If you want to build a prosperous and resilient company, you need to understand that your employees are the heart of your business. Engaged, motivated employees who are connected to the organization's purpose not only deliver better results but also become ambassadors for your brand.
But how can you objectively measure this engagement and identify areas for improvement? That's where the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) , a powerful metric that allows you to hear your employees' voices simply and efficiently.
Just as NPS measures customer satisfaction, eNPS reveals how enthusiastic employees are about recommending the company as a great place to work.
After all, happy employees not only boost productivity, but also create a positive environment that rubs off on everyone around them.
Let's explore how eNPS can transform your organizational strategy and take your team engagement to the next level!
What is eNPS?
Employee Net Promoter Score , or eNPS , is a derivative of the popular Net Promoter Score , designed to measure employee engagement in their workplace. The idea is simple: if you enjoy working at the company, you want to share that experience with others, right?
The first companies to adopt eNPS were Apple , Rackspace , and JetBlue . They recognized the importance of employees being advocates and engaged with the company's mission and purpose.
That's why the Employee Net Promoter Score works so well. Like NPS customer surveys, eNPS is an ongoing process that solicits employee feedback and provides tangible results for product/service improvement.
eNPS Question:
Originally, eNPS sought to measure only how much a company's employees recommended their workplace to friends or colleagues:
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company as a good place to work?
Over time, the metric has evolved and added additional questions to make it more effective, making it possible to measure three segments of the work environment:
Application of eNPS for companies:
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company as a good place to work?
- In a few words, what motivated your answer?
Applying eNPS to Leadership:
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the team leader (boss) as a good person to work for?
- In a few words, what motivated your answer?
Application of eNPS for product/service:
- On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company's products to friends or family?
- In a few words, what motivated your answer?
The reason for these additional questions is to help you truly understand your employees' opinions on different aspects of the business. For example, your company may offer a great workplace, but some product-related issues may not be so positive. And the consequence? Employees who don't believe in the product!
And the opposite also happens, for example – a terrible work environment, but the company develops an incredible product, which makes the employee recommend it.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is that they only ask these quantitative questions, and focus exclusively on their scores, when the real value is in the follow-up question.
This can be customized depending on the answers given. For example, if someone gives a high score (9-10), you might ask something like:
What is the main reason you recommend [company] as a place to work?
Or some variation thereof.
If someone gave you a low score (0 to 6), then you can ask something like:
- What can we do to improve your experience with us?
- What is the main reason for your grade?
- What made you have this realization?
eNPS Calculation:
The Employee Net Promoter Score is the same as the NPS , measured on a scale of 0 to 10.
Depending on your answer, customers will be divided into three categories:
- Promoters (score 9-10) These are happy and loyal employees who love their company and are likely to share their work experiences with friends and family. Promoters are typically the employees who lighten the organizational climate and spread the good vibes to their teammates, making them extremely important to your company.
- Neutral (score 7-8) These employees are currently satisfied, but would likely leave the company if a better offer were available.
- Detractors (score 0-6) These are dissatisfied employees who can tarnish your brand's reputation with negative word-of-mouth. Detractors can also negatively impact your company's organizational climate, so it's important to act quickly on negative feedback! Furthermore, an employee is also a point of contact, so if they're unhappy, the chances of them providing a poor experience for the end customer are high.
Knowing the three categories your employees fall into, the next step is to calculate your company's eNPS. To do this, you need to subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, thus obtaining a score from -100 to 100.
A little more about eNPS
Before getting down to business and implementing this metric in your company, you need to know some peculiarities of eNPS:
#1 Anonymous survey
eNPS surveys should be confidential to encourage honest employee feedback. In this case, the goal isn't to identify employees who are detractors or promoters of the company, but to address the problem as a whole. The focus should be on helping leaders and their teams recognize and prioritize issues, addressing areas for improvement directly.
#2 Loop Closure
You might be wondering how loop closure in eNPS surveys, right? The truth is, loop closure does exist, but indirectly.
In this case, when you launch your survey, many areas for improvement will likely emerge, but you don't know who left that comment. Therefore, closing the loop means prioritizing feedback and acting on it!
So, after analyzing employee responses, it's time to start, stop, or continue . Check out this simple methodology:
- Initiate: In this step, you and your team will decide what the company should start doing. Ask questions like: What new ideas or methods will be introduced? Are there any changes to the company culture?
- Stop: At this stage, you need to decide which practices or methods should be abandoned? What impact/cost will this have on the company? Will I need to hire people?
- Continue: What should be kept? Why should it be kept?
This is a very simple yet extremely powerful exercise. Through it, your company will be able to identify which methods need to be revised.
How to implement eNPS:
Now that you know what questions to ask and how to calculate your score, it's time to implement the metric in your business. For eNPS to work and generate tangible results for your company, follow these steps:
#1 Segmenting the audience
By defining your company's employees, you'll be creating your first benchmark . This definition is crucial to track eNPS variations by period or project, and to identify progress over time.
In this step you also define whether you will send to the entire base or just a selected group.
Tip: It's a good idea to conduct eNPS research by department, so you can identify which areas of your business are most or least engaged. This way, you can create internal metrics and gain more insight into your business!
#2 Creating your survey
In this step, you create the questionnaire according to the questions above, and it is recommended that you always ask a descriptive question, to understand what motivated the employee to give this rating.
The qualitative question will provide input to map the company's potential bottlenecks and transform them into an action plan.
#3 Submitting your survey
How your survey is sent depends on the collection point. Since this is an anonymous survey, you can send it via email, SMS, public link, QR Code, or make it available on an intranet—in short, any channel you have access to and can control to avoid duplicate responses. Anonymity is extremely important to encourage employees to provide honest feedback.
Another important point to make your survey effective is for leaders to emphasize the value of receiving feedback and also ask team members to complete the survey during work hours.
#4 Sending Frequency
The frequency of sending surveys depends largely on each business, but eNPS surveys are generally sent quarterly, as this ensures a healthy feedback loop with your employees.
You should keep in mind that measuring employee satisfaction and engagement should be an ongoing process so that your company can identify what your employees think and feel about your business.
Tip: If you work with OKRs or other agile methods, eNPS fits perfectly with this frequency as well.
#5 Analysis
Remember the example I mentioned earlier about stopping, starting, and continuing? That's a great approach for this step. The key to eNPS isn't the metric itself, but what you do with your employees after the survey. The number responded is just an indication of the employee's expectations of your company .
What is a good eNPS score?
One of the biggest advantages of NPS is the ease of making comparisons between companies and sectors, right? However, with eNPS, the story isn't the same.
It's important to remember that eNPS is a relatively new metric, so it doesn't yet have a benchmark .
According to studies that mention this metric, it's normal for eNPS scores to be slightly lower than NPS, and the reason is simple: your employees know your company better and tend to have higher expectations than your customers. So don't be surprised if your eNPS is lower than your NPS.
In this case, it is recommended that you create your own benchmark and monitor developments constantly.
Employee Experience Statistics
Check out some statistics behind the employee experience. Here's a summary of the findings:
- On average, 12% of workers voluntarily leave their jobs each year – Human Capital Benchmarking
- Disengaged employees cost organizations between $450 and $550 billion per year – Engagement Institute
- 80% of employees felt more engaged when their work was consistent with the company's core values and mission – IBM
- Happy employees are 12% more productive – University of Warwick (UK)
- There is a 37% increase in sales and three times more creativity among the most satisfied employees – University of California (USA)
- 56% of formal workers are dissatisfied with their jobs – G1
- Companies that excel at managing talent earn about 15% more than their competitors – Hackett Group
- Brazil has the highest employee turnover rate – Catho
- The cost of replacing an employee is about 20% of their annual salary – American Progress
Conclusion
Employees are the front line of companies, so it's crucial to understand their feelings to build a healthy company with a great organizational climate.
eNPS is a great indicator for measuring the health of your organization, but you need to make an action plan as soon as the responses start coming in.
It's important to remember that eNPS is just the beginning. The metric is just one part of a complete feedback loop that should include employee engagement surveys , performance reviews, individual reviews, and other forms of personal development.
