What is Employee NPS (eNPS)?

The Employee Net Promoter Score (or eNPS) is a metric used to measure employee engagement and loyalty towards a business. The eNPS is directly correlated to the short-medium term intentions of an employee. It is a score that is often measured as part of a wider study looking at employee satisfaction.

The eNPS is very simple to measure. The key question to ask your employees is ‘How likely are you to recommend your employer to others as a place of work?’. Employees are asked to give their score on a 0 to 10 scale, where 0 is not at all likely to recommend and 10 is very likely to recommend.

Those who give a 9 or 10 are called Promoters, and are advocates of your business. Their positive experiences mean they are engaged with staying and growing your business, and their enthusiasm and ideas should be harnessed for your future business plans.

Those that rate their place of work in the range 0-6 are called detractors. Typically detractors are looking to leave their place of work in the near future. Addressing their issues and concerns can help you to prevent employee churn.

The overall eNPS for a business is calculated by subtracting the % of detractors from the % of promoters. This will leave you with a score of between 100 and -100 and is your eNPS.

There is a direct link between performance of a company and the engagement of their workforce. Working towards a good eNPS can help reduce your staff turnover, meaning less money needs to be spent on recruitment and training. There are other added benefits such as increasing your workforce’s productivity. For example, on average an engaged employees only take 2.7 sick days off per year, compared to 6.2 for those that are disengaged.

It is reported that there is a link between engaged employees and the effect on a company’s growth and profits. Engaged employees are more likely to feel they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs. Our studies have shown there is a direct link between employee NPS and a company’s customer advocacy scores. This ultimately filters down to the bottom line and positively effects growth.

Firstly, it is worth noting that employees and customers often treat the 0-10 scale differently, and therefore your eNPS may be quite different to your customer NPS – it is a slightly different question after all!

To make the most of your eNPS you need to make sure that your survey includes a number of other questions to put the feedback into context. It is important to understand what areas employees are satisfied with the business and where they feel it could improve as a place to work. You also need to ask employees what is most important to them, so that you can focus any changes you make within your company on issues that will have the biggest impact on staff satisfaction.

Make sure you communicate widely within your business about what you are doing and reassure that you will treat all responses with complete confidentiality with this type of exercise. Using a market research agency can help to keep employees confident that there responses will be treated impartially. After the project let staff know about the outcomes and changes they can expect to see – this is the first step to improving your score!