Everything You Need to Know about Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) and How it Works
Customer satisfaction and feedback has always been a critical measure of a company’s reputation and success.
But companies need a way to visually measure this experience, which lead to the creation of NPS and NPS surveys, which was first introduced and developed by Bain& Company in 2003.
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, which is a metric used in customer experience programs and ultimately measure the loyalty of a customer to a company.
NPS is often seen as the gold standard metric for customer experience and measure customer perception based on one simple question:
How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or college?
Respondents would be given a survey with a scale rating between 0 (not likely) and 10 (very likely), and depending on their response, the customer would fall into one of three categories (Promoters, Passive, Detractors) and via a simple calculation (see below), would establish their NSP score.
The higher the score, the better idea you will have on overall customer satisfaction.
Evolution to Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)
More recently, companies began to realize that besides customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction is also important to both a company’s culture and bottom line. After all, without any employees, there would be no product or service to provide to customers.
And so, through applying the NPS formula to employees, the employee net promoter score, or eNPS, was created.
The Benefits of eNPS
The most obvious benefit of eNPS surveys is how simple it is. It is the least time-consuming way to pulse check your employee satisfaction with one single question.
It also has higher response rates compared to normal surveys, which end up having too many questions and taking way too long to complete. With eNPS, employees only need to answer one single question based on a rating scale, which takes less than a few seconds to complete.
eNPS is also a cost effective and quick way to measure employee satisfaction, as it leaves you with a single variable to send out, track and measure morale over time.
Companies in the top quartile on employee engagement significantly outperformed those in the bottom quartile on performance outcomes with 81% lower absenteeism, 18 – 43% less turnover and 23% higher profitability.
Ultimately, eNPS surveys will give you the freedom to check in with employees more regularly, giving you better awareness of how employee satisfaction is doing.
Pro Tip: Do not compare your eNPS with your NPS, as your employees’ livelihood is a lot more influenced by the workplace than your customers are to the product or service, usually causing employees to be more critical when submitting their scores.
Understanding eNPS Response Categories
Using the same rating scale as NPS, eNPS will give organizations the overall measure of employee satisfaction. The same NPS survey question can be applied to employees, but with a small change:
How likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work for your family or friends?
Each employee will fall between one of three categories to find your final score.
- Promoters are employees who choose a score of 9 or 10 and are usually loyal and enthusiastic to the company.
- Passives are employees with a score of 7 or 8 and satisfied with your company, but not happy enough to be a promoter.
- Detractors are employees with a score of 0 to 6 and are unhappy employees who are likely to leave your organization or may even discourage others from joining.
How to Calculate eNPS Score
Employee Net Promoter Score = (%Promoters) – (% Detractors)
The eNPS formula can be calculated as the % of promoters minus the % of detractors (then take away the % sign). Passives aren’t considered in the formula, as they are seen as neutral.
eNPS Score Example
Let’s say your company has 100 employees and 33 of them are promoters, 33 are passives and 34 are detractors. Removing the passives from the formula leaves you with 33% promoters and 34% detractors.
As mentioned earlier, passives are not considered, but the number of employees should reflect the total number of people who work at the organization.
Subtracting the 34% detractors from the 33% promoters, you are left with -1%, which means your eNPS is -1.
Let’s look at another example with an odd number of employees. Your company has 117 employees and your most recent eNPS survey shows 25 promoters, 57 passives, and 35 detractors.
Removing the passives from the formula leaves you with 25 promoters (21%) and 35 detractors (30%). Using the formula, 21% - 30% leaves you with – 9%, giving you a final eNPS of -9.
Understanding your eNPS Score
Your eNPS can land anywhere between -100 to 100. So what constitutes a good score? Is it okay to get a score below zero?
There have been many schools of thought that say any score above 30 is excellent, with 0 to 30 being safe and anything below 0 being a concern.
However, you are better off setting your own benchmarks, as a lot of it can be organization, location or industry influenced. There are so many unknown variables when it comes to eNPS, so you are better off comparing your own eNPS with past ones.
The key is to figure out what went wrong if you got a low score and how to maintain the improvement if your eNPS improves over the next quarter.
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The eNPS Methodology
Knowing how to structure your eNPS cycles is just as important as understanding the score. Similarly to OKR cycles, sending out an eNPS survey once a quarter will yield you the best results.
It will keep your eNPS results regular and get employees in the habit of answering eNPS surveys, in conjunction with other regular business cycles.
In order for you to keep your eNPS unbiased, you must keep your eNPS surveys anonymous and reassure employees that their identities will not be known even if they give a lower score.
Besides anonymity, you must remind employees that they shouldn’t give over positive scores, especially if they do not feel that way. The point is to have employees be as honest as they can be, rather than providing a score they think the organization wants to see.
Pro Tip: If you are a smaller company, you can consider using an external party to send out the survey and collect the results to get honest answers.
Lastly, even though eNPS surveys are quick and easy to answer, you should still provide a few reminders emails to help improve overall response rates.
How to Improve your eNPS Score
After you have finished your first round of eNPS survey, it’s time to look at the results. Let’s say you got a 20. That’s not bad right? So how do you improve this for the next quarter?
One of the keys to improving your score over time is to hold them regularly, so that you build enough data to find trends. If you hold your eNPS surveys too far apart, it will be harder for you to correlate any changes you did with to the score.
You should always consider sharing your eNPS with employees, giving them a sense of inclusion, rather than keep it secret. Even if it is a negative score, you should still show it, as it can show employees the organization is willing to improve.
You can also show more transparency with employees by talking about your own reactions to the eNPS results and what the organization plans to do about it.
Scores will almost always improve when employees know that their voices have been heard and have had an impact on the actions of the organization.
Lastly, the best way to ensure you improve your eNPS score is to follow up with an open-ended eNPS survey question or longer engagement survey. These longer and more specific survey can help you understand why your eNPs is that score and learn about the things that it relates to.
Open Ended Questions to include in your eNPS Surveys
As mentioned above, the simplest and best way to get more out of your eNPS is to include an open ended question. Just make sure to keep it brief and make it only one question. Avoid yes or no questions, loaded questions or very specific questions.
Below are some examples of great open-ended questions...
- What was the main reason for your answer?
- What do you think we could do better?
- Can you describe something you enjoy about working here?
Here are some examples of opened ended questions to avoid...
- Do you see yourself working here 5 years from now?
- Why do you enjoy working here?
- What would you say if we were to implement a new feedback process?
What’s next? Take eNPS Surveys for a Spin
We are huge advocates of employee satisfaction and experience. It really is the reason why our solution was built in the first place.
eNPS surveys are a great way to start your journey towards helping employees feel fulfilled in the workplace, reduce churn and create a better company culture.
To get started, simply sign up for a free Jobini account and you will be able to send out your first eNPS survey within minutes!
Step 1: Create an eNPS Survey
After creating your free account, start creating your first survey by clicking Create. You will be able to name your survey for internal purposes and customize your labels for low and high scores. You also have the option of leaving an open-ended question box within your eNPS survey to get further insight into their score.
Step 2: Set Up Reminders and Notifications
After you have finished creating you labels and open ended question, it’s time to set up your reminder emails and schedule your surveys. By default it is set to follow up every 2 days, but this really depends on your organization. When starting out we recommend scheduling your eNPS surveys more frequently (once a month) to get staff used to seeing and answering your surveys. You can also set up email notifications to specific administrators or managers to let them know when the survey is complete.
Step 3: Add Recipients
In the free version, you will only have to option of uploading an excel sheet to Jobini to import your list of recipients. We include a file template for you to download and fill in before uploading to the platform.
Step 4: Launch eNPS Survey
Once you have finished uploading your recipient list, simply launch the survey and within a few minutes, your staff should receive an email survey in their inbox to fill out. Answering the survey takes less than 10 seconds and will give you the starting point to begin improving employee satisfaction.
Step 5: Measure eNPS Results
Once the eNPS surveys have been completed, you will receive an email notification in your inbox letting you know your results. Over time, you will be able to analyze and see the trend of your eNPS and track any progress your organization is making.
Taking eNPS Surveys to The Next Level
If you are interested in learning more about eNPS and how to measure or improve employee engagement within your organization, check out our article on how to take eNPS and employee satisfaction to the next level.
To get started with eNPS and see how it all works, create a free user account