What Is Your Employee Net Promoter Score Actually Telling You?

With increased emphasis on employee engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, many businesses are using Employee Net Promoter Scores to gauge employee loyalty. But what are the numbers actually telling you?

What is an Employee Net Promoter Score?

An Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS consists of two or three questions:

1. “On a scale from zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend this organization as a good place to work?”
2. “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend this company’s products or services to a friend or colleague?” (optional)
3. “Why did you answer in this way?”

Question number two was a later addition to the net promoter score formula, and some employers choose to stick to the first question and the follow up.

Depending on an employee’s answer, he or she is put into one of the following categories:

• Promoter: An employee who gives a rating between 9 and 10
• Passive: An employee who gives a rating between 7 and 8
• Detractor: An employee who gives a rating of 6 or below

An employer’s eNPS comes from subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Passives are considered neutral and are not counted.

So, for example, if Company X has 1,000 employees and received results like this:

• Promoters: 300
• Detractors: 400
• Passives: 300

It would calculate its eNPS like this: 30 percent promoters – 40 percent detractors = -10

Therefore, Company X’s eNPS score would be -10.

Businesses like the Employee Net Promoter Score because it is a simple way to measure employee loyalty. Though the concept of a net promoter score was designed originally to measure customer satisfaction, employers soon adopted the model to measure employee satisfaction as well.

Why Employee Loyalty is Important

“Promoters” is the keyword to consider here. Employees who are ambassadors for your brand can help you promote your business. They are also more likely to stay with your company for a long time. Less turnover saves money and increases morale, which in turn increases the ultimate strength of your organization’s bottom line.

Loyal employees care about your company, which means they will go the extra mile and put in the work to help you achieve your goals. This is why you want to aim to get as many promoters as possible. Additionally, promoters breed more promoters, creating a self-perpetuating positive atmosphere within your organization.

Encouraging Employees to Take the Survey

In order to maximize your eNPS results, you need to make your data pool as large as possible. Some recommend offering the survey frequently, as often as every three months or so, to increase your data set and benchmark against your own company. The eNPS lends itself to frequent distribution because of its simplicity.

The hubEngage app makes it easy to target employees at the right place and at the right time via its mobile location technology. This could lead to more survey responses and a bigger data set. Click here for more ways to increase engagement with your employee surveys.

What Your eNPS Score is Telling You

A score can range from -100 to +100. If you have a plus sign in front of your score, that is great. Positive scores mean you have more promoters than detractors, which is always a good thing. Negative scores tell the opposite story. This means you have more detractors than promoters, which is not so good.

The eNPS is a barometer of the health of your engagement strategies. Anything above a +10 is great. But -10 does not mean that all is lost. There is room for improvement, but the task before you need not be insurmountable.  If, however, you get below a score of -10, that is a strong sign that you may need to think about some major changes to your employee engagement strategies.

You can learn a lot from the eNPS, but your score is just a number. It is the data behind it that matters.

From one or two simple questions, you know which employees are brand ambassadors (promoters), which are generally satisfied (passives), and which are unhappy working for your organization (detractors). The true value of the eNPS, though, comes from the follow-up question.

The Follow-Up Question

In order to use your Employee Net Promoter Score to effect change, you need to know what is working and what is not. That is the information the follow-up question nets. This question should be tailored to each category of respondents.

Example follow up questions include:

• Promoters:
  • What makes you proud of this organization?
  • What makes you willing to recommend this company?
• Passives:
  • What is the #1 thing that would make you want to promote this company?
  • What is keeping you from promoting this organization?
• Detractors:
  • What is the #1 thing that stops you from recommending this company?
  • What is the #1 change you would like to see in this organization?

Remember, you only need one follow-up question in order to get the data. You want to keep this survey short and sweet in order to maximize responses.

How to Improve

You can ask the above follow-up questions in person or as a continuation of the survey. The very act of asking the question lets employees know you are listening and welcoming their feedback. Just this small step can start your organization on the road to improving employee engagement.

You want employees to feel that their opinions matter and that they have a voice. You can reinforce this by sharing the results of the survey and making and announcing a plan for change. Transparency is key here. Thank the respondents for their feedback; the more the ‘thank you’ is personalized, the better.

In order to truly increase employee engagement, you need to evaluate the feedback you get. This will help you know what engagement strategies are working and what needs improvement. You can also filter the data by categories such as demographics, length of time with the company, or the department in which the employee works.

The hubEngage app can help make this process fun, engaging, and valuable for you and your employees. It is fully customizable and packed with engagement features. Try the HubEngage app now for free and take full advantage of all of the HubEngage employee communication tools available to you.