Fostering a positive work environment and employee experience is crucial to the longevity of any organization. Happy employees tend to stay with a business longer, have more focus at work, and perform better on tasks. On the other hand, low employee satisfaction can lead to high employee turnover rates and instability within the company.
Learning what your employees think about your business is the first step to creating a sustainable company culture that encourages employee loyalty.
So, what's the best way to learn how your employees feel about their workplace? Measuring eNPS for your organization.
eNPS stands for employee Net Promoter Score. This metric is a simple and effective way for HR teams to measure employee engagement and satisfaction.
Let’s go over why and how to calculate your employee Net Promoter Score and how you can use eNPS data to implement positive changes in your company's work environment.
Why should you calculate your employee Net Promoter Score?
How organizations treat their employees directly affects the quality of their work. Calculating an organization's eNPS can provide a practical understanding of how employees think and feel about their workplace experience. As a manager, you can use the data to develop impactful strategies to motivate and engage your teams.
Studies show that positive employee engagement can dramatically increase employee retention rates and lead to greater overall work satisfaction and higher productivity levels.
Officevibe data shows that 96% of employees feel like regular feedback and performance reviews were helpful to their work.
By conducting regular eNPS surveys, you can keep your finger on the pulse of your organization's culture. This allows you to watch how the changes you implement improve your employees' view of your organization over time.
Engaged employees who feel heard typically focus harder on their work and develop a more positive attitude toward their employers. Calculating your eNPS is a positive way of letting your employees know that their thoughts and ideas matter.
Interpreting employee feedback
Developed by Fred Reichheld in 2003 as a metric to gauge customer satisfaction, the original Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps businesses increase consumer engagement and provides crucial data about consumer concerns.
With the success of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) aimed at consumers, the next step was developing the eNPS, which became an effective method to measure employee satisfaction within an organization.
The data that eNPS questions produced have proved useful for employers looking to better understand how they might improve their internal business practices. Rather than having management implement changes without the input of their people, eNPS scores can give your leadership team valuable employee feedback to help establish a baseline understanding of what employees want and need from your organization.
You will calculate your eNPS from employee answers to the key eNPS question:
Using a scale from 1 (unlikely) to 10 (highly likely), what is the likelihood that you would recommend your current place of employment as a good place to work?
To understand the rationale behind your employee responses, your survey should also provide a follow-up question or prompt that elicits a more qualitative response, such as:
Please let us know why you provided this score.
The initial 1-10 scale allows you to measure the eNPS and determine employee engagement. While you will likely receive a mix of positive and negative feedback, performing this eNPS survey can give you a general sense of how employees are feeling about your company at that moment.
The quantitative data you collect contributes to a helpful rubric for understanding your employees' relationship to their work. Interpreting the data requires the follow-up qualitative prompt, which gives you vital insight into the reasoning behind the score and will give you a window into the individual experiences of each employee.
Grouping employee responses into separate categories based on how they feel about their work will provide your management with an understanding of the state of employee loyalty within your company.
Breaking down the data into three employee Net Promoter Score categories
When we conduct an eNPS survey, we look for trends in the scores that can tell us more about employee experience. The eNPS formula provides us with data that can help us visualize different aspects of employee feedback in more concrete terms.
To process the survey results, you will group employee responses with similar scores on the eNPS scale together into one of the three basic categories. Each category reflects how likely an employee is to recommend your place of employment to friends and family.
To help unravel this data, we assign value associations to each of the three categories, giving us a clear idea of employees' relationships and attitudes about their organizations.
Promoters
We label the first group as Promoters, a category that includes employees who assign the highest scores (9-10). Promoters are indispensable assets and may serve as ambassadors to your company's brand identity and recruitment campaigns.
These highly loyal employees feel the greatest satisfaction and are the most likely to recommend your company to prospective employees and customers. They may even promote your company publically on LinkedIn and spread positive word of mouth among friends and family.
Detractors
On the other end of the scale, we have the Detractors, which includes a broad range of unsatisfied employees who provide the lowest scores (0-6). Detractors are more likely to be pessimistic about the company's future and may view their work negatively. They are likely to be at the core of your low-morale challenge.
Detractors are the least likely to recommend your brand or employment to friends and family. Those with the lowest satisfaction rates may go out of their way to discourage others from engaging with your company.
Passives
The last group, the Passives, are those employees who score a moderate rating (7-8). While passives may enjoy working for your company, they may be open to other employment options, even if they aren't actively seeking new opportunities.
Since Passives are neutral, you will not use their scores to calculate your employee Net Promoter Score. However, this group is the most likely to provide constructive feedback. Passives may also move up to the Promoter category if you make positive changes to your company's culture.
How to calculate your employee Net Promoter Score
Now that you know what measuring your eNPS can tell you about the range of employee attitudes, let's dive deeper into how to calculate an eNPS score.
After you collect your eNPS survey responses and separate the scores into three categories, subtract the percentage of Detractors (those with scores from 0-6) from the percentage of Promoters (those with scores of 9-10). The number you get will be your employee Net Promoter Score.
The eNPS formula should look something like this:
Employee Net Promoter Score = Promoters (%) - Detractors (%)
Although you're subtracting percentages, your eNPS is a number rather than a percentage.
Your eNPS will fall somewhere between +100 (the highest possible score) and -100 (the lowest possible score). An eNPS that is less than the zero midpoint is a serious red flag and can indicate the root cause of systemic issues.
Regardless of whether or not you receive a positive or negative score from your company's eNPS survey, you may be surprised by what the responses tell you about your workplace. Part of what makes engagement surveys like eNPS so effective is their ability to tap into the underlying sentiments of an organization's employees.
One simple question can tell you a lot about what your employees think and feel about your company. Their responses and feedback can help you gauge if your company is heading in the right direction. This metric should serve as the first crucial step toward making improvements in your workplace.
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A practical example of an employee Net Promoter Score calculation
Examining a real-world example of an eNPS calculation can highlight what you might expect from your company's score. It also provides a rough sketch of the process.
Let's use Organization A as our example.
Organization A is a signage business with 300 employees. Amy, Organization A's CEO, has noticed a recent dip in employee performance and focus. Using her eNPS score, Amy wants to measure employee satisfaction and collect feedback. Ultimately, she wants to learn what she can do to improve Organization A's work environment for employees.
Out of Organization A's 300 employees, the survey scoring found that 180 (60%) are Promoters, 65 (22%) are Passive, and 60 (18%) are Detractors.
Disregarding the Passives, the key percentages were 60% Promoters and 18% Detractors. With this information, the results for Organization A looked like this:
60% [Promoters] - 18% [Detractors] = +42 [Organization A's Final eNPS Score]
While Organization A received a positive score from the eNPS surveys, the employee responses revealed a significant number of Detractors. Just by asking one simple question, Amy was able to measure her company's eNPS and find out that nearly one out of five of her employees were dissatisfied with their jobs. But why?
Amy’s analysis noted that a common answer to the qualitative question from the Passives highlighted poor communication from management as the main cause of their discontent. Using this feedback as a baseline, Amy was able to implement changes to increase employee engagement with management.
To find out if the changes she made were improving her employees' outlook, Amy continued to conduct monthly engagement surveys to see if her company's eNPS was improving.
After several months, Amy observed that Organization A's eNPS jumped several points from +42 to +47. While the number of Detractors only slightly decreased, a considerable number of Passives had become Promoters since the eNPS survey and following the management changes.
What should you expect from your organization's eNPS metric?
When you calculate your organization's employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), it's important to keep an open mind about the results.
As a leader, you’ve poured your heart and soul into your company, so it's normal to be nervous about what measuring eNPS may tell you about your business. But a good leader is one who is open to negative and constructive feedback rather than one who immediately gets defensive. Emotional responses to the data can make it more difficult to understand eNPS results.
Once you calculate your eNPS, you can then use the feedback from your employee Net Promoter Score qualitative surveys to come up with strategies to improve engagement. Regardless of the mix of positive or negative results, what's significant is understanding why your employees gave the responses they did.
For those with positive responses, find out why employees like working for your organization. Rather than patting yourself on the back, use this as an opportunity to expand on working strategies. For the negative responses, consider this a valuable way to review those areas in your organization that need improvement and to reconsider your management tactics.
What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?
While you may expect a higher score than you receive, that doesn’t mean that your score is bad or reflects poorly on your organization. Just keep in mind that eNPS scores can mean different things for different types of companies.
An employee Net Promoter Score can fall anywhere between -100 and +100. The following is a general rubric for gauging your eNPS score:
- Acceptable = 0 (or above)
- Positive or Good = 10-30
- Superb = 50 (or above)
Although your organization's score provides a good baseline for understanding employee engagement, it's more important to look at the underlying factors that contributed to the score you received. The responses to the additional qualitative question in your survey will provide you with insight into your employees' perspectives and the mood of the organization more broadly.
Employee opinions are subject to change, often very quickly, so be sure to remember that eNPS surveys only reflect attitudes in the present moment. As a result, it's important to hold an engagement survey periodically to keep you updated on how your employees regard your organization.
Negative responses one month do not automatically translate to negative responses the next. This is especially true when you implement strategies that target identified areas of weakness.
Conducting an eNPS survey is especially important for companies going through a period of upheaval. Dramatic changes can be unsettling for employees and cause increased levels of discontentment. Calculating eNPS provides an important metric that will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your employees and that can allow you to anticipate these dips in performance so that you can take preventative action.
Tactics to improve your eNPS to increase employee engagement and employee satisfaction
Although the exact tactics an organization can use to improve their eNPS will vary between companies, several general principles can help guide you.
One of the major benefits of eNPS is the opportunity it provides an organization's leadership to reach out to employees for input and general feedback about their workplace experience. The first step to improving your eNPS is learning how your employees feel about working for your company and how they feel conditions might improve.
Often, their suggestions will contain practical answers that are within your organization's means to implement. Some of their suggestions will also align with general strategies for increasing morale in the workplace and improving employee efficiency. Several of the goals and strategies you might adopt include:
- Developing transparency between employees and management
- Empowering employees through recognition and incentives
- Allowing flexible work hours so employees feel that they have more agency over their schedules
- Providing constructive feedback regularly (Officevibe statistics show that 83% of employees appreciate feedback, regardless of whether it's negative or positive)
- Encouraging collaboration among employees can build a sense of unity and promote loyalty within an organization
While these are all good places to start, the tactics you will employ will largely depend on your organization's specific needs and the types of changes you are able to achieve. Because some changes may not be possible for your organization, be sure to think creatively about what methods are available to allow you to meet your employees’ needs.
Once you implement these initiatives, the best way to keep track of the results is by continuing with engagement surveys. Future surveys will help you gauge the success of your strategies and can provide you with crucial insight into why and how your initiatives worked (or not).
How Officevibe can help
Officevibe’s easy-to-use, intuitive engagement surveys and Pulse Survey tools help managers connect with their employees on a deeper level. From showing you how to calculate eNPS to recognizing employee achievements, we can help your organization gain a better understanding of what makes your team want to stick around for the long haul.
Sign up for a free Officevibe trial and start improving your employee experience— your team will thank you for it.
