Employee Net Promoter Score - Your Ultimate Guide

What is Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)?

eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) is a valuable and important tool for measuring Employee Engagement. It is very easy to use and produces a single number that can easily be used to track a trend over time.

It is based on the Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks customers the likelihood that they would recommend a company's products or services to others. NPS, which is widely used to assess customer loyalty, is based on Bain & Co. research. As most leaders know, engaged and loyal employees are critical to a company's success and have such a direct effect on the customer experience. Many top executives and entrepreneurs have been vocal in supporting this idea like Richard Branson, Ray Dalio and Tony Hsieh.

"I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers and that people flourish when they are praised" - Richard Branson

While it’s not meant to be a complete way of measuring Employee Engagement, because of its simplicity, eNPS is an amazing way for anyone to get started and is a great headline Human Resources Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

How is eNPS calculated?

Your team is asked a question like "I would be happy to promote the organisation as an employer to my friends and family" and score their response from 1 to 10. Those responses are then sorted into three buckets:

  • Detractors (1-6) Employees who are not likely to recommend working at an organisation and who may be likely to negatively influence others are called detractors.
  • Passives (7-8) These employees are satisfied for the moment but are likely to leave the company if a better offer were to come along. In addition, though passives might recommend the organisation as a place to work, that recommendation is likely to be tempered by caveats.
  • Promoters (9-10) These are the most enthusiastic fans, who would willingly recommend the organisation as a good place to work.

eNPS is simply the Promoter bucket as a percentage of all responses less the Detractor bucket as a percentage of all responses and will result in a score between -100% and 100%.

Example: 30% (Promoters) – 40% (Detractors) = -10%

If you're looking for more questions to add to your survey, then check out our article on Survey Questions.

Employee Net Promoter Score Benchmarks

At Roslin, we rate the possible scores as follows:

  • -100 to 0: Needs Improvement
  • 0 to 30: Good
  • 30 to 70: Great
  • 70 to 100: Excellent

This needs to be compared to your industry and region, however as they will differ. It's also important to track your eNPS over time.

How do I use eNPS?

Since it's a single number, eNPS is easy to track over time. It's also very similar in concept to Customer Net Promoter Score which is widely understood already thus making eNPS more acceptable as a number to track across any organisation.

The simplicity of eNPS is also its major drawback in that it doesn't give much insight into the trends it represents. To get a deeper understanding you have to look at the scores of your underlying Engagement Drivers as well as the Qualitative Feedback coming from staff.

Warning! Employee Net Promoter Scores can be substantially lower than Customer Net Promoter Scores. Employees tend to hold their company to even higher standards than customers do. So before you initiate the employee survey process, be ready to process some tough feedback and respond with the appropriate action.

How do I start using eNPS?

The simplicity of eNPS makes it easy to deploy in that it's typically only the question "I would be happy to promote the organisation as an employer to my friends and family" that needs to be asked of staff. Any simple survey tool can be used to achieve this. Take a look at our article on Running an Engagement Survey with Google Forms.

In addition, experts have the following tips for using eNPS:

  • Senior Leadership should agree on their understanding and targets for eNPS as well as how to follow up with employees when results are obtained.
  • The use of eNPS should be communicated to all staff using change management approaches with a specific focus on why it's being used and how it will benefit employees and the workplace.
  • Anonymity is essential in order to protect trust in the Employee-Employer relationship.
  • Consider what other Key Performance Indicators to track in conjunction with eNPS.
  • Surveys should be sent out more regularly than previously thought. Consider sending them at least once per quarter, ideally monthly, and send results to staff quickly.

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