What you Need to Know About Employee Net Promoter Scores

Employee engagement and satisfaction in the workplace is integral to an organisation’s culture, retention rate and bottom line. 

Keeping up to date with how your employees are feeling is crucial to maintaining and enhancing your business’ performance, but how do companies measure this in a timely and cost-effective manner?

It’s time to explore the Employee Net Promotor Score (eNPS).

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What is an eNPS?

Just like a Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction derived from their products or services, an eNPS is an employee-focused variant used to gauge how employees rate their employers in terms of engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction. 

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Asking the Right eNPS Question for Best Results

Whilst an NPS asks ‘How likely are you to recommend our product to your family and friends?’ an eNPS asks ‘How likely are you to recommend our business as a place to work to your family and friends?’

Employees are asked to answer the question with a score out of 10 which reflects their overall satisfaction.

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How do you Measure an eNPS?

An eNPS is calculated using the standard NPS formula:

eNPS = % of Promoters - % of Detractors

Essentially, an eNPS is the difference between your happiest and least happy employees.

eNPS scoring is only displayed when at least 15 eNPS ratings have been provided for the date range selected.

The respondents are generally classified as:

• Detractors: respondents who provide an eNPS rating of 0-6.
• Passives: respondents who provide an eNPS rating of 7-8.
• Promoters: respondents who provide an eNPS rating of 9-10.

A good eNPS score is generally between 10 and 30, whilst anything above 30 is excellent.

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Why Should you Measure it?

By measuring an eNPS regularly a company can monitor how well they are viewed by their employer and track this score over time to see if they are maintaining a good standard or if their employee experience has been declining.

A regular eNPS questionnaire can indicate if there is an area of a company’s employee experience that has changed abruptly, allowing the organisation to rectify the issue promptly.

How regularly will depend on your company. There are some recommendations that measuring your eNPS should occur every three to four months. However, others believe that it should only be calculated when there is capacity for change - perhaps once or twice each year. 

Maintaining a positive eNPS provides businesses the peace of mind that their employees are happy and that they will become strong advocates of working for the organisation to their peers and contacts within the industry.

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What are the Benefits of an eNPS?

If implemented correctly, there are many benefits of utilising eNPS measurements into any organisation.

• Simplicity: Acquiring an eNPS is a simple process for both the employer and the employee. 

• Speed: Due to its simple nature, management doesn’t have to spend a great deal of time thinking of carefully worded survey questions, as employees only have to select a numerical score. Therefore, the turnaround time in collecting the data is very quick.

• Easy metric to work with: The uncomplicated nature an eNPS leaves you with a single number which is easy to calculate, leaving little room for error. 

• High participation rate: Due to its speed and simplicity, employees can register their answer within a matter of minutes, resulting in a high participation rate.

• Familiarity: Every adult has been a consumer of some form of product or service, so it is highly likely that they have experienced being a part of a NPS previously, which in turn provides a sense of familiarity with the notion of an eNPS. 

• Cost-effective: As an eNPS can be distributed through email or your organisation’s preferred communication channel, there is little additional cost involved.

• Anonymity: Employees can register their answers under the security of anonymity, which paves the way for genuine, honest feedback.

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How Should eNPS and Employee Engagement Surveys Interact?

Whilst there are many benefits to utilising an eNPS system, it is not without its limitations. An eNPS provides you with what is happening, but it doesn’t convey why it’s happening. Basically, it is a snapshot of your organisation.

An eNPS is not focused on individuals, it doesn’t provide a deep dive into the complex and multi-faceted nature of an employee’s workplace experience, nor does it provide any great insight and direction into the specific areas that are working well or that need improvement. 

Thus, an eNPS and Employee Engagement Survey should work hand-in-hand.

An eNPS should be viewed as a starting point, not as an end result. The findings of an eNPS should lead to further exploration through a deeper engagement survey, a follow up questionnaire or focus groups.

Nate Dvorak from Gallup gave this analogy for the interaction between an eNPS and employee engagement. 

“Fans wear your jersey and cheer from the stands. Players put in extra practice, score points, and give every last ounce of energy to win. eNPS tells you who your fans are. Employee engagement tells you who your players are.”

Should I Compare my eNPS With Other companies?

In an environment where competition for talent is high, you might be tempted to do market research and compare your eNPS with other companies. Perhaps it’s worth knowing if, overall, your employees are happier than those at a competitor organisation because you hope they’ll be less like to resign. 

However, it is far more valuable to benchmark against yourself. The reason being that your organisation is unique and you are looking to improve your eNPS so you can retain talent. Consider what your employees report that you do well, in terms of company culture, and continue that or work towards improving it. 

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How can I Improve my eNPS?

Once you’ve established a baseline eNPS, working towards improving it will encourage your employees to stay. Here are five ways you can improve your eNPS:

1. Share the Results

Transparency is an important way to move towards to improving your eNPS. Share as much as you can, but be warned about hiding anything. 

Involving your employees in the assessment process will help them feel more responsible, thus increase their engagement. The end result is more engaged employees tend to score higher in your next eNPS survey. 

2. Make a plan for change

Follow up with results and plans for change after the survey. As an employee, there is nothing more frustrating than taking the time to provide your feedback and hearing silence afterwards.  

There may be employee feedback that you are willing to implement and it may be easy to do so. 

To engage employees even further, you could establish establish a committee to handle the feedback, communicate the results, and make a plan for implementing changes.

3. Communicate the full cycle

Imagine if you could conduct customer NPS surveys to track their experience, conduct eNPS surveys with your employees to understand loyalty and satisfaction, and then create a feedback loop between customers, employees and management. 

4. Filter the data

Don’t forget you can use and filter all the data from customer and employee NPS surveys for even deeper insights.

For example, you could filter your results by:

• Demographics - are many older employees feeling a certain way? Are there consistencies amongst feedback from female employees? 
• Employee cohorts - are new employees less likely to recommend your company compared to employees with a longer tenure?
• Department - is there a specific department that’s unhappy? Why?

5. Ask your promoters

Most of the time it’s tempting to simply thank your promoters for their high recommendation and feedback.  

However, it never hurts to ask them what you could do better - sometimes when pushed, it’s human nature to provide even a small element of constructive criticism.

You might find they are willing to help you since they care so much about your brand.

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Conclusion

It’s easy and a well-known practise for organisations to focus on customer satisfaction. After all, if you don’t promote a positive customer experience, you can’t expect customer loyalty and as a result, your company won’t last much longer. 

But it’s less common to think about employee experience. Employee satisfaction is more than just good pay and benefits. Satisfied employees will work harder for you and become your biggest brand advocate. In turn, this positively affects business growth.

Taking the time to calculate your eNPS by asking your employees ‘How likely are you to recommend our business as a place to work to your family and friends?’ provides them with a sense of being valued. 

Following an eNPS calculation, the organisations that take the time to take a deeper dive into how engaged their employees truly are and understanding what is working well and what needs improvement, are the companies that will truly benefit from eNPS. Over time, this becomes one element of measuring employee engagement.

You can learn powerful insights about your product, brand and organisation when eNPS is coupled with NPS from customers.