Austria-based startup Kununu launches Engage to digitize and streamline workplace feedback

Austria-based startup, Kununu, is a platform for employer reviews and ratings that has helped millions of job seekers make better job decisions each month. The company announced it’s rolling out Kununu Engage, a tool that allows any company worldwide to easily generate valuable continuous real-time employee feedback.

Kununu is the largest employer review platform in Europe has been growing for over a decade, since launching in 2007. After expanding to the US two years ago, Kununu has opened its newest office in Berlin. The Kununu platform currently has more than 2.5 million reviews for over half a million employers.

According to the millions of employees, companies still have room for improvement when it comes to internal transparency. Among the 18 workplace dimensions that kununu measures, “internal communication” consistently comes in last place year to year.
Employees struggle with work cultures that are based too much on hierarchical structures. Instead, they would like to openly discuss and influence developments within their companies. Another factor that rates poorly compared to other aspects of worklife is “support from management.” It also happens to be the dimension where users share the most insights; people tend to be very vocal about how much (or
little) support from management they’re getting at work. kununu engage provides a simple way to directly address both of these areas and more.

“We all know that happy employees are more productive in the workplace. We also know that it can be hard for employees to share concrete feedback with their employer. Often, the real reasons for being unsatisfied in the job don’t ever get revealed until the exit interview. This is fatal for companies, especially in times when they are struggling to retain their best employees. And costly for employees too, who think that their only option to improve their work happiness is changing the job,” says Moritz Kothe, CEO of kununu.

Kununu Engage helps to increase employee engagement and transparency. By offering a range of smart tools, including an automated weekly pulse, employees can anonymously submit feedback to their employer about what is working well and what specifically needs optimizing within their company at that current moment in time. As part of the pulse, employees can rate their satisfaction on a scale from 1 (very bad) to 5 (very good). Kununu Engage also comes with a discussion board for teams, where every employee can share and discuss topics with their colleagues and vote for them.

Kununu Engage

Based on the weekly pulse, companies gather valuable insights about the current morale of their teams. What has traditionally been tackled in performance reviews once or twice a year, is now available in an organized display with a few clicks and in real-time. The weekly pulse and the discussion board can also be filtered by individual groups and teams within your organization to help gain deeper insights. Using this flexible real-time data, management can quickly identify and locate relevant topics and problems to take swift corrective action.

“Employee engagement is partially tied to the possibility of giving feedback and how management reacts to it,” says Steffen Zoller, Managing Director of Kununu and founder of Kununu Engage. “With Kununu Engage we want to supplement the insights of Kununu reviews with verified, continuous employee feedback and ultimately help companies improve their company and culture.”

Co-Founded by Steffen Zoller and Fabian Friede, both Berlin-based serial entrepreneurs, the product is led by Christopher Stephenson, previously of Google and Planet Labs. Kununu Engage already has 150 clients in the beta phase, including leading tech and media companies as well as international firms from the US, UK, Australia, China, Sweden, and Germany. The tool can be tested for free until the end of May and will then shift to a paid model based on the number of users.