Many studies have pointed out the importance of employee engagement in the workplace and how measuring it can benefit your organization: enhanced employer brand, increased productivity, greater profitability, reduced absenteeism, and employee turnover.
And a simple way to measure your employees’ level of engagement is by rolling out an employee net promoter score (eNPS) survey.
It gives you information about how employees think and feel about your company so you can work on improving your engagement for a happier and more productive workforce.
What is Employee Net Promoter Score?
Employer Net Promoter Score measures the likelihood of an employee recommending you to others as a good employer. It focuses on the question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend (organization name) as a place to work?”
If you are looking for an easy, simple, and cost-effective approach to tracking your employee engagement, eNPS is the way to do it. It is simple: HR won’t have to rack their brains to come up with several questions, and employees only have to answer two to three questions, max. Responses can be collected and analyzed quickly so solutions can be implemented sooner.
In addition, many people are already familiar with the concept of NPS, so introducing eNPS should be a breeze. And you could guarantee a higher participation rate from your staff because the survey is short.
To have a more effective eNPS survey, include open-ended follow up questions. You get both quantitative and qualitative data for a more accurate picture of your employee engagement.
How do you measure eNPS?
eNPS is calculated with the employees’ responses on a scale of 0-10 divided into 3 categories:
Promoters - these are employees that gave a score of 9 and 10, which means they are happy and satisfied with how things work in your organization
Passive or Neutral - these are people who responded with a score of 7 and 8, indicating they will neither promote the company nor say something negative about it.
Detractors - these are individuals who scored between 0 to 6, expressing unhappiness in their workplace.
Then, you need to look into how many employees you have in each category and what their share of the total is.
For example, you surveyed 100 employees. Based on the scores, you need the percentage of each category to compute your eNPS (which will be given a total of 100%).
Passives are not included in the computation. Now, subtract Promoters from Detractors. The formula would be:
What is a good NPS score?
According to Perceptyx research, the overall eNPS benchmark is 12. It aligns with other reports that the average Employee Net Promoter Score is 14 across all organizations that measure this metric collectively.
Their research also shows average eNPS benchmarks for the following sectors:
- Telecommunications: 27
- Manufacturing: 13
- Information technology: 26
- Healthcare: -6.5
On a different note, a good eNPS score is between 10 to 30, mirroring the benchmark for NPS. A score of 50 and above is considered excellent, while a -10 score indicates poor employee engagement.
Getting a good score shouldn’t be the end goal itself. Improving your eNPS score year over year is more important than measuring it from industry benchmarks.
Each organization is different, so you shouldn’t interpret your outcome based on the eNPS scores of other companies. Instead, work on maintaining or scoring higher than your last record.
Why is eNPS important?
It provides accurate information about the employee experience.
eNPS measures not only engagement but also employee experience, which includes employee satisfaction and retention. And employee experience also affects other business metrics like productivity and sales.
Employee experience describes the employees’ journey while working for an organization. It covers recruitment, onboarding, learning and development opportunities, health and wellbeing, and performance management.
By measuring and monitoring your employee experience, you gain insights into how your staff is doing at any moment in time, so you discover opportunities to boost your engagement and morale.
It highlights the aspects a company needs to improve for better employee satisfaction (culture, office, salary, benefits, etc)
Using the eNPS metric can enhance your engagement. Asking follow up questions (open-ended) provides you with the data you need to know on what aspects you can improve:
- Value proposition - what the company gives in exchange for the individual’s talent, skills, time and effort: salary, benefits
- Enablement - how the company helps their employees do their work through training, tools, equipment and technology
- Alignment - how the organization set the expectations on what the employee needs to do to be successful in their roles
- Career growth and development - how the company supports their staff in growing and advancing their careers
- Change management - how the company communicates the changes happening inside the organization driven by the business climate, industry and competition
- Future outlook - how the company communicates their vision and goals
- Manager effectiveness - how the managers support their direct reports in performing their jobs, their professional development and cares about their wellbeing
- Company leadership - how the management decides on the direction of the business, and the critical decisions to keep the business running and stay ahead of the competition
Improving this metric reduces turnover and the cost of hiring
A high eNPS score means that your employees are deeply engaged with your company. By continuously increasing or maintaining a high score, you’ll be able to prevent your employees from leaving your company.
On the other hand, poor engagement leads to staff turnover, which means:
- You spend unnecessary expenses on recruitment and onboarding because you need to replace those resigned staff to keep the business going.
- You also experience productivity losses when you don’t have enough employees to fulfill daily business operations.
- You risk overworking remaining staff to meet day-to-day targets
- It's more expensive and time-consuming to find and hire new people than to train existing employees.
Enhancing employee engagement
Improving employee engagement starts by establishing trust. By listening to your staff via eNPS survey, you can confidently make business decisions based on what they honestly seek, value, and appreciate. And once you’ve fulfilled your commitments to address their concerns, you’ve earned their trust. Trust is the foundation of
for building connections with your employees and engaging with them.
How to improve your eNPS
Create a survey with follow-up questions based on the initial eNSP survey
Conduct a follow-up survey to gain a deeper understanding of your employee engagement, especially if there is a huge jump or decline in your eNPS score. It can clarify the reason for achieving such a score: what factors contributed to it but were not accounted for.
So if you notice plenty of comments from passives and detractors mentioning the lack of development opportunities as a reason for dissatisfaction, design a follow up pulse survey with questions revolving around learning and development.
You could ask questions like:
Filter your results
When you want to get the best information from your eNPS survey, you shouldn’t only focus on the overall outcome. You should organize your survey data for a more detailed analysis to get a realistic picture of your employees’ sentiments.
You can organize the results per department, per role, or per employee seniority. For instance, filter by gender, and you’ll see how female employees perceive career development opportunities inside your organization.
Filtering data can yield a granular view of the results and capture the difference between different employee population segments. From there, HR can create strategies that are relevant to the whole organization and tailor tactics specifically for an employee group or segment.
Create transparent and open communication
It's essential to disclose eNPS survey results to build transparency and trust. Here’s how to communicate with all responders:
Promoters - study their responses to learn why they are happy with your company and why they are likely to recommend it to their friends and colleagues.
For example, if they enjoy diversity in the workforce, continue to boost your company’s DEI initiatives like putting more budget on diversity hiring or conducting regular DEI training for new employees.
Passives - Pay attention to their feedback even if their responses are excluded from the eNPS score calculation. Make it your goal to convert them to promoters.
Conduct meetings or send follow-up questions by email and ask them what the employer can do to make them promote your company as a good workplace.
Detractors - this is where you need to focus. Find out why they’re unhappy with the organization. It's crucial to be open-minded about this so you’ll know exactly your weaknesses. Don’t be intimidating, so your staff is more encouraged to open up to you.
And don’t forget to thank them for their honesty and that the company genuinely values their feedback by reviewing and implementing their suggestions for a better workplace.
Provide some of the improvements mentioned in the survey (bonus, more benefits, more equipment, etc)
Your action plan based on the survey outcome is more important than knowing and discussing your eNPS score.
Implement specific actions to make improvements. For instance, if many respondents mentioned they desire more flexibility in their jobs, consider having a flexible work schedule or allowing your staff to work remotely three times a week. Or, if you already have a hybrid work setup, invest more in collaboration tools to make remote working more convenient.
Then three months after deploying changes, conduct a follow-up survey or have one-on-one or team meetings to ensure that the strategies implemented were effective and satisfying for employees.
Continuously track your eNPS score
To reap the benefits of the eNPS survey, deploy it bi-annually or quarterly so you can address any issues quickly. If you conduct them sporadically, you won’t be able to determine the changes that correspond to each score.
Regular eNPS surveys allow you to closely examine your organization’s eNPS trends and engagement over time so you can decide whether the changes you’ve rolled out yield the expected results.
Employee Net Promoter Score Survey
To deep dive further into your employee engagement, it's highly recommended to have follow up questions.
Add 2-3 short questions. Remember, this is supposed to be a short survey, so resist the urge to ask many questions that it can drive survey fatigue.
And your follow up questions should be open-ended, so you’ll get the exact answers you need to accurately and completely interpret and understand your eNPS survey.
Conclusion
Employee Net Promoter Score is a simple yet effective way of measuring employee satisfaction and loyalty. But it’s only the beginning.
To get the most out of your eNPS survey, study your participants’ responses carefully and act accordingly based on the results. Combine it with other strategies like additional surveys and meetings to get a holistic view of your overall employee engagement.
Finally, you should benchmark your results against your previous performance and not against competitors. Every organization is unique, so implement changes based on your employees’ needs and desires.
