management and offers a forum for expressing their opinions and ideas.

TINYpulse — An adequate space is provided for employees to register their opinions and suggestions and to formally acknowledge peers for good work performance. Live-feed streams the results of pulse surveys and allows employees to register feedback on favorite co-workers. Ranking: 2

Culture Amp — An array of surveys measures employee engagement, experience, and effectiveness. The surveys invite employees into in-depth, one-on-one interactions as well as broad and frequent engagement through pulse surveys. The employee experience in using the EDI is not as highly prioritized as by the two competitors. Ranking: 3

Clarity Wave — This platform offers users an incomparably personalized space for examining survey results and inputting employee feedback. Each user has a personal page for uploading opinions and feedback to other users in the system. The page is packed with graphs displaying personally relevant data including individual scores as given to them anonymously by their peers. In terms of accessibility, the platform clearly caters to survey participants. Ranking: 1

Trend Analysis

Trend analyses are how stakeholders in employee satisfaction make sense of the data. They reflect the changes in the collective attitudes and opinions across the personnel base, and help leadership understand the cultural needs and results of previous actions.

TINYpulse — A wide range of trends are tracked, including sentiments, communications, company culture, transparency and recognition. The software features high-capability machine learning. This enables it to adapt and advance its analytic proficiency, and increase the value of its analysis with continued use. The system auto-highlights trends and emphasizes the most important data points. Ranking: 1

Culture Amp — Employee feedback data are all displayed on horizontal bar graphs. Demographic hot spots are called out with in-line color-coding. Machine learning improves analyses and identification of the data to be featured in the measurements. The system uses 180° and 360° evaluative principles for tracking and connecting milestones to reveal developmental trends over time. Internal trend tracking appears less prominently prioritized than demographic trending. Ranking: 3

Clarity Wave — Clarity Wave's emphasis on psychological concepts such as the Pyramid of Needs, the Essential Factors and the Wheel of Dimensions and Sub-dimensions creates a platform that focuses on the employees' self-improvement – an important factor in creating employee engagement. While each of these three software platforms use 360° feedback, Clarity Wave's peer-driven approach to motivation is perhaps the most progressive. Businesses with a younger workforce will likely feel more comfortable with this kind of feedback – millennials in particular have been shown to respond very well to it. Other employees, however, may take time to adjust. Personal-trend data is in real-time on this platform, so the feedback can be quickly responded to. Ranking: 2

Custom Questions

Customization of survey questions is essential to help each organization meet their unique needs. Generic surveys cannot address the particular real-time concerns, interests, objectives and organizational culture goals of larger businesses.

TINYpulse — TINYpulse sends a weekly one-question pulse survey to employees – which is well in keeping with the most effective drivers of successful engagement with the current generation of workers. Additionally, the software provides queues and scheduling functions to permit administrators to freely change or add custom questions and schedules without limitation. Ranking: 1

Culture Amp — Culture Amp features open-ended questions, based on a surveying philosophy developed with input from professional psychologists. Various surveys are deep-research modules, for extracting extensive feedback on topics around employment entry and exit and current employee experience. Heavy use of open-ended questions creates data that can be more difficult to interpret. Ranking: 3

Clarity Wave — Clarity Wave provides functions for designing 3 weekly custom questions in addition to its standard 7 pre-set questions. These custom questions are analyzed and graphed separately from the system's current multi-sided model. Ranking: 2

Peer Recognition

TINYpulse — TINYpulse does provide a peer recognition opportunity, in the form of submissions of acknowledgement of exceptional performance by peers. This feature is for self-initiated, occasional use. Rating: 2

Culture Amp — Culture Amp does not feature a peer recognition function as part of its auto-prompted engagement program, nor as a self-initiated activity. Employees can request feedback from their peers, but not initiate feedback to peers when unprompted. While this can alleviate some of the stress of 360° feedback, it can also skew results. Rating: 3

Clarity Wave — Clarity Wave allows more peer recognition opportunities than its competitors. While this may intimidate some employees, or make them feel uncomfortable, those awkward feelings can be worked through, and the upcoming workforce has been shown to respond well to this kind of feedback. Rating: 1

Notifications

Notifications permit such interactions as automated follow-up with non-responsive survey recipients. This function enables data gathering platform administrators to obtain complete results for conversion of accurate cross-company metrics into actionable information. Measurements at stake include various indicators of cultural needs, levels of effectiveness of implemented solutions, and success of initiatives for development of high-performance teams.

TINYpulse — TINYpulse sends reminders to employees who have not responded to surveys. Employees can submit their responses through an employee portal accessible via their iOS or Android device, or their desktop. The notification system is thereby well aligned with modern tech requirements for maximum participation. Ranking: 1

Culture Amp —  In addition to general survey distributions, this system is set up to reach out to employees on occasions such as milestones, and to prompt workers for individual engagement. This more regimental routine of notifications and processes is very organized, but may lack TINYpulse's flexibility, versatility, and organicity. Ranking: 2

Clarity Wave — This system enables team members to submit their input, which is then delivered to others across teams, departments, or organizations, for an exceedingly flexible web of interactions. While Clarity Wave's system is a hub of high-visibility notifications that become a prominent cultural feature in-and-of-itself, the very frequency of notifications may be viewed as a drawback in terms of practical workplace applicability on multiple levels, unless actively and well managed. Ranking: 3

Pros and Cons

TINYpulse

Culture Amp

Clarity Wave

Conclusion

All three of these software platforms provide easy-to-use interfaces, powerful analytics, and readily interpretable data and actionable information. And, all three feature impressive machine learning capabilities to continuously adapt and advance analytic efficiencies and future usefulness.

Culture Amp presents management with virtually unbounded options for questioning on a variety of fronts, as well as effectively limitless depths of interrogatories. This may be viewed as a strategic advantage for workplace cultural development. However, this approach to engagement and data gathering may become a cultural issue in-and-of-itself, if not applied more conservatively than the system is configured to permit. Its $4,500 price makes it a value only if your company has over 75 employees. But even then, its ranking in other areas needs to be compared against its competitors to make sure it meets the needs of your business.

TINYpulse offers more attractive mid-range pricing for small to mid-sized companies than does Culture Amp. And, TINYpulse's balanced approach to provisioning survey questions offers practical, real-world boundaries on ways employees engage with the software. Further, TINYpulse's streamlined approach to survey management arguably offers a design edge over Culture Amp, producing a comparatively innovative system in a brand of non-intrusive, organic communications styles. This form of interactive programming is one that millennials consistently indicate they prefer.

Clarity Wave's low price per user seems commensurate with its more limited allowances of weekly uses. However, its spectacular features create a very stimulating experience for users. Clarity Wave's analytics do not match Culture Amp's more robust system. But, when accounting for features such as price, quality of user interface, uniqueness of experience, and its overall ranking, Clarity Wave edges out the other two programs in our analysis of overall value.