When optimizing employee performance, your approach to employee management is ultimately just as important as who you choose to hire.

But many organizations fall short of executing an effective people management strategy. This is a big reason why only 20% of global employees report high employee engagement. 

Thankfully, there are tools that streamline this process for busy HR leaders — designed to bring out the best in your employees and simplify your HR team's talent management responsibilities. But which tools does a rapidly growing tech organization really need?

Here we'll explore nine of the best workforce management solutions, the HR processes that they are best suited for, and the top features that set them apart from the competition.

What is people management software?

People management software is a digital tool that helps HR teams manage employee information and activities. With features like performance-management and goal-setting tools, people management software is designed to help employees perform at their best and align their objectives with overall organizational goals. 

1) Pyn

According to research from the Harvard Business Review, 90% of employees say that they want at least weekly communication from their company, with 29% stating that they would prefer daily communication. Frequent, personalized communication is certainly one of the biggest keys to effective human capital management, but it can also require a lot of human capital when done manually.

With Pyn, organizations can automate employee communication with software capable of automatically sending timely, personalized messages. 

Pyn lets you map out every step of the employee journey and support employees each step of the way with personalized communication. From onboarding new hires to offboarding retiring employees, Pyn ensures that employees have the guidance and support they need to excel at every phase of their lifecycle.

Pyn is the perfect tool for HR departments seeking to automate employee communication without sacrificing personalization. By leveraging your existing HRIS data and with the help of powerful algorithms, Pyn empowers companies to improve the employee experience at scale with a personal, human touch.

Best for: Personalized employee communication at scale

Key features

• Employee journey mapping software for planning out all the important moments and milestones in an employee's journey
• Behavioral nudges for scaling company culture and values
• Facilitates pre-onboarding communications and a 90-day onboarding journey for new employees
• Wide range of message templates for further streamlining employee communication

2) Leapsome

Leapsome is an all-in-one people enablement platform designed for driving employee development, productivity, and engagement. With Leapsome, HR professionals can access a wide range of user-friendly tools designed to help them better manage their employees. 

This includes tools for conducting performance reviews, a skills roadmap for guiding professional growth, tools for goals/OKR tracking, engagement surveys, and tools for conducting 1:1 meetings — just to name a few.

With flexible pricing that lets you choose the exact tools and features that you would like to pay for, Leapsome makes it easy for organizations to design a solution for their budget and business needs. 

However, with every Leapsome pricing plan, you can look forward to essentials such as HRIS integrations, single sign-on and encryption security features, and exceptional customer support.

Best for: Organizations looking for an all-in-one performance management platform

Key features

• Performance review and 360-degree feedback templates
• Skills roadmap builder for guiding employee development
• Goals/OKR tracking tools
• Engagement survey templates for collecting employee feedback

3) Workday

Workday is a well-known HR platform that offers a litany of useful tools and features. With Workday's human capital management system, organizations are able to manage everything from employee benefits and compensation to employee feedback to professional development.

One especially noteworthy feature of Workday is its employee self-service knowledge base. This resource allows you to build a custom knowledge base for your organization that employees can use to quickly find the answers to common questions and issues on their own without having to contact someone else for assistance.

As one of the more popular HR platforms on the market today, Workday also offers a long list of integrations with other high-quality people management tools. This enables you to create a streamlined and integrated tech stack that will help everyone in your organization save time and enjoy an optimized user experience.

Best for: Employee self-service

Key features

• Automated 360-degree feedback
• Detailed reporting and analytics
• Automated payroll processing
• Employee time and attendance tracking

4) monday.com

monday.com is a well-known project management platform designed to streamline collaboration between project team members. With monday.com, you can create customizable workflows that break your project down into standardized tasks, making it easier to improve your team's alignment, productivity, and efficiency. 

monday.com also offers customizable dashboards that you can configure to display important project data and provide a high-level overview that will help keep everyone informed on the project's progress.

Enabling efficient collaboration is one of the key purposes of people management software — and efficient collaboration when it comes to project management. But in a 2020 survey, 25% of employees stated that they lack the technology to effectively collaborate on informal projects. 

Best for: Streamlined project management

Key features

• Customizable dashboards provide a high-level overview of projects for improved transparency
• 24/7 customer support that was voted #1 most loved by customers on G2
• Detailed project reporting and analytics
• Customizable workflows for breaking projects down into individual tasks

5) Rippling

Rippling is an HR management system that offers a variety of tools and features for optimizing numerous HR tasks. This starts with an applicant tracking system for hiring new employees that also includes the ability to post job openings on every major job board with a single click and the ability to schedule interviews automatically. 

Rippling also allows companies to run payroll automatically for employees located all over the globe. It provides an employee benefits management system that automatically invites new hires to review and enroll in health insurance, retirement benefits, and more.

Time-tracking is another key function of Rippling's HR management system, and Rippling enables employees to clock in and out in seconds using a tablet kiosk, the Rippling mobile app, or their computers. 

Lastly, Rippling allows organizations to create cloud-based training programs for employee development and automatically enrolls employees in the courses that you create based on predefined rules.

Best for: Organizations seeking a well-rounded and versatile HR management system

Key features

• Global payroll processing that enables you to automatically pay employees in their local currency
• Ability to quote, compare, and enroll in more than 4,000 benefits plans from the nation's leading carriers
• Employee time-tracking tools that sync with payroll

6) PerformYard

PerformYard is a complete performance management toolkit that allows organizations to build a multi-layered approach to improving employee performance. This starts with tools for collecting and providing employee feedback in numerous formats — from employee appraisals to one-on-one meetings to public feedback posts. 

The second approach to employee performance management that PerformYard facilitates is goal setting and tracking. By making it easy to assign goals to employees and track their progress toward those goals, PerformYard ensures that employees are aligned toward goals that will improve their performance and benefit your company. 

Along with these tools for directly improving employee performance, PerformYard also provides insightful employee performance reporting and analytics for tracking the results of your performance management efforts.

Best for: Managing and improving employee performance

Key features

• Customizable, automated performance reviews
• Flexible goal setting and automated progress tracking
• User-friendly dashboard for tracking performance data across time, teams, roles, or any other factor

7) Gusto

Gusto is another all-in-one HR automation platform that enables automated payroll processing, employee benefits administration, time/attendance tracking, and streamlined recruiting/onboarding processes. 

By improving the ease and efficiency of these processes for your employees and HR staff, Gusto creates a hassle-free experience across numerous HR processes that everyone involved will surely appreciate. Along with automating and streamlining many HR processes, Gusto also provides actionable insights via automated employee feedback surveys, workforce costing, and project costing.

Best for: Automating HR processes at startups and small businesses

Key features

• Customizable onboarding checklists
• Job posting and offer letter templates
• Automated payroll and tax filing

8) Bambee

All the tools we've covered so far have been software solutions for optimizing and automating various HR processes. But if you want to outsource your company's HR responsibilities entirely, you need Bambee.

With Bambee, organizations can outsource a range of HR tasks, including payroll processing, HR policy creation, and employee training/certifications. Bambee also conducts HR audits to help your organization keep its internal practices up-to-date and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Bambee's services are only available to organizations with less than 500 employees, meaning that Bambee won't be an effective solution for larger organizations. However, for small-to-medium-sized businesses that would rather outsource HR tasks than beef up their internal HR department, Bambee is a great option to consider.

Best for: Comprehensive outsourced HR services for small-to-medium-sized businesses

Key features

• Dedicated HR manager for each customer
• Bambee Report Cards that provide insights into employee performance
• Employee training (sexual harassment, workplace safety, business ethics)

9) Papaya Global

Modern companies often employ workers that are located all over the globe. While having access to such a large talent pool offers plenty of advantages, it also creates several challenges when it comes to completing processes such as payroll processing, benefits management, and new hire onboarding. 

Papaya Global allows you to automatically run payroll, manage employee benefits, and complete onboarding paperwork for employees in 160 different countries. Papaya Global is also the only payroll provider with its own regulated payments network, allowing you to deliver worker, authority, and vendor payments with real-time visibility and control.

Best for: Global workforce management

Key features

• End-to-end payroll consolidation for employees and contractors in 160 countries
• Country-specific onboarding workflows
• Employee Portal where employees can view their payslips, wage and tax statements, and employment documents in their native language
• Access to competitive benefits packages for international employees

Achieve your organizational goals with Pyn

People management software — in all its various forms — is a powerful tool for improving the efficiency of your HR team while also creating an optimized experience for your employees. 

But if you want to provide personalized guidance and support for your employees, Pyn can't be beat. Our industry-leading internal communications software makes it easy to connect with employees at pivotal moments in their employee journeys, leading to better engagement and retention.

Sign up for a Pyn demo to see how you can leverage personalized communication to improve the employee experience within your organization.