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Engagement
7
min read
“Every employee can affect your company’s brand”- Tony Hseih, Former CEO, Zappos
TL:DR
Employee NPS is a key component for your organization if you wish to create a culture which engages, motivates and inspires employees and encourages them to recommend it to their friends. Here are a few quick points that you should not forget:
- It helps organizations gauge the level of engagement and experience for employees by segmenting employees into promoters, passives and detractors (discussed later)
- eNPS is important as it helps in employee retention as well as facilitate fast and effective hiring by ensuring a winning employer brand
- It is best to conduct eNPS surveys on a regular basis to gauge trends over cycles and address fluctuations in real time
- To improve your eNPS, you must focus on understanding each segment of employees and taking appropriate action
- You must acknowledge that passives have a great potential of changing your eNPS and you should focus your efforts on bringing them up the score spectrum
- Finally, you must use eNPS as a means to boost employee morale and track level and reasons for disengagement
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritties of employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and how you can use them effectively.
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What is employee Net Promoter Score?
eNPS is or employee NPS is a measure of employee loyalty and how they feel about your organization. It is a scoring mechanism that employees can use to share their satisfaction/ dissatisfaction with the company culture, which in turn helps leaders to gauge the impact it will have on the organization.
The advent of eNPS came as a result of realizing that employees have an equal impact on an organization as the customers
For instance, if any employee leaves a bad review or reports a bad experience about your organization, it might act as a deterrent for other high performing candidates from applying to your organization.
In a nutshell, eNPS is one of the top tools you can use to gauge how satisfied your employees are with your company culture and measure whether or not your employee engagement and other efforts are actually bearing fruits.
How to calculate eNPS?
You can calculate the eNPS for your organization by subtracting the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors. Let’s quickly understand what this means.
You will start by asking your employees to rate their experience on a rating scale of 0-10. You can have questions like ‘How likely are you to recommend the organization to your peers or friends, on a scale of 0-10’. We will talk more about potential questions in subsequent sections. Depending on their experience, your employees will share their rating. Based on the rating, you can segment your employees into three categories:
- Promoters: With a rating of 9-10; they are highly loyal, motivated and inspired and show full commitment to the organization
- Passives: With a rating of 7-8; they are generally neutral, while they are happy with the experience, their level of loyalty and commitment may not be as high as the promoters
- Detractors: With a rating of 0-6; they are generally dissatisfied, lack loyalty, inspiration and motivation and may not recommend the organization to others
eNPS= %of promoters - %of detractors
For instance, if your organization has a total of 100 employees and 61 are promoters, 18 are detractors and 21 are passives, then your eNPS= 61%-18% = 43
The higher the eNPS, the more advocates you have. This suggests you will have an ecosystem of high percentage of employees that are loyal, inspired, motivated and committed.
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Why does eNPS matter?
For growing organizations like yours there are several reasons why eNPS matters to create a sustainable workplace. Such as —
1. Get a picture of your employer branding
Research shows that the majority of candidates read six reviews before forming an opinion about a company and 70% of people look to reviews before they make career decisions
With employee NPS, you will know how likely your employees are to recommend your organization to others outside. This ensures employer branding which determines the quality of talent you will be able to attract.
By ensuring a good Net Promoter Score from employees, you will be able to manage the reviews effectively.
2, Identify your advocates in a simple and quick manner
Employee NPS is very easy to execute, fast and cost-effective. At the same time, it gives you a clear picture of who are the advocates for your organization vs those who are disengaged and are unlikely to make recommendations. This information has two-fold benefits:
- You can create personalized plans to engage the different employee segments based on results
- You can leverage the reasons your promoters or advocates list for high level of loyalty and focus on enhancing the same
3. Reduce employee turnover
It is very rare that an employee will one day decide to leave your organization out of nowhere. Often, the decision to quit starts in advance and can be attributed to several factors including disengagement and dissatisfaction. eNPS, conducted regularly, can help you anticipate potential turnover in advance, when the employee rates low on the eNPS survey. You can use this data to fine tune your engagement plan and identify and address specific challenges.
🚀 Predict and prevent turnover with employee experience surveys by SuperBeings. Learn more
4. Hire faster
As stated above, eNPS directly impacts the quality of the talent you attract. Similarly, it also impacts how fast you are able to close an open position. If you have a high eNPS, you will receive a higher inflow of applications because your organization will be branded as a preferred place to work. This higher number of applications will translate to faster interviews and closures. Invariably, this will prevent the loss of work hours between transitions.
5. Gauge employee trends over time
Finally, eNPS can help you track employee loyalty and engagement over time. If individual and overall employee NPS increases, it reflects that your interventions are moving the needle. However, if the score drops, you may need to relook at your practices and understand the root cause.
Employee NPS cycles
As mentioned before, employee NPS is generally measured with eNPS surveys. Therefore, like any other feedback cycle, your eNPS surveys should also follow a structured and cyclical approach. Here are to create an effective eNPS survey process —
1. Ensure anonymity
Make your eNPS ratings confidential and anonymous. Do not force your employees to give names along with ratings or do not disclose ratings of one to another even if you know who it is from. One of the easiest ways is to use a platform that doesn’t capture respondent data, except the rating. Anonymity will help build employee trust and ensure honesty in the rating received
2. Keep it short
Refrain from adding too many questions in your eNPS rating. A maximum of 2-3 questions is more than enough. While most organizations use 1 central or core question, you can supplement it with another one to augment impact. For instance, one question can be about probability to recommend, while the other could be on motivation, inspiration.
3. Make it frequent
Having an eNPS rating at regular intervals is important. Ideally, as a growing organization, you should have a monthly cadence. However, if that seems overwhelming, you can start with a quarterly rating, and gradually increase the frequency.
4. Use a 10 point rating scale or open ended questions
While a 2 or 5 point rating scale can also capture data, a 10 point scale and open ended questions enable employees to be more specific about their answer by giving them more options to choose from. The deeper your eNPS survey insights are, the more accurate actions you can take to improve your score.
5. Follow up
Just because responding to an eNPS question requires one click, you cannot assume that you’ll receive 100% participation. You must follow up a couple of times. Using employee survey tools to increase survey participation rate can be useful here. For example, SuperBeings sends reminders and follow up nudges at preset intervals via existing chat tools (Slack, Teams, Gchat etc) directly in the flow of work to maximize response rate.
6. Encourage authentic answers
Finally, you must encourage your employees to be honest in their rating. Anonymity will help you achieve this. Additionally, explain to your employees that the answers will not have an impact on their appraisal and their negative rating will not land them in a backlash.
eNPS survey questions
As a best practice, you can start your employee NPS survey with a core question and then you could follow it up with a few open ended questions. Your first question must follow a rating pattern to get your employee Net Promoter Score. Some of the questions can be:
- How likely are you to recommend your organization as a workplace to your friends/ peers?
- On a scale of 0-10, how inspired do you feel to work at this organization?
- What is the primary reason for the score you gave?
- What can the organization do better to get a higher score?
- What is one reason that is preventing you from recommending the organization to your friends?
- What is one reason why you enjoy working here?
Here are a few best practices you can use while preparing your follow up questions:
- Don’t be too vague with your questions
- Try to keep your questions open ended to get support for your core questions
- Try to get specific answers with 1 or 2 instances
What is a good employee NPS score?
While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact score which can be considered good, there are a few ways to measure how well your performance has been on eNPS.
If you look closely, by formula, your score can range from -100 to +100, depending on the ratio of your promoters and detractors. Generally, any positive score, that is, a score above 0 is considered to be a good starting point. This indicates that there are more promoters in your organization than detractors. This translates to the fact that more employees are likely to recommend your organization than those who will not.
However, only a positive score is not the end of the story. While a positive score represents retention and recommendation, the higher the score, the greater will be propensity and impact.
Use eNPS benchmarks
Furthermore, you must also align your eNPS with other organizations in your industry. For instance, while 60 might be a great score, if all organizations in your industry have an eNPS of 70+, then you may need to relook at your numbers.
Here, studying industry benchmarks can help. However, eNPS is not a data point that is publicly available that you can consume.
At the same time, your own eNPS can also be a benchmark for you over time with an aim to increase every time. The idea is to track your own company’s fluctuation, positive or negative, to identify the reasons or interventions behind the same.
Unlock top engagement survey question templates and advanced employee analytics. See SuperBeings in Action
How to improve employee NPS?
eNPS surveys can disillusion even the most people friendly organizations. It is not rare to have a survey score below expectations. But improving eNPS is easier than you think:
1. Capture eNPS regularly
You must have heard that what gets measured, gets improved. The same is true for eNPS. When you capture employee NPS on a regular basis, you can track fluctuations and gauge whether or not the needle is moving. You can get a real time picture of whether the promoters or the detractors are increasing. Furthermore, the fluctuations can help you identify how specific interventions or regular organizational activities impact eNPS.
2. Share the results
No matter what the results say, share it with your team members. Even if you have a negative score, share it with the team to facilitate collaborative thinking on what is going wrong. This will help you create an image that you are truly listening to your employees and are taking action. After sharing results, follow up and communicate the next action steps so your employees know that their voices are being heard and impact is being created.
3. Understand the rationale
To improve eNPS, you need to understand the rationale or the reason behind each rating. Here, you should ask follow up questions to your employees on what contributed to this particular rating. On one hand, it will help you understand the motivation or the inspiration for promoters as well as you will be able to identify what is stopping detractors from recommending the organization to others.
Put simply, the factors mentioned by promoters can be augmented and focused on, while those from detractors must be addressed or resolved
4. Take action
Once you share the results and engage in collective brainstorming, you must take action.
- Example 1: If the major reason behind low eNPS is lack of work-life balance, your focus should be on addressing the same, by facilitating workplace boundaries.
- Example 2: If lack of career growth is stopping your employees from recommending the companies to others, investing in mentorship, learning and development, career coaching, etc. can be extremely helpful.
5. Communicate with all segments
If you think that you only need to focus on detractors to improve your eNPS, you are mistaken. While you definitely need to pay attention to them, the other two segments, i.e. promoters and passives must not be left attended.
- When it comes to detractors, your focus should be on their pain points, how it translates to a poor experience and what you can do to reverse the same.
- For promoters, while you may think they are happy, engaged and don’t require any intervention, you must not lose attention on them and focus on keeping their rating high. Furthermore, when you communicate with them, you will be able to get insights for long term strategies.
- For passives, focus on understanding what would make their experience within the organization and the role even better and more meaningful.
6. Improve continuously
When it comes to improving your eNPS, there is no stopping point. Just because you improve your eNPS by 20 points, doesn’t mean you have reached the pinnacle, even if you are above the industry average.
- While in the first few years of your employees’ lifecycle, you will focus on retention and loyalty by ensuring a positive score,
- In the later years, your focus should be on making the employees feel inspired, motivated and committed to unleashing high levels of innovation and productivity.
7. Follow up with more comprehensive feedback
Employee Net Promoter Score must be a part of a more comprehensive employee feedback framework. The idea is to get more qualitative feedback and insights to compliment the score. You can use open-ended survey comments for this purpose. Such feedback will help you understand where the score came from and how you can take steps to move in the right direction.
8. Understand the passives
Finally, to improve your eNPS, you need to focus on the passives. Based on the formula, you might think that passives have no role to play in eNPS. However, you must understand that they are just one point away from falling in the detractor or the promoter category. Here, your focus should be on moving them up the spectrum. Getting qualitative inputs from them is very important as they have some level of commitment and positive regard towards the organization already.
How to use employee NPS for better engagement
With eNPS, you can turn employee feedback into a growth strategy both as a business and as an employer. Here’s how:
1. Boosts morale
First, employee NPS boosts the morale of employees who believe that their voice has value and is being heard. It makes employees feel included in the process of building the right culture. Employees who participate in eNPS come with a sense of pride as being a contributor to building the overall experience in the organization. It also comes with a sense of respect when an organization asks the employees for their perception.
2. Understand level of disengagement
Low or negative eNPS is a clear indicator of the level of disengagement. It shares an inverse relationship.
Lower the eNPS, higher will be the disengagement
Obviously, only when employees feel disengaged at work, will they not recommend it to others in their network. This can act as initial information for your organization to create strategic plans to reverse the trend. Furthermore, fluctuations in eNPS can be useful when it comes to sudden disengagement which may not be very apparent, but can lead to mass turnover.
3. Gauge factors contributing to engagement
A deep dive into the qualitative aspects of eNPS can help you understand the factors contributing to engagement or disengagement. For instance, if a promoter claims that they gave a high score because of the focus on wellness, it becomes clear that wellness programs can augment engagement. Similarly, if the reason for a detractor is high workload, effective distribution can help improve engagement levels.
Increase employee NPS with SuperBeings
Creating, communicating and analyzing employee surveys can be intimidating and time taking. To conduct eNPS in a comprehensive and hassle free manner, you can partner with SuperBeings. Here’s what you get with our employee engagement survey feature —
- Built-in survey templates: Reduce the time to create survey questionnaires by using science backed, best practices pre-built survey templates. You can customize them as you need.
- Choose the most suitable rating scale: You get full flexibility to customize each question by choosing from a wide array of rating scale options — 2, 5, 7 or 10 point scale, multiple choice and open-ended.
- Filter options for better comparison: For each question you can filter the responses at manager, department or org level and compare them on a single dashboard. Also, you get deeper insights into each question on the Insights tab
- Use comments for qualitative feedback: Understand the sentiments behind each response by looking into open-ended comments left by participants
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with our engagement survey tool. At SuperBeings, we are constantly trying to improve the engagement processes and make it easier for the people leaders.
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