Most organizations are highly concerned with customer satisfaction, as they should be; after all, you wouldn’t have a business without customers. There is, however, another group that can also make or break a business: employees. Keeping track of employee satisfaction is just as important as customer satisfaction when it comes to sustaining a successful and growing business.
A lot of elements affect an employee’s overall satisfaction with a company, from corporate culture, to management and leadership, to basic communication. In fact, over 50% of CEOs say that company culture alone influences productivity, creativity, profitability, company value, and growth rate. More specifically, highly-engaged companies are 23% more profitable compared to companies with less employment engagement and satisfaction, which is just one example of how fulfilled, engaged, and respected employees directly impact the positive results that a company yields.
Improving the customer experience, inspiring more profitable work, and optimizing employee retention are all influenced by the happiness and satisfaction of employees, which should make the well-being and loyalty of employees an essential part of any business strategy. While it’s not always easy to learn about how content employees sincerely are, eNPS is one of the most relevant and effective starting points for employers and business owners.
What Is eNPS?
eNPS or Employee Net Promoter Score is one way to measure employee engagement and satisfaction, adapted from the very similar customer satisfaction measurement, NPS. The main idea is to ask one straightforward question: “How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work for your friends and family?”
Simple but powerful, eNPS gets at the core of how your workforce actually feels about what they do and who they work for. By regularly sending out surveys to gauge the success of their employee engagement, employers are regularly reevaluating the value and viability of their company. Utilizing eNPS means that businesses ultimately become more profitable and provide a better place to work.
How to Calculate eNPS
As mentioned, an eNPS survey should approximately ask: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company as a place of work?” It can be even more effective to get specific and ask if they would recommend their workplace to a friend, colleague, or family member, which personalizes the answer and encourages them to be sincere.
This question is typically broken into two parts in a survey: first, there’s the actual rating on the 0-10 scale. Second, the survey asks for an open-ended explanation of why they gave the company that ranking. Generally speaking, here’s how employers can break down rankings:
- If they answer 9-10, they are promoters, who are the most engaged, satisfied, and motivated group of employees.
- If they answer 7-8, they are passives, who are considered more or less neutral. They may be generally satisfied but don’t have a great deal of loyalty to the company.
- If they answer 0-6, they are detractors, who are overall unhappy with their job and/or the company, wouldn’t recommend the work environment to their circle of friends and family, and are to some degree disengaged with their work.
To get an overall impression of how much a company is thriving in terms of employee satisfaction, employee net promoter scores are calculated by deducting the percent of detractors (0-6) from the percent of promoters (9-10) in your company. It’s best to use a scale of 10 since smaller scales usually inflate the answers, good and bad, while a larger scale is too broad to really capture the thoughts and feelings of employees. Your results will usually range from -100 to 100; getting above 0 is a must to make sure more people are satisfied with their workplace than not.
What Is the Difference Between eNPS and NPS?
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are very similar and essentially measure satisfaction with a company, product, or service, but NPS came first and was used for customer engagement. It came from Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld to evaluate customer loyalty, and by adapting it for employees, this simple system gives employers a better understanding of how well employees are doing, what is and isn’t working for culture initiatives, and more.
Both use a simple 2-question survey that offers a lot of clarity for fairly easy implementation. NPS surveys, though, are usually more focused on a product or service, while eNPS is more effective when it asks employees if they would recommend working for the company itself.
NPS and eNPS also differ in that NPS surveys can be tied back to a particular customer, which strengthens the legitimacy of the rating, compared to eNPS results, which usually need to be anonymous to get accurate and honest feedback.
A company should be measuring both NPS and eNPS ratings, and often, the higher the eNPS, the higher the NPS will be too since engaged employees help create and foster engaged customers. However, employees are much more emotionally invested in their jobs compared to a customer reviewing or rating a product. As such, employers shouldn’t be discouraged if their eNPS rate is significantly lower than their NPS—they are different metrics and there are a lot of factors that play into the ratings.
To sum up the differences, eNPS measures employee satisfaction with the company and is anonymous, while NPS measures customer satisfaction with the product and is tied with the customer’s data. The scores are usually correlated, but generally, an eNPS score will be lower than the NPS score since the employees more easily can see things going on in the company.
What Are the Benefits of eNPS?
eNPS surveys should be given regularly so that employees have a more or less constant perspective of their employee engagement. Here are some of the primary benefits of doing so:
- Simple questions. Finding out your eNPS is simple, only requiring a 1- or 2-question survey. It doesn’t take a long time for employees to complete, nor is it overwhelming or complicated.
- High participation. Because it’s so stripped down, eNPS has a higher participation rate than a lot of other surveys because it is generally only 1-2 questions. eNPS is easy to introduce to employees taking the survey and stakeholders who see the results, too. Low effort, powerful results.
- Straightforward calculations. eNPS is an easy metric to work with; it only requires basic calculations and it is represented numerically, so putting data and action items together is usually pretty easy.
- Accessible. eNPS is cost-effective because it’s so easy to implement regularly. It isn’t an extensive survey, so it’s not going to give employers or employees a headache.
- Protecting the brand. A brand community often starts with or is at least influenced by the employees. eNPS helps you see how much brand loyalty there is since employees can especially fuel brand loyalty in customers and online spaces.
- Practical. eNPS is a more tangible measurement of feelings or thoughts that may be otherwise difficult to express. By having a metric, it’s much easier to compare your company to competitors and make other decisions.
- Care for your employees. Decent employers want their workforce to be happy and able to provide for themselves, so eNPS surveys are also a great way to find out what is detracting from the employee experience.
- Recognizing patterns. Tracking key phrases or keywords within the survey answers in the open-ended question section can help easily identify major themes that make or break customer experience and engagement.
Best Practices for Using eNPS Effectively
Employers can get a much better idea of what their employees need and want in a lucrative and effective workplace by using eNPS. Here’s what business owners should know to make the most of their data.
- eNPS is a starting point—not an endpoint. Constant improvement is a must, and even if you have an acceptable eNPS, you should still continually look for ways to improve your EX (employee experience).
- eNPS is especially attractive for its simplicity, but that also means it’s inadequate as a standalone assessment. Often, the simplicity of this metric also makes it lack depth. Following up with employees with more in-depth surveys every once in a while helps dig deeper into the ways the company can improve the EX.
- It is critical to send out eNPS surveys regularly to keep track of trends and the data over time—a one-time survey isn’t going to tell you much, especially because you can’t measure how you’ve improved. Quarterly eNPS surveys are what experts recommend. Extra survey follow-up questions for detractors and promoters are also recommended to help dig deeper into the real issues that might be causing people to have less happy experiences.
- Make sure you regularly reassure your employees that the survey is anonymous. Employees may want to please the company and not be honest in the survey, but that doesn’t promote growth and improvement in the company if people are worried about their results being exposed to their managers. That being said, adding filters to the survey can help you see how the eNPS varies between departments or locations to see if there are specific areas that need extra attention.
- Run an eNPS survey alongside a customer NPS to see how the eNPS score correlates with the NPS score.
- Be transparent with results—employees want to actually feel heard, not just appeased. Make sure employees know that you care and are working to improve areas that do need refinement or development.
Start With eNPS
eNPS is an amazingly helpful metric and a good place to start as you work to help your company increase employee engagement. Remember, though, that eNPS has certain limitations; though the simple structure is great for gathering data, it leaves employers with a fairly wide range of options for improvement. There are other metrics and company elements to look at when you are working on enhancing employee engagement.
To learn more about all the metrics you should look at to help you improve your employee engagement, checkout this Point of View!