Employee NPS or eNPS is a method to measure your employees’ willingness to recommend your company as a place of work.

Yes, you are giving your employees a pool table, team outings, a decent package, and more. But sadly that’s not enough to nurture and support a high-performing culture or engaged employees.

A recent study by Gallup suggests that more than half of any workforce is disengaged and unhappy with their work environment. So an employee survey done yearly once with dull, mundane questions won’t be enough to accurately gauge employee pulse.

eNPS: Meaning
Why choose eNPS over other employee surveys
How employee NPS helps you become not just great, but legen-dary
How do you assess the employee NPS results?
Calculate employee NPS (or eNPS)

ENPS: Meaning

Employee NPS tells you how happy, confident or engaged your employees are at work.

The Net Promoter Score, the most sought-after metric, lets you measure customer sentiments towards your brand. Employee Net Promoters Score, or in short eNPS, helps you measure how loyal your employees are to you, similar to NPS.

The question that eNPS relies on is, “On a scale of 0-10, How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work to your friends/family?” or a variation of this. For examples, check out our list of 50+ employee NPS survey questions.

An open-ended follow-up question will help you learn why your employees gave the rating they did, helping you to close the feedback loop in a matter of seconds.

Did you know that with SurveySparrow, you can view all of the data from your NPS surveys at a glance? Sign up below to get a full-feature free trial of the platform.

Why choose Employee NPS over other employee surveys?

#1. It acknowledges your most valuable asset

There are many great companies, but not everyone becomes a ‘legendary brand’!

Companies such as Google, Zappos, USAA, Lego, and Costco are labeled as ‘legendary brands’ not because they have brought out the most amazing product or for the gigantic stock returns. Then, what did? It’s their obsession with the customer experience as well as employee experience! Their NPS score and Employee NPS scores are inspiring.

Their customers are their superfans and celebrate them, while their employees engage and act as their most loyal advocates. These firms have turned both parties into their passionate promoters and thus obscured the legendary status.

How do you achieve that ‘legendary status’?

Turn your customers and employees into your loyal promoters. Sounds pretty straightforward, huh? It is! Then why not many are on this list? Well, they are all running behind bettering the customer experience while completely ignoring the most valuable contributor to it…happy, loyal employees!

#2. It is intuitive

Here’s probably what happens during every employee survey. You craft well-defined surveys that cover every single aspect of your organization to your employees.

Not many complete the survey, a lot of them don’t even open it. Your HR has to follow up multiple times and then, only then the surveys are completed. You must have tried even rewards to fasten the process but nothing seems to work.

On the other hand, Employee NPS surveys ask your workforce a single question. What makes this one question more insightful than a two-page survey is that, eNPS doesn’t just measure employee satisfaction, but their loyalty to the company. By asking NPS follow-up questions, you can also find out why.

The willingness of your employees to recommend reflects how engaged and passionate they are.

#3. It is easy to use

You don’t need to be a statistician or invest a lot of time and effort to share and analyze an eNPS survey. Keeping the optional follow-up question open-ended lets you dig deeper into your employees’ ratings. You need only a spreadsheet and basic mathematical skills.

Related: How to Calculate NPS using Excel

While sharing an eNPS survey, you can share them across multiple channels with so much ease. There are survey platforms that help you automate all this, like NPS by SurveySparrow. This makes eNPS the perfect metric to measure employee attitudes for your management.

Related: 7 of the Best NPS Software You Should Look Up in 2022

None of your employees would want to go through drab lengthy procedures of survey.

#3. It helps to achieve lower turnover

eNPS tells you what exactly is putting off your employees. It could be micromanagement, work/life balance, undefined job roles, and more. You will be able to pinpoint what went wrong.

Other employee surveys may not help you achieve this with so much ease. Address the concerns raised by your employees immediately and show that you mean to ‘walk the talk’. This helps to increase confidence your team has in you and will be able to score a higher eNPS score.

#4. It helps to form a benchmark

Recognize where you stand against your biggest competitors in a snap with eNPS. It is a standard measurement used across the globe making it easier to compare your score with your competition. Compare it with the industry average and learn what you can do to achieve a greater eNPS score.

How employee NPS helps you become not just great, but legen-dary

From Google’s pet projects to Zappos’ grant-a-wish program and Lego’s AFOL, examples for engaging employee experiences and high-performing cultures are many. Your employee will voluntarily become your spokesperson when he is truly happy with your brand.

It was only until recently executives and managers started making rigorous efforts to measure employee happiness. In a recent study done by Gallup, researchers found that those who secured high scores on employee engagement doubled their odds of success when compared with those with lower scores.

And one thing many forgets is that customer happiness and employee happiness is inseparable and are the two sides of the same coin. You will be able to consistently turn your customers into your fans when they are served by a team that is passionate and enthusiastic about their work.

#1. Employee NPS improves employee satisfaction

“If you figure out how to make employees happy and make customers happy, then the business just kind of takes care of itself. It’s just about delivering happiness.” – Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos

Employee NPS helps you structure the teams in your organization correctly, assign experienced leaders, provide the right tools and segregate individual roles that play to their strengths. This ensures that you have created an environment where the employees are able to garner positive growth.

#2. Employee NPS increases employee retention

The hiring and onboarding processes are really expensive and steal a lot of effort and time from you. It is imperative to be always in the know about your employees’ attitudes towards your brand. When the employees don’t feel challenged or recognized enough, they leave. Conducting employee NPS at regular intervals helps you monitor the changes and patterns emerging in employee behaviors. Finding the root causes for employee disengagement lets you avoid them altogether

#3. Employee NPS for higher productivity

Engaged employees work harder, faster and stronger. It’s no secret! The Employee NPS surveys let you in on everything you need to do to keep your employees engaged. Research says that engaged employees are 17% more productive. For example, Zappos, a clothing company, encourages its call center employees to “go above and beyond” for every customer that calls them.

This was showcased when a hungry group of people was stranded at night and their hotel’s food service had stopped. A lady in the group called Zappos call center and the representative helped them find eateries that were open at that time of the hour. This Zappos story told and retold across the world has helped them with free marketing too.

#4. Employee NPS for increased profitability

The latest studies prove that businesses with engaged employees secure 21% more profitability than their competition. When the employees engage themselves in the job, they work harder. When your employees work harder it increases productivity.

And when your employees are being consistently productive at work, they keep on creating happy customers with their quality of work. This will have happy loyal customers coming back to you which will, in turn, result in steady revenue growth.

How do you assess the Employee NPS results?

Now, since we have explored the different aspects of Employee NPS, the time’s ripe to delve into one of the most vital segments which is, of course, calculating and assessing your results.

Categorize Based on Individual Scores

The scores you garner will be in the scale ranging from 0 – 10, in accordance with the question you put out to your employees,‘On a scale of 0-10, How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work to your friends/family?’. Collect the individual scores of your employees and categorize them into promoters, detractors, and passives.

Promoters – Answered in 9-10

Promoters are your happy, loyal lot. You can bank on them for advocating your company as an ideal place to work. But don’t want to distract yourself by the positive feedback and ignore your valuable set of employees. Make sure you respond back through a ‘thank you’ mail and also find the reason behind scoring you a 9 or 10 through an open-ended follow-up question.

Passives – Answered in 7 – 8

The employees coming under passives needn’t necessarily be satisfied with your work culture, they are rather neutral. This group is neither too satisfied nor displeased with your company yet you can’t rely on them to promote your firm as a great workplace. In fact, chances are that they jump to a different organization for a better package. But yes, you can convert them into your promoters by finding why they scored you so, through dedicated follow-up procedures.

Detractors – Answered in 0 – 6

Now, this is the section of employees that demands maximum attention from you. They are clearly unhappy with the way things are working in your company and it is imperative to dig deep and identify the root cause; the sooner the better. Reach out to them through follow-up questions or emails, ask them the reason, and implement the right solutions. And yes, do not forget to notify them once you do so. This is how you say ‘I care’ and mollify the detractors.

Employee NPS Calculation

As far as the calculation of Employee NPS is concerned, the entire procedure is a cakewalk.

Find out the total number of respondents and get the percentage of both promoters and detractors. To obtain your eNPS score, you can just subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters.

Let’s say, you conducted an eNPS survey in your company. From a total of 150 respondents, you have 70 promoters, 30 detractors, and 50 passives. The percentage of your promoters will be 46.6% while you have the detractors at 20%.

So, your Employee NPS will be :

46.6% – 20% = 26.6%

So, your overall eNPS is 26 (Display the employee NPS as a whole number and not as a percentage).

Since your eNPS is a 26, you have a decent score meaning there are more promoters to back you up. But if it were a -26, then it’s a blazing alarm indicating a gang of unhappy detractors. If that’s the case, you will have to take immediate measures to pacify and convert the passives and detractors into promoters.

The score does not matter until you have a graph that slopes upwards with each eNPS survey.

The tedious procedures of collecting data and then getting it analyzed by a third party can be avoided through eNPS.

Conduct Employee NPS surveys the right way, at the right time with the right employee engagement software to collect mindful, unbiased responses. Having a Likert scale question with the eNPS question would only help you with collecting the responses part.

When you have dedicated NPS software, you will be able to enjoy the advantages of the ‘one question you need to grow’, completely. You won’t need spreadsheets to calculate the eNPS score when you have a tool that does it for you. Create, send and share Employee NPS surveys painlessly using an NPS platform. Automating processes lets you utilize your time better.

Related: What is a Good NPS Score?

Wrapping Up

Ignoring your employees for the longest time and sharing a survey yearly or quarterly, won’t collect you any insightful information but abandoned or biased responses. Scheduling and planning your Employee NPS surveys at the right frequency helps you track your progress. You will be able to differentiate the improvements you have achieved over a period of time.

The Employee NPS would guide you into creating a virtuous cycle that assists your employees to earn nothing but a 10 from the customers. And they should be rewarded for it. The customer and employee net promoter score systems get fully integrated for they are in the pursuit of nothing but happiness.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

The Ultimate Guide To Employee NPS (2024)