If you want to build a thriving and resilient company, you need to understand that 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 brand ambassadors.
But how do you measure this engagement objectively and identify areas for improvement? That's where the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), a powerful metric that allows you to hear the voice of your employees in a simple and efficient way.
Just as NPS measures customer satisfaction, eNPS reveals the level of enthusiasm employees have in recommending the company as a great place to work.
Ultimately, happy employees not only boost productivity, but also create a positive environment that is contagious to everyone around them.
Let's explore how eNPS can transform your organizational strategy and take your team's engagement to the next level!
What is eNPS?
Employee Net Promoter Score , or eNPS, is a derivative of the popular Net Promoter Score, developed to measure the degree of employee engagement in their work environment. The idea is simple: if you enjoy working at the company, you want to share that experience with other people, right?
The first companies to adopt eNPS were Apple, Rackspace , and JetBlue. They recognized the importance of employees being promoters and engaged with the company's mission and purpose.
That's why the Employee Net Promoter Score works so well. Just like NPS surveys for customers, eNPS is an ongoing process that solicits employee feedback and provides tangible results for product/service improvement.
eNPS Question:
Originally, eNPS aimed to measure only how likely a company's employees were to recommend 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 evolved and gained some additional questions to make it more effective, making it possible to measure three segments of the work environment:
eNPS application for businesses:
- 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 with?
- In a few words, what motivated your answer?
eNPS application 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 so that you can truly understand your employee's opinion on different aspects of the business. For example, your company might offer a great workplace, but some aspects of the product might not be so good. And the consequence of that? Employees who don't believe in the product!
And the opposite also happens, for example – a terrible work environment, but the company develops an amazing product that 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 lies 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 could ask something like:
What is the main reason you would 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 that realization?
eNPS Calculation:
The Employee Net Promoter Score is calculated the same way as the NPS, measured on a scale of 0 to 10.
Depending on their response, customers will be divided into three categories:
- Promoters (score 9-10) are happy and loyal employees who love their company and likely share their work experiences with friends and family. Promoters are typically the employees who create a positive work environment and inspire other team members, making them extremely important to your company.
- Neutral (score 7-8) These employees are currently satisfied, but will likely leave the company if a better offer comes along.
- Detractors (score 0-6) are employees dissatisfied with the company who can tarnish its reputation through negative word-of-mouth. Detractors can also negatively influence your company's organizational climate, so it's necessary to act quickly on negative feedback! Furthermore, an employee is also a point of contact, therefore, if they are unhappy, the chances of providing a bad 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, it's necessary to understand some of the peculiarities of eNPS:
#1 Anonymous Survey
eNPS surveys should be confidential to encourage honest employee feedback. In this case, the goal is not to identify employees who are detractors or promoters of the company, but to solve the problem as a whole. The focus should be on helping leaders and their teams recognize and prioritize issues, acting directly on the areas for improvement.
#2 Loop Closure
You might be wondering how loop closure in eNPS surveys, right? The truth is that loop closure exists, but it's indirect.
In this case, when you launch your survey, many points for improvement will likely emerge, but you don't know who left that comment. Therefore, closing the loop means prioritizing the feedback and acting on it!
Therefore, after you analyze the employees' responses, it's time to start, stop, or continue. Check out this simple methodology:
- Start: In this step, you and your team will decide what the company should begin doing. Ask yourself – what will the new ideas or methods be? Does any change need to be made to the company culture?
- Stop: At this stage, it's necessary to decide which practices or methods should be abandoned. What will be the impact/cost of this on the company? Will I need to hire more 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 reviewed.
How to implement eNPS:
Now that you know which 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
When defining the company's employees, you will be creating an initial benchmark . It's important to do this in order to track eNPS variations over time or by project, and also to identify progress over time.
In this step you also define whether you will send it to the entire database or just a selected group.
Tip: It's helpful to conduct eNPS research by department, so you can identify which areas of your business are more or less engaged with your company. This allows you to create internal indicators and gain more insight into your business!
#2 Creating your research
In this step, you create the questionnaire according to the questions above, and it is recommended that you always include a descriptive question to understand what motivated the employee to give that rating.
The qualitative question will provide input for mapping the company's potential bottlenecks and transforming them into an action plan.
#3 Submitting your survey
The delivery of your survey depends on the collection point. Since we are talking about an anonymous survey, you can send it via email, SMS, public link, QR code, make it available on an intranet, in short, any channel that you have access to and can control to avoid duplicate responses. Anonymity is extremely important to encourage employees to give honest feedback.
Another important point to make your research effective is for leaders to emphasize the value of receiving feedback, and also ask team members to complete the research during work hours.
#4 Frequency of submissions
The frequency of mailings depends heavily on each business, but eNPS surveys are generally sent out 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 methodologies, eNPS fits perfectly with that frequency as well.
Analysis #5
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 of responses 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 with which it allows for comparisons between companies and sectors, right? However, with eNPS, the story is different.
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 scores, and the reason is simple – your employees know your company better and end up having higher expectations than your customers. Therefore, don't be surprised if your eNPS is lower than your NPS.
The recommendation in this case is that you create your own benchmark and constantly monitor its evolution.
Statistics on employee experience
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 US$450 and US$550 billion per year – Institute for Employee Engagement
- 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 (United Kingdom)
- There is a 37% increase in sales and three times the creativity of the most satisfied employees – University of California (USA)
- 56% of formal workers are dissatisfied with their jobs – G1
- Companies that excel at managing talent generate approximately 15% more revenue than their competitors – Hackett Group
- Brazil has the highest employee turnover rate – Catho
- The cost to replace an employee is approximately 20% of their annual salary – American Progress
Conclusion
Employees are the front line of companies, so it's crucial to know how they're feeling in order 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 create 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 only one part of a whole feedback loop that should include employee engagement surveys, performance reviews, individual analyses, and other forms of personal development.