4 Best Employee Enablement Software for People Leaders

In this article:

• Why HR teams are choosing enablement software
• The 4 best employee enablement platforms for HR teams
• 4 factors to look for in an enablement platform (our experts weigh-in)
• An in-depth look at each tool and how they work

👋 Long story short: We think Mesh is the best employee enablement software for HR teams. We're powered by leading People Science techniques and AI technology, to enable continuous feedback, goal progression, and skill improvement.
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But of course we would say that. Luckily, you don't have to take our word for it, we have 254 customer reviews on G2 that say things like "one of the best platforms I have ever used" and "very intuitive and easy to adopt".

Think Mesh might be right for your business? Watch our overview video here or reach out to our team for a product tour here.

Why Employee Enablement Software is the Future of HR

Employee enablement represents a shift from a focus solely on periodic evaluations of past performance to a more holistic approach that emphasizes continuous improvement and support.

For years, Performance Management has been focused on backward looking assessments, enforcing rules, and ensuring compliance through periodic form-filling. Many in the industry agree that this approach is unhelpful for actually improving performance in rapid, iterative cycles.

Companies can no longer rely on traditional performance management for three reasons:

1. Demand for top performing talent is far greater than supply, leading to an increase in talent cost. Developing and retaining that talent is now mission critical.
2. Tenures are getting shorter as hot talent seeks newer opportunities faster. Again, retention must be a focus.
3. Newer generations are demanding purpose, personalization, and flexibility.

Traditional employee performance systems simply fail to meet the demands of a modern business environment.

On the other hand, employee enablement techniques and platforms provide HR teams with the tools to continuously nurture employees into top performers in a way that they appreciate.

Read more about the pivot to employee enablement in our guide here.

The 4 Employee Enablement Platforms We'll Review

These are the best employee enablement softwares in 2024:

1. Mesh - Best for continuous feedback, goal-setting, and nurturing high performers
2. Leapsome - Best for personalized learning paths
3. Culture Amp - Best for engagement tracking
4. Lattice - Best for linking compensation to performance

But before we dive into our review of each one, I asked our People Science team to share their expertise on what makes a *genuinely* useful tool for employee enablement.

Let's take a look at their responses:

Four Factors to Look for in Your People Enablement Platform (Experts Weigh-In)

We asked our People Science team two questions:

1. What is the modern HR team struggling with when it comes to employee enablement?
2. What should they look for in their Employee Enablement Platform?

When it comes to what HR teams are going through, they said:

• Traditional review and reward processes aren’t enough. To develop and retain high performers companies need something more continuous (Adobe scrapped their reviews as far back as 2012). 
• Modern employee expectations are high. Especially amongst younger generations who demand more from their workplace, and high performers who know they’ve got options.
• Expensive off-site and classroom training for managers are often ineffective. Improving manager’s ability to develop their employees is hugely important, but the on-the-ground implementation of those lessons is <10% (expensive classroom teaching is quickly forgotten unless implemented).
• Rapid technological innovation (*cough* AI *cough*) requires agile companies. In 2023, we’ve seen so many 500-employee companies crumble overnight. The reason? The inability to pivot company goals toward market demand (and for employees to pivot just as quickly).

Sound painfully familiar? You might like our guide on the "Pivot to Employee Enablement"

Luckily, our People Science team also told us how the best employee enablement tools solve these problems.

These are the four factors they said you should consider when selecting your platform:

Factor 1: Embeds continuous employee feedback and development into your culture

The best employee enablement platforms help you embed continuous and effective feedback into the day-to-day of your employees. 

This works by getting timely reminders of when feedback should be given and what effective feedback looks like. 

It reinforces desired behaviors while identifying areas of improvement, making employees feel seen and empowered to develop.

Factor 2: Facilitates better & more effective performance reviews based on unbiased data

Employee enablement platforms should also facilitate better performance reviews—ones where bias or lack of data points won’t get in the way. 

Those data points should include progress on goals, feedback received since the last review, and new capabilities acquired. 

Having them equips managers and employees with the information they need to write a review that's objective and fair.

Factor 3: Connects individual and team goals with the needs of the business

An effective employee enablement tool ensures alignment between individual ambitions and organizational objectives.

The tool needs to provide clarity and oversight about what the organization wants to achieve and how employees can set goals that fit within that bigger picture.

Because when everyone is pushing toward the same outcomes, they become more achievable.

Factor 4: Provides comprehensive analytics and insights for informed decision-making (for managers and HR)

An employee enablement platform that offers comprehensive analytics enables you to pinpoint trends, celebrate successes, and intervene where necessary before small issues become significant problems. No one wants discontent to fester. That could spell disaster for employee retention.

Managers and HR can leverage these insights to make decisions about talent and hiring as well as to know when, where, and why engagement may be low.

It could be the difference between an effective and an ineffective People strategy.

In this article:

In this article, I’ll introduce you to Mesh—our own employee enablement software platform—and I’ll show you how it excels in the above areas. 

I'll also list three alternative tools to help you decide if they’re for you. Let's dive in.

1. Mesh | The Best Employee Enablement Tool for Habit-Formation that Fuels Performance

Mesh’s platform enables employees to:

• Receive continuous feedback and coaching
• Understand company and individual goals and their progress toward them
• Form positive habits that improve their performance (Mesh “nudges” them to improve daily!).
• Have continuous conversations with peers and managers about performance and development.

The platform helps much of the work HR teams do to improve employee performance. It facilitates manager-employee check-ins, company and team goal setting, performance tracking, period reviews and continuous employee feedback.

However, unlike most tools, Mesh doesn’t rely on “good managers” to be useful for developing and enabling employees:

• Mesh improves manager effectiveness via nudges, their AI coaching copilot, and other modern techniques. 
• Mesh continuously prompts peer-to-peer feedback and better manager coaching to enable employees to get better at core skills.

It’s the ideal tool for HR teams who want their people—managers and direct reports alike— to not only know what to do to be high-performers, but actually do it.

How does Mesh stack up against the four factors that make an effective employee enablement platform?

Let’s see:

→ Factor 1 | How Mesh embeds continuous employee feedback and development

Mesh makes giving regular employee feedback a habit, rather than a chore completed once or twice a year (AKA, too little, too late!). 

The habit is easy to form thanks to nudges sent through the tools your team already spends time using—Slack and MS Teams. 

Feedback is guaranteed to be effective and clear. Managers, colleagues, and even execs are prompted by our built-in AI on exactly how to write feedback. 

The platform even makes suggestions on how to improve what they’ve written. This increases the effectiveness of what’s being shared while making the activity less daunting.

Employees can also request feedback from anyone in the organization at any time, ensuring they hear from more than just their manager. Plus feedback is measured against specific competencies you want to see developed.

Once praise or advice is shared, it gets documented (so it can be used in 1:1s and at review time). At an organization level, you can see what competencies the company has and where they’re lacking. 

On an employee level, they build a real-time view of strengths that feed into development and career conversations, empowering incremental growth every day for big results long term.

Teams that leverage praise and advice on Mesh see a ~138% boost in feedback inputs throughout the year over traditional periodic review/feedback cycles. Learn more about our Continuous Feedback Feature. Or check out how we support People Development.

→ Factor 2 | How Mesh facilitates effective performance reviews based on unbiased data

Even with regular, timely feedback, it’s beneficial for managers and direct reports to sit down and have a formal review of performance for salary raises, promotions, and hiring decisions. 

But every company approaches performance reviews in its own unique way. So we ensure our performance review feature can be customized to your exact process. 

When it's time to complete that process, your employees are provided data from past check-ins, 1:1s, and feedback (both given and received). That way they have multiple data points to pull from to complete an unbiased and comprehensive review. 

They also get support on how to deliver their review, with AI prompting how to structure and word everything so that it's effective and objective. 

At the end of the performance review cycle, you get an automated overview of how everyone in the organization is performing without the need to spend hours in spreadsheets or meetings.

Teams that run reviews/feedback cycles on Mesh see a ~42% drop in grievance reports on the final feedback reports.

→ Factor 3 | How Mesh connects your goals to your business’s needs

Mesh’s goal-setting function is designed to keep every team aligned, up-to-date on progress, and clear on what’s expected.

This makes the goals you set more likely to be achieved and more likely to translate to tangible growth. 

If you’re worried about employees following through on goals, even if they are the right ones, don’t. 

Mesh uses automation and AI nudges to hold your people accountable, working towards the goal and reporting progress. 

You’ll also get clear oversight into how others are progressing. This is particularly useful for managers as they can pinpoint problems and address them in 1:1s with their team members.

One of the biggest barriers to employee performance is a lack of clarity on what’s expected of them. The goal setting and goal management feature in Mesh provides transparency and ongoing visibility so that your team is never at a loss as to what to do or how to do it. 

Teams that manage goals on Mesh achieve ~22% higher achievement of team and individual goals than legacy performance management systems.

→ Factor 4 | How Mesh improves decision-making with comprehensive analytics and insights

With Mesh, your managers and your HR team won’t need to act on gut feeling or blind assumptions. 

Instead, you can lean on the data collected in the platform and make informed decisions based on how your employees really feel and how they’re really performing. 

Data is collected from goals, documented praise and advice (feedback), performance reviews, development of set capabilities, and surveys. 

The surveys are run to gauge the sentiment of your employees and templates are provided in the platform. 

Beyond surveys, we provide a safe space for your people to express themselves as and when, anonymously if they choose. That way nothing goes unnoticed and you can get a real-time read on employee sentiment.

The platform also points you toward your next best action based on what the data is showing. 

Let’s say you log in to the Mesh platform. The platform will nudge you with a timely action item. So if you haven’t checked in with a team member about their career growth in a while, the AI will tell you it’s time to do so. 

And the data is configured for you in a digestible format. You can use it to inform your People strategy and managers can use it to make time with their team more productive and impactful. 

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Organizations that leverage Mesh recommended templates for employee listening see a ~14% boost in talent’s average tenure. Learn more about our Engagement Features to see how they’ll improve your ongoing People strategy.

Mesh’s Pricing

Our pricing is designed to meet different needs and scale as needed. 

We offer three tiers*: Base, Premium, and Enterprise.

• ‍Base: $4 per user, per month
• ‍Premium: $7 per user, per month
• ‍Enterprise: Custom pricing 

You can see what features are included in each:

Get in touch with us here for a demo of the product.

Mesh Reviews

We could go on and on about how we enable the performance and development of your people but the proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding. In this case, the pudding is our user reviews. 

Here’s what Mesh users have to say:

Want to see more? Head to our G2 profile.

Mesh Pros and Cons

When reviewing what our uses have to say, a few pros and cons stand out:

Pros:

• Improved 1:1 management where managers feel empowered and informed
• Management of goals with the ability to set, measure, and stay on track.
• Automation of performance analysis, saving managers and HR from clunky, time-consuming excel sheets

Cons:

• Unable to download documents and data from the platform
• Lack of employee onboarding specific features
• Employees who are collaborators for goals can edit targets

→ Book a demo to see for yourself how Mesh enables your managers, your employees, even you to perform at your best.

2. Leapsome: The Best Employee Enablement Tool Software for Personalized Learning Paths

Leapsome is a versatile employee enablement platform that excels in integrating personalized learning paths with traditional performance management processes such as reviews, goals, and surveys. 

The pathways are especially useful for onboarding new employees with specific training and resources or upskilling an individual to a core competency.

What we love about Leapsome is they have a learning library built-in to the platform. You can upload internal documents, create new content, or access third-party resources there. It removes the need for an LMS, which can be a pricy bit of software.

While Leapsome is great for showing employees how to improve performance and providing a place to host resources, it doesn’t support behavioral change or habit-building in the same way Mesh does.

And more than half the battle of high performance is getting your people to action best practice behaviors not just know what they are. So it’s worth keeping that in mind.

Leapsome Pros, Cons, and User Reviews

Pros:

• Customizable learning and development pathways
• Integrations with other tools (Slack, Zoom, etc)
• Easy to set up
  

Review from a Leapsome user:

“The interface is straightforward to use and the ability to integrate with many facets of your career growth makes it a must-have: targets, peer reviews, and Learning materials are just a few of the many services Leapsome offers.”

Cons:

• Lack of customization options 
• Difficult to align goals with business objectives
• Clunky UX
  

Review from a Leapsome user:

 “I've found the customization options somewhat limited, especially in fine-tuning review templates and aligning goal-setting with our specific business objectives. It would be beneficial to have a bit more flexibility in these areas to fully cater to our organization's unique requirements.”

Pros and cons have been determined by looking at real user reviews and feedback. 

Leapsome Pricing

Leapsome doesn’t share its pricing publicly and instead builds custom quotes for every prospective customer who books a demo. This may hint at a scary price tag they don’t want people seeing upfront.

3. Culture Amp: The Best Employee Enablement Tool Software for Engagement Tracking

Designed to help organizations understand and improve employee engagement, Culture Amp offers a suite of tools that make it easier to gather, analyze, and act on employee feedback in real time.

What sets Culture Amp apart is its evidence-based approach to measuring engagement and its commitment to using data to drive meaningful change. 

The platform offers a range of customizable surveys, including pulse surveys, engagement surveys, and more, all designed to capture a comprehensive view of employee sentiment.

For a company that wants to hone in on employee sentiment as a route to performance enablement over development and goal achievement, Culture Amp is a great tool.

But if a company wants to invest in every area of people enablement at once, an all-in-one where you don’t need to pay for several add-on features is best. 

Culture Amp Pros, Cons, and User Reviews

Pros:

• Comprehensive engagement surveys and templates
• Users have access to industry benchmarks, enabling organizations to compare their engagement levels against those of similar companies
  

Review from a Culture Amp user:

“I use Culture Amp primarily for surveys. The platform is relatively easy once you use it a few times. I like that they provide baseline surveys you can customize for your organization. I like that they have data to compare your organization to others based on size, location, and industry."

‍Cons:

• Lack of customization for unique company needs
• Unable to coach or track development
• Difficulty finding information and historical data
  

Review from a Culture Amp user:‍

“While the platform offers some level of customization, such as the ability to add custom questions, the rating scale is fixed to a 5-point scale. This rigidity limits the flexibility for companies to tailor surveys according to their specific requirements.

It would be beneficial if Culture Amp allowed for greater customization in terms of rating scales, as different organizations may prefer alternative scales that align better with their unique needs and rating systems.”‍

Pros and cons have been determined by looking at real user reviews and feedback. 

Culture Amp Pricing

Similarly to Leapsome, Culture Amps pricing is custom. 

They do, however, outline four packages: 

• Engage (their most basic offering)
• Perform (features focused on performance management)
• Develop (an add-on)
• The Full Platform (all features)

4. Lattice: The Best Employee Enablement Tool Software for Linking Compensation to Performance

Lattice is a comprehensive employee enablement software that integrates seamlessly with compensation management. 

This focus helps HR departments and managers make informed decisions about pay raises, bonuses, and promotions based on clear, quantifiable performance data. 

By leveraging Lattice, organizations can foster a culture of fairness and motivation, where employees are encouraged to excel knowing that their efforts have a direct impact on how they’re compensated.

We love that Lattice even provides benchmarking data so you can sense check what you’re paying your people against others:

Lattice is very much like Leapsome, only it’s been around longer and has become a bit of a default solution for organizations. Because of this, it tends to lean more on the 'status quo’ of performance management rather than pushing into new areas of employee enablement. 

Lattice Pros, Cons, and User Reviews

Pros:

• Clear visibility into how performance impacts compensation, promoting transparency and trust within the organization.
•  Organizations can tailor performance metrics and goals to fit their unique needs
• Users rave about the 1:1 features (ability to schedule, prep, and review) 
  

Review from a Lattice user:

“We find Lattice user interface to be intuitive and user friendly. It's easy for employees to navigate and access the information they need quickly. Custom optimization options allowed us to tailor our specific performance management process and metrics, which has been a significant advantage."

‍Cons:

• Many desirable features are ‘add-ons’ making the tool expensive
• Often delays in promised product improvements
• Cost 
  

Review from a Lattice user:

“Unfortunately Lattice has had some pretty bad misses on their product roadmap and delivery. They made some lofty promises (getting weighted review score calculations out by Jan 2024, launching hidden talent reviews in Q2, enabling group 1:1s in Q2 etc) that have ALL been postponed, delayed, or the launch was very disappointing in my opinion. Lattice apparently laid off quite a few Engineers in Q1'23 which probably impacted their ability to meet their product updates/enhancements roadmap. I have hopes that they'll turn it around, but this has been pretty disappointing thus far.”

Lattice Pricing

Lattice starts at $8 per user, per month for one of its base packages which can be either ‘Performance Management’ or ‘OKRs & Goals’. 

You can bundle those two for $11 per person, per month.

Any features on top of that incur additional costs:

So as you can see, the compensation package we love is only offered as an additional monthly subscription and is quite expensive. 

For the full suite of features, you’d be looking at $25 per user, per month. If you’re a 200 person organization that could be about $60,000 a year.

Summary: 4 Best Employee Enablement Software Platforms