Microsoft Viva (including the former Ally, or Ally.io) is a Strategic Goal-Planning & Execution Management software that enables businesses like Slack, Remitly, Plaid, Teleperformance and UrbanClap to operate with the organizational alignment, agility, focus and transparency they need to match the fast pace needs of their evolving markets. Ally.io became a Microsoft brand after the October 2021 acquisition.
$108
per year per user
Workday Peakon Employee Voice
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Peakon is an employee engagement application now from Workday (acquired August 2021) which emphasizes getting useful and actionable data from employee surveys, and with that as a goal includes features to ensure all employees are sufficiently included, that surveys do not induce fatigue, and that data is not lost from open-ended responses, all with the goal of ensuring that employees feel heard and are invested in their company.
Peakon is a great solution whether you are thinking of pulsing your employees weekly, monthly, or even yearly. The solution provides great dashboards, easy reporting, on the fly segmentation creation, and ways to really dive deep into your people data. I think it's a bit expensive for very early-stage companies, so I would love to see them create a startup/early-stage version or pricing because it has become an invaluable tool for any size company.
The default state of transparency. This helps in reinforcing the superpower of OKRs. In Ally.io, the default mode of any objective created is public (unless stated otherwise). This helps people across the organization to understand where and how the organization is progressing.
The above feature of transparency is also reinforced by the feature of creating dependencies. This allows for people to understand the parties involved in achieving a particular goal and creates accountability. It is clearly understood which party has not contributed enough and RCA can be done on the same.
It allows for integrating with a host of other tools such that the check-in process can be automated. This allows for reducing the effort of managers in terms of updating multiple tools.
The dashboarding feature has helped us in reducing effort spent in creating presentations for retros, planning, and demos
Ally.io's customer success team is among the best that I have worked it. Always ready to help, proactive, and up for the next challenge. They take the success of their customers extremely seriously. Kudos to the team for this attitude.
Peakon looks beautiful and feels very light, which is comforting when you're (potentially) giving negative feedback and feel anxious. The emails are friendly and the survey is super clean.
The surveys are very easy to navigate. You can answer as many or as few questions as you like, skipping forward and backward, and choosing to provide comments when you want. It's low pressure and feels flexible.
The HR department is able to respond to your comments. You can then have a back and forth conversation while remaining anonymous. This really helps employees further explain and contextualize their survey comments without identifying themselves personally.
Again, Ally ranks very high and this is because they continuously work towards improving their software, platform and solutions. I believe that they have been very innovative and are adding important layers to help keep an OKR program culture relevant and beneficial to its customers. Ally is an opinion leader in this category and not a me-too tool.
SurveyMonkey is a great survey tool that also allows responders to stay anonymous, but I think Peakon is more effective for corporate feedback. It offers more reports and analytics specifically for HR and feels more professional. We often use SurveyMonkey for more lighthearted surveys (e.g., what to eat for team lunch) while keeping Peakon for employee feedback.
When we moved to WFH due to COVID, we use Peakon a regular basis to understand what employees are thinking. We lost the serendipity of talking to people during chance encounters in the office, Peakon has replaced those conversations.
We saw an incredible year in spite of COVID, while there are so many internal and external factors contributing to that success, we can see that having engaged and happy employees has an impact on our business. We also see what happens when they are not engaged or happy.
