Employee loyalty is one of the biggest challenges employers and HR professionals face throughout their careers. Perhaps in the past, people stayed with the same company for years or even their entire careers; but it’s no longer the case.
When an employee leaves, replacing them isn’t simple; a company must spend significant money and time searching for top talents through recruitment agencies, advertising, screening, interviewing, and hiring. According to Employee Benefits News, the average cost of losing an employee is 33% of their annual salary.
Previously, the salary was only crucial for employees to stick with a company; now, employee engagement, flexibility, shared values, growth, recognition, and work-life balance have become some of the key factors to employee retention.
Thus, attracting and retaining employees is an integral part of any business, and it has evolved increasingly complexly over the past years.
Here’s where the eNPS (employee net promoter score) comes in and makes employee retention less difficult. The eNPS is a metric that will be an indispensable part of the business toolkit by measuring and tracking employee loyalty.
Stay tuned, we’re just about to cover everything you need to know about employee net promoter scores and how to calculate them.
Table of contents:
- What is the employee net promoter score?
- Why is the employee net promoter score important?
- What are the benefits of employee net promoter score?
- How can employee net promoter score be used to increase engagement?
- How to use employee net promoter score effectively?
- How do you calculate employee net promoter score?
- How to improve your employee net promoter score?
- 15 Employee net promoter score survey questions you need to ask in 2022
- Conclusion
What is the employee net promoter score?
Employee net promoter score is a faster way to gauge employees’ satisfaction in an organization and measure their loyalty to the company.
In layman terms, it’s nothing but how likely are your employees to recommend your organization for work amongst their friends and family. Thereby increasing your referrals and cutting down your hiring costs. Cool right?!
As an employer, when you nurture loyalty in employees, you will start seeing incredible benefits where employees will be more willing to invest in their work, pitch-in new ideas, and go the extra mile. Forbes states that “Happy Employees = Hefty Profits.”
You can control the problem of employees leaving the organization to a great extent but can’t stop it completely. According to Willis Towers Watson, 53% of employees are either actively looking for a job or at risk of leaving.
But you can improve the employees’ satisfaction through measuring employee net promoter score since it will give you a fair understanding of how your employees feel about working for your organization.
All the attributes combined makes the employee net promoter score more efficient when combined with other HR metrics to know what the employees’ feel negative about your organization and improve their overall employee engagement by motivating them to be loyal.
Why is the employee net promoter score important?
Customer satisfaction has been a company’s primary measure of success and reputation for a long time. From the early ’90s, organizations had a “Net Promoter Score” concept for measuring their services and products’ popularity by asking simple questions like—How likely are you to recommend our services or products to your friends and family?
Similarly, employee engagement and overall satisfaction are also important in the workplace culture.
Fred Reichheld from Bain & Company and Satmetrix introduced employee net promoter scores with similar NPS metrics to monitor and track how employees feel about their workplace.
According to Gallup, 51% of workers are not engaged as they are psychologically unattached to their company and work. They constantly seek employment opportunities and will leave for a slightly better offer.
So, to tackle all these hurdles, the employee net promoter score provides you with deep insights into the recommendation to understand the engagement level for improving welfare and boosting employee productivity.
Workplace satisfaction motivates employees to be the best version of themselves and remain loyal to the organization. With this setup, employees would feel heard, less strained, and will have reduced workplace stress.
With the help of the employee net promoter score, you can divide the response into three simple categories.
- Promoters: These employees are more positive, satisfied, and motivated.
- Detractors: These employees are dissatisfied and will not recommend their workplace to others.
- Passives: These employees will be neutral and generally content but not fully satisfied or committed to the organization.
What are the benefits of employee net promoter score?
Implementing and working through employee net promoter scores alongside other key metrics improves and creates a holistic view of the employee experience.
But in addition to satisfaction and engagement, employee net promoter score can help your business improve other metrics, like:
Usability
The most significant benefit of the employee net promoter score is that it’s easy to use. Employees only need to answer questions in a simple format (on a scale of 1–10), saving valuable time and eliminating survey fatigue.
Higher participation rates
Most of us are more familiar with survey fatigue; often, we might receive an email asking for 5 minutes of our time, and we think, “Okay, fine!” And after answering the first three questions, there will be another set of questions, which will take more than said time and frustrate us.
So, that’s where survey fatigue happens. McKinsey defines survey fatigue as “a lack of motivation to participate in assessments.” But with the employee net promoter score’s simple method of answering, you can increase the employee participation rate in surveys and get accurate results.
Identifying general problem
The employee net promoter score effectively measures organizational problems, employee engagement, and satisfaction. These metrics help highlight underlying issues and optimize interdepartmental communication, employee recognition, and other workplace factors.
Accurate assessment with anonymity
The employee net promoter score accurately reflects how your employees feel about recommending their workplace. Since every employee will answer the questions anonymously, they are more likely to be honest, which allows you to detect the causes of low productivity and employee engagement.
Employee attrition
Employee attrition is when the company gradually reduces employees over time, which means that employees might leave faster than recruitment.
Future Forum report titled—The great executive employee disconnect surveyed 10,569 knowledge workers in many countries, in which 63% of the U.S. workers are ready to seek a new job within the next year.
But by regularly measuring the employee net promoter score, the organization understands and prevents high employee attrition. Remember, employee retention and attrition are two sides of the same coin. So, results allow employers to gauge the issues before employees leave.
Continuous measuring
Tracking and monitoring problems in an organization can be hard for employers, so experts suggest that a company start with a score and work to improve it.
According to Harvard Business Review, the employee net promoter score inspires companies to have great customer success, which will also help bring back customers and improve business.
So when an organization deploys the employee net promoter score survey more frequently than annual engagement surveys, it will pave the way for more effective monitoring.
Benchmarking suitability
Benchmarking provides critical insights to help employers understand how organization has developed compared to the past results. The employee net promoter score is flexible and easy to benchmark and better understand when and where things may have changed or where the employer should focus more.
How can employee net promoter score be used to increase engagement?
Employee engagement is crucial for all organizations since having effective workplace strategies helps create less turnover rate, better work culture, increase productivity, increase customer relationships, and positively impact profits.
But why does it matter for employees?
When employees are more engaged with their company, job, and colleagues, it helps their overall experience and workplace satisfaction. Employees become more optimistic, efficient, energized, and surpass expectations, which naturally influences their mental health.
But according to Gallup, only 36% of U.S. employees are engaged in their workplace. So showing, as an employer, that you are listening and acting toward employees’ feedback will help to increase engagement.
It will boost morale by displaying to employees that you care what they think and know their voice is heard, making them feel respected and included when they see the company take action to close experience gaps.
How to use employee net promoter score effectively?
So what’s next after successfully implementing the employee net promoter score survey?
Remember the golden rule—there is always room for improvement. So ensure you leverage the employee net promoter score to get better.
Right solution
According to People Doc, nearly 50% of employees are less truthful in their answers. Ensure the results are always anonymous; by doing so, you allow your employees to be more honest. You can filter survey findings to reveal differences based on location, department, and demographic to implement the right solution.
Extensive program
Measuring the employee net promoter score program would provide more depth of understanding on employee satisfaction and engagement to help employers understand why specific employees are detractors vs. promoters and take possible actions to satisfy employees’ needs.
Happy customers, happy employees!
During employee net promoter score, run a customer NPS because these two metrics are often aligned. If your employees are happy and more engaged at the workplace, they will be willing to go that extra mile to put a smile on your customers’ faces.
Normalize listening
You have to normalize the process of you listening and taking care of your employees. So you must make sure that you conduct employee net promoter score surveys at regular intervals to get enough data about your employees and find the current trend. But, when you implement surveys too far apart, you won’t be able to pinpoint the challenges or get enough data to be on trend with your employees.
Be transparent
Glassdoor defines workplace transparency as “an organization that operates in a way that creates openness between managers and employees.” So don’t hide your employee net promoter score from your employees, and make them feel more invested and included rather than removing them from the evaluation process.
Take action
Once you pinpoint the employee engagement challenges and experience gaps your employees face, ensure you dedicate resources to implement an immediate change. When it comes to workplace engagement, the worst thing you can do is ask for feedback and fail to take action, and it develops distrust among employees, who are more likely not to participate in future surveys.
According to SHRM, one in three employees doesn’t trust and report their problems to the employer or HR since they don’t fix the issue. So, be sure you show that you are more committed to improving employee engagement.
How do you calculate employee net promoter score?
The employee net promoter score is the actual difference between your happiest and least happy employees. The best way to measure it is to use recurrent survey questions more frequently to identify the improvement in employee engagement.
Here, the employees will answer the question on a scale of 0–10, with 0 being the least likely to recommend their workplace and 10 being more likely to recommend.
Formula:
Employee Net Promoter Score = No. of Promoters – No. of Detractors/Total No. of Respondents x 100
- Promoters are those who gave a score of either 9 or 10
- Detractors are those who gave a score between 0–6
- Passives are those who gave a score of either 7 or 8
Calculation examples
Let’s take an example—company A wants to identify their employees’ loyalty and satisfaction, and they have a total of 2000 employees and received 2000 responses. Where
- 200 responses were from detractors (0–6 range)
- 600 responses were from passives (7–8 range)
- 1200 responses were from promoters (9–10 range)
Using the formula: 1200-200/2000×100 = 50
A result is always a whole number and not a percentage; hence, company A’s employee net promoter score is 50.
From the above calculation, it’s evident that company A needs to analyze the root cause behind a low employee net promoter score and work to improve employee satisfaction.
How to improve your employee net promoter score?
Taking the proper steps to understand and measure employee net promoter score has significant value, and it helps decision-makers address employees’ concerns and foster more promoters. Here are some tips that will help you to improve your employee net promoter score.
- Collaborate with senior leaders, as teamwork always starts at the top, and everyone should be more committed to continuous improvement. Ensure you are ready to invest in your training, culture, and recruitment, which will lead you a long way.
- Assure your employees that their feedback is completely anonymous and safe to provide. Working with a third-party company to implement an employee net promoter score helps since failure to provide anonymity leads to employees not providing the right or accurate information.
- Track your reputation on all available platforms since employees, or former employees often write reviews on sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Comparably, Vault, and Careerbliss. The reviews might be an eye-opener for you!
- Cultivate an environment where your employees provide input and comfortable sharing feedback, like anonymous employee opinion surveys, and make sure you are transparent about the results.
- Acknowledge and celebrate your employees for going above and beyond in simple methods, such as responding to their feedback and taking appropriate actions, which are some best ways to cultivate workplace satisfaction.
15 Employee net promoter score survey questions you need to ask in 2022
The employee net promoter score survey opens the door for constructive and honest communication between employees and employers.
You can take further steps to increase employee satisfaction to raise the score. The following are some crucial employee net promoter score survey questions:
- Is there any specific factor that prevents you from recommending your workplace to others? [scale of 0–10]
- Has your experience at the company improved over the past 6 months? [scale of 0–10]
- Would you say your company invests enough resources in employee engagement and satisfaction? [scale of 0–10]
- How helpful is your manager when you come across an issue at work? [scale of 0–10]
- Do you see yourself working here in the next 5 years? [scale of 0–10]
- How valued and recognized do you feel in your workplace? [scale of 0–10]
- How interesting or exciting would you say your work is? [scale of 0–10]
- Did any recent changes in the workplace improve, impair, or have no impact on your work experience? [scale of 0–10]
- Would you say your workplace is more attractive to the employees than its competitors? [scale of 0–10]
- How closely would you say our organization met your expectations? [scale of 0–10]
- How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends and family? [scale of 0–10]
- Do you enjoy working here at our company? [scale of 0–10]
- Do you think that we are prioritizing workplace culture and work-life balance? [scale of 0–10]
- How strongly are you willing to go the extra mile for the company? [scale of 0–10]
- What do you like the least about our organization? [Open-ended question]
Conclusion
Employee satisfaction should be of the utmost importance for employers to grow as an organization, both in size and revenue. Satisfied employees are the ones who are loyal towards their organization and would stick with the organization even in the worst scenarios, as they don’t work out of compulsion and won’t have second thoughts about going the extra mile to help the organization grow.
Anonymous employee survey tools would help you measure your employee net promoter score accurately, which will help your people leaders to improve employee satisfaction and workplace culture. To spot any challenges that your employees are facing in your organization or to make the change that you always wanted to, don’t wait. You can implement a user-friendly employee survey to get deeper insights and develop competitive work culture.