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Improving employee engagement is easily one of the best ways to influence company success, and it all starts with eNPS (employee net promoter score). Running a recurring eNPS survey every 90 days or so is a great way to understand your people, and their connection to the company. Your eNPS score tells you whether your employee engagement levels are where they should be, and, crucially, help you predict any issues that are coming down the road.
So how do you get started with employee net promoter score? And what should you do with your scores once you get them? We’re answering all of these questions and more in our quick guide to eNPS.
Contents
3. How does an eNPS survey work?
6. What are the Benefits of eNPS?
7. Why is Employee Engagement so Important?
8. What are the Downsides of eNPS?
9. What are the Best eNPS Survey Questions to Ask?
10. Who Should I Send an eNPS Survey to?
11. How Often Should I Run an eNPS Survey?
12. How Long Should the Survey Window Be?
13. What’s a Good Day to Launch an eNPS Survey?
14. What Should I Do with my eNPS Score?
15. How Do I Run an eNPS Survey?
eNPS is a simple and effective system for measuring employee engagement.
A recurring eNPS (employee net promoter score) survey shows how your people feel about working at your company.
It also helps you track the progress of any employee engagement initiatives you introduce and make impactful changes in real time.
eNPS surveys are based on a single question - “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend (company name) as a good place to work?” - but you can add additional questions to help you understand the responses in greater detail.
eNPS stands for employee net promoter score.
In an employee net promoter score survey, employees are asked one question; “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend (company name) as a good place to work?”
Based on their responses, they’re split into three categories:
- employees who respond with a score of 9 or 10 are promoters. These employees tend to be satisfied, engaged and loyal.
- employees who respond with a score of 7 or 8 are passives. These employees tend to be content, but not highly engaged.
- employees who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are detractors. These employees tend to be dissatisfied and disengaged.
eNPS surveys are anonymous. This means that you’ll never find out which employees gave which scores, although some team members may voluntarily identify themselves if you give them the option to add additional comments.
Your score is then calculated using the following formula:
% Promoters – % Detractors = eNPS
eNPS is calculated by splitting employees into three categories based on their responses:
- employees who respond with a score of 9 or 10 are promoters. These employees tend to be satisfied, engaged and loyal.
- employees who respond with a score of 7 or 8 are passives. These employees tend to be content, but not highly engaged.
- employees who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are detractors. These employees tend to be dissatisfied and disengaged.
Your score is then calculated using the following formula:
% Promoters – % Detractors = eNPS
Scores can range from -100 (all responders are detractors) to +100 (all responders are promoters).
Example:
Your survey had 24 respondents. 14 of them are promoters, 2 are passives and 8 are detractors.
Divide 14 by 24 and multiply by 100 to learn that 58% of your respondents are promoters.
Divide 8 by 24 and multiply by 100 to learn that 33% of your respondents are detractors.
58 - 33 = 25.
Your eNPS score is +25.
eNPS scores can range from -100 (all responders are detractors) to +100 (all responders are promoters).
A good eNPS score is between +10 and +30. Above +50 is excellent and above +80 is exemplary.
There are a few reasons why eNPS is a great system for measuring employee engagement.
1. It’s the simplest way to measure engagement. One survey, one question, one metric.
2. It’s quick to run. As NPS is an established system, most team members will be familiar with it, so you should be able to get going right away.
3. It’s cost-effective. There isn’t a large financial or time commitment associated with eNPS. That said, we do recommend managing eNPS and other employee surveys through a dedicated software platform like Frankli, to make them as efficient and effective as possible.
4. It has a high response rate. Because eNPS surveys are short and quick to complete compared with most employee surveys, the response rate tends to be high, somewhere between 80% and 90% for small companies and 65% and 80% for large companies.
5. It creates a bespoke benchmark for your teams. For example, if your company has 25 employees and an eNPS score of +55, this gives you a number you should look to improve upon, or at the very least maintain as your team grows.
6. It helps you predict attrition rates. A significant increase in your number of detractors (low scorers), a dip in your overall eNPS score or a dip in response rate are indicators that some of your people might be looking elsewhere.
We could talk about this all day! Research shows that highly-engaged teams are more productive and more profitable, and show lower attrition rates. Learn more about the link between employee engagement and high performance.
We’re big fans of eNPS, but even we have to admit that there are limitations to this type of survey.
The main downside of eNPS is that the results aren’t highly detailed. They don’t give you a lot of information on how your people are feeling about work.
As a recurring pulse survey, eNPS is fantastic, but it’s only one piece of the employee engagement puzzle. That’s why we recommend combining regular eNPS surveys with other, more detailed employee surveys (employee engagement, job satisfaction, wellbeing, onboarding, etc.) as well as research-based rituals like regular 1:1 meetings and 360 degree feedback.
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eNPS surveys are based around one critical question; “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend (company name) as a good place to work?”
If you’d like to gain a little more detail on your responses, we recommend adding three more questions to be answered only by detractors (low scorers). These are designed to measure employee satisfaction, loyalty and belief.
They are:
- If you were offered the same job at another organisation, how likely is it that you would stay with (Company Name)?
- Overall, how satisfied are you working for (Company Name)?
- How likely is it you would recommend (Company Name) products or services to friends and family?
You can also add an open-ended question for all responders inviting them to provide additional comments.
While it may be tempting to add more questions to your eNPS survey, we don’t recommend it.
Instead, we suggest rounding out the information gleaned from eNPS by running several other research-based employee surveys throughout the year, including an employee engagement survey, job satisfaction survey, and onboarding survey.
We recommend sending it to all employees. Excluding any outgoing employees will give you an even more accurate score next quarter.
We recommend running an eNPS survey every 90 days. This gives you enough time to make changes that will positively impact your score next quarter.
It’s a good idea to give your employees 7 working days to complete the eNPS survey. Most will respond within 4 days, but this timeframe should account for employees on annual leave.
In our experience, the day you launch your eNPS survey doesn’t hugely affect response rates but you may see slightly higher participation if you launch it on a Monday morning, a Thursday morning, or Friday afternoon (so it’s waiting for employees in their inboxes first thing on Monday!)
eNPS is terrific at telling you whether or not you have an employee engagement problem. But unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you how to solve that problem.
As researchers at Gallup put it, “If you discover one of your teams has a low eNPS, what do you do next? Well, you don't really know what to do.” (1).
In order to bring about positive change, you need to ask more questions. Moreover, you need to ask the kinds of questions that teams and managers can act on. For this reason, we recommend an employee engagement survey next.
If you are happy with your eNPS results, your next step is to set a reminder to run an eNPS survey again in 90 days’ time (or have Frankli automatically run the survey for you) and establish a benchmark or target score you’d like to aim for next quarter.
For this one, you should check out our complete guide to running an eNPS survey.
Sources:
1. Gallup, Fans vs. Players: Why eNPS Is Not Enough.
