Employee NPS often gets unnoticed by leaders focused exclusively on driving CX related impacts. However, neglecting employee perspectives on their overall experience might cost businesses in the long run.
One of the reasons companies should implement employee NPS as their standard practice is the increasing importance of employer brand, and employee value proposition. Put differently, the willingness of your talents to recommend your organization mirrors the success of your company on the market.
To shine the light on this immensely important topic, our team prepared a comprehensive guide on employee NPS definition, the value behind it, and the long-term benefits your company can gain by applying it.
With the aim to emphasize the connection between eNPS and CX, we invited CCXP Laura Tengerdi, the co-founder of CXPA Hungary, to comment on the importance of this metric when it comes to building a customer-centric organization.
What is Employee NPS (eNPS)?
Employee NPS (eNPS) is built around the concept of NPS in customer experience to measure talents’ loyalty and satisfaction. It is a method of checking how willing employees are to recommend a company as a desirable place to work. Employee NPS is measured through a survey that contains one question:
“On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our organization to your family or friends?
What a great workplace is, should of course be decided by a multitude of factors. Asking just one single question cannot uncover the reasons behind talents’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Therefore, employee NPS should be combined with other HR metrics and methods of checking in with employees on their overall experience.
To truly understand how it feels to work at your company, your HR team, with help of external EX consultants, has to conduct a series of research practices. Applying eNPS, however, has the advantage of getting the picture of general employee loyalty which further informs the next stages of research and needed investigations.
What companies get after conducting the employee NPS survey are the three categories of satisfaction classified in the following way:
- Detractors (score from 0 to 6) are highly dissatisfied employees who are actively spreading negative words about the organization. Detractors sometimes continue to talk negatively about the company even once they quit and move to another workplace.
- Passives (score of 7 and 8) are satisfied but neutral about spreading the word about your company and emphasizing any aspect as particularly valuable.
- Promoters (score of 9 and 10) are the most satisfied and loyal employees willing to recommend the company and talk about their work on LinkedIn and other social networks. They are so called ambassadors and advocates of your company’s values.
How to calculate eNPS sore?
Let’s take an example of how to calculate eNPS. Imagine your company has 1000 employees, and in the eNPS survey, you identified that 400 among them are detractors, 100 passives, and 500 promoters. Once you have the correct percentage of each type, to get your final employee NPS score, you need to subtract your percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Employee Net Promoter Score = % Promoters – % Detractors
Such eNPS calculation will help you bring strategic decisions related to people operations. For instance, leaders might focus on converting passives into promoters or identifying reasons behind detractors’ negative impression of the company.
Can Employee NPS improve employee engagement?
Many HR experts argue that employee NPS is just one facet of employee experience. In one of our previous EX guides, we wrote about employee engagement and factors like communication, leadership, and positive company culture as important elements to consider when designing a positive employee experience. Knowing that most of your talents would recommend you to their friends and family, doesn’t explain the reasons behind this attitude.
However, eNPS can be a negotiation tool for HR leaders who need quick inputs to bring to the table and share with decision-makers sceptical about investing in talents. Put differently, some leaders still won’t invest money in improving employee satisfaction until they see devastating eNPS results. Therefore, employee NPS can serve as a red flag and a wake-up call for leaders to react to dissatisfaction, high turnover, and low performance.
Driving customer-centricity with eNPS
At Customer Experience Magazine, we often talk about the unavoidable correlation between employee and customer experience. For any organization that wants to build customer-centricity, employees have to come first.To better understand how eNPS can contribute to building people-oriented strategies, we asked Laura Tengerdi, ICXA21 judge and co-founder of CXPA in Hungary, to share practical suggestions for applying eNPS. This is what she said:
As per my experience unfortunately eNPS is still not used or used inconsistently by companies: once asking employees’ opinion about the company as a place to work at another time asking them about the company as a service provider. Both questions make sense and can be used for tracking the engagement level, both are good for gaining invaluable insights but the aim of using them should be discussed and agreed upon.
To understand what the right balance between these two approaches is, we asked Laura to further explain how she applies eNPS in her work:
I like the apply both perspectives, but in separate surveys, otherwise, employees might be confused. Both can be used as standalone questions, but according to my experience the first one is usually part of a yearly HR Pulse survey, while the other one is more frequently used as a standalone question with an extra open-ended ‘Why’ question, which is necessary for gaining useful insights to be able to act upon them, said Laura.
In our further conversation, Laura summarized the benefits of using the eNPS as a service provider in the following way:
- simple to use and usually give high response rates. Even if you add couple more questions to the survey, you have a higher chance for people to respond.
- great indicator of what the focus should be to become more customer-centric, can be easily compared with customer NPS and usually are closely linked.
- easy metric to use in CX Dashboard next to the well-known customer NPS. It gives a good signal for the management team if the direction is bringing benefits.
On the other hand, eNPS comes along with certain limitations, as any survey or metric in general. Let’s mention two you should keep in mind:
- as in the case of customer NPS, you have to be careful with only using the numerical results. Instead, try to invite qualitative data to your final analysis.
- if linked to the leadership team’s bonus scheme, it might be ‘abused’. The eNps should always be anonymous and conducted with the ethical code in mind.
Final thoughts
In the end, it’s important to highlight that employee NPS, even though useful, should not be used isolated from other qualitative and quantitative insights about employee’s loyalty and satisfaction. To be on the right path of building sustainable CX and EX programmes, organizations should combine NPS, eNPS, one-on-one interviews, employee surveys, and design thinking workshops to discuss how to act on the gathered insights.
As Laura emphasized, knowing What the problem is, without understanding Why it is an issue from the employee’s point of view, won’t bring you too far.