The employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) measures how likely your employees are to recommend their workplace to family and friends. This score can be used as an indicator of employee engagement and loyalty and can help you gauge the overall satisfaction of your workforce.
The eNPS score is derived from calculating the results of a single survey question posed to all of your employees: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to your family and friends as a good place to work?”
While your eNPS score is calculated by your employees’ answers to a single question, much more can be achieved with a follow-up question. The follow-up question will be the “why” of the score and can help you improve your employee engagement and your eNPS score. If you’ve researched the benefits of employee engagement in the past, you’re likely aware of the benefits like improved performance, decreased absenteeism, and increased collaboration and innovation. Learning how to calculate your eNPS score and using the results can help you develop an improved workplace where employee and company goals are closely aligned.
eNPS Survey Questions and Results
The eNPS survey is designed to help you understand how loyal your employees are to the organization. Unlike many engagement surveys, an eNPS survey offers the benefits of being fast (with only one question), honest (responses are anonymous) and straightforward (a scale of 0-10). t’s typically composed of one of these two questions:
- On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company to your family and friends as a good place to work?
- On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our products/services to your friends or family?
Before the survey is deployed, it’s important to make sure that employees understand that their responses will be anonymous. Otherwise, you risk getting skewed results from employees who fear backlash from a negative response. Although employees answer on a scale of 0-10, the responses will fall into three distinct groups.
- Detractors: Answers from 0-6 fall into this category. These employees are dissatisfied with their job in some way. They are most likely to talk negatively about the company or employer. While it’s never a good experience to hear that your employees are unhappy, detractors hold valuable insight into how to improve.
- Passives: Those with an answer of 7 or 8 fall into the neutral category. These employees are considered satisfied but neither emotionally invested nor disengaged. While passive scores aren’t used to calculate your eNPS score, the reasons for these in-between scores could prove very important.
- Promoters: Employees who answer 9 or 10 are most likely to promote the company because they are very satisfied. These employees are your company ambassadors and can provide insight into improving conditions for other employees.
The Follow-up Question
While calculating your score is essential, some of the most crucial feedback will come from answers to your follow-up question. To keep the survey short and avoid the potential for survey fatigue, you want your follow-up to be a single open-ended question. It should ask “why” in a manner that’s not leading or overly specific. Common examples include:
- What was the primary reason for your score?
- How can we improve your experience with our company?
- What is one thing that would hold you back from recommending the company?
- Name one thing you enjoy about working with our company.
Gauging employee loyalty is just the beginning step in using your eNPS survey. Negative answers provided by your employees should be considered an opportunity for improvement. Your detractors have a story to tell. If you receive several comments that reflect similar dissatisfaction, it might be easier to determine how to implement positive changes within the workplace. Passive responders who won’t have a voice in the eNPS score can provide relevant information in their responses about why they aren’t promoters. While promoters’ satisfaction might appear to have little to offer, their answers can shed light on ways you can improve conditions for the employees who aren’t content.
How to Calculate eNPS
After learning the three categories your employees’ answers fall into, calculating your eNPS score is not difficult. Although most of your employees may fall into the passive category, these responses won’t be used in the calculation. If the survey isn’t mandatory, employees who fail to answer will also fall into the passive category. To calculate your eNPS score, simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
eNPS= %Promoters – %Detractors
Your score can fall between -100 to 100. If your eNPS is negative, there are more detractors than promoters. You have more promoters than detractors if it’s positive, which is a good thing. Yet, it’s still a starting point that can yield improvement.
Benchmarking Your Score
After calculating your score, your first impulse might be to compare your score to other companies in your industry. While you might be able to gather comparison scores, benchmarking your score against other organizations might not provide accurate information or help you implement positive changes. Your eNPS score is a unique number representing how your employees feel and the conditions within your organization. Instead of benchmarking your score against other companies, your scores will be more meaningful if you compare your fluctuating scores. In other words, benchmark your score against yourself.
Your follow-up question offers a chance to find ways to improve your score. Conducting an eNPS survey shouldn’t be a one-time thing. Instead, make the decision to repeat the survey every quarter or twice a year. When you begin repeating the survey, you can note how improvements affect employee engagement within your organization.
Using Technology to Track eNPS
While the individual results of your eNPS survey are anonymous, eNPS tools can be used to filter the results by department, location, demographics and other criteria. By determining if certain groups are less satisfied than others, you may reveal that your inclusion efforts could use some work. If a certain department is unhappy, additional tools may exist to make specific tasks easier.
Routinely measuring your eNPS score will give you other options to use data points to note progress. Having a regular cycle can give you enough data to find trends and pinpoint the actions that lead to changes. By using your timeline of changing scores alongside performance development tools and collaborative behavior tracking, your eNPS score can tell a story about your workplace environment.
You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure
As a company leader, you know that employee turnover has reached record numbers during the past year. Efforts to retain employees often depend on speculation and competitive wage wars. These solutions frequently aren’t the answer to creating a healthy workplace culture. Using measurable data helps identify real insights within your organization and find solutions that lead to long-term employee satisfaction.
An eNPS survey is a simple tool that can offer a powerful impact on your employee engagement levels and, ultimately, improve other metrics like efficiency, collaboration, and performance. Today’s employees have new options. Remote work is here to stay and becoming more popular than ever. Many businesses offer perks like flexibility and unique choices that improve employee engagement.
However, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Your eNPS score is an important benchmark that reveals employee satisfaction, and feedback questions offer an opportunity to how and where, specifically, improvements are needed. When you recognize the eNPS score as the valuable tool that it is – one that sources data to enhance the workplace for employees, which in turn fuels business success – everyone wins.
Today’s HR technologies offer a wealth of tools for leaders who want to improve the performance and well-being of their employees. RallyBright offers easy-to-use tools to measure, diagnose, and improve collaborative behaviors that affect your bottom line. To learn how to utilize your eNPS survey and other essential metrics to make high-impact improvements on how your teams work, schedule your demo today.
