What is Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)? How to Calculate eNPS 2022

Employee Net Promoter score, aka eNPS, is the in-house counterpart to NPS, the famous customer satisfaction metric, and allows for simple and effective measurement of employee satisfaction levels.

The better your eNPS, the more likely you are to save money on employee attrition and turnover. And, the happier your employees are, the better your overall customer experience (CX) will be – it’s a win-win.

The key to effective eNPS lies in both asking the correct questions at the right times, and actually following up on the feedback you receive.

A proactive, eNPS-conscious company not only saves itself from a myriad of headaches, but gives itself a competitive edge with engaged and effective employees.

Let’s get into how your business can achieve this goal. Click through to the section most relevant to your needs.

What Is Employee Net Promoter Score?

Employee Net Promoter score (eNPS) is a loyalty metric that measures how satisfied and engaged employees are with their place of work. It is the in-house counterpart of NPS.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) itself is a customer satisfaction metric thought up by Bain and Co. and Satmetrix in the 90’s. It has gained popularity across industries due to its simplicity. The Net Promoter system includes a simple question with an easy-to-understand response range, which generates an accurate snapshot of customer satisfaction at that specific point in time.

The NPS question is:

‘On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to your family or friends?’

So, in order to turn this inward and measure employee satisfaction, the eNPS question asks:

‘On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our organization to your family or friends?’

By shifting the focus to their experience with your organization overall, you are better able to measure their level of happiness, and detect employees who are unsatisfied in their roles. The best eNPS then reaches out to dissatisfied employees with an open-ended question, and passes the results on to team leaders and HR managers. The entire process should, of course, be conducted anonymously for the sake of employee trust and results objectivity.

How to Calculate eNPS

Calculating the eNPS is calculated in exactly the same way as calculating NPS but with your eNPS numbers.

As with NPS, all of your responses lie within the range of 0 (extremely unlikely) to 10 (extremely likely). From there, you divide your responses into three groups: Promoters (9-10), Detractors (0-6), and Passives (7-8) not included in the equation but still important to consider (see below).

Then, just divide your number of responses that are Promoters and Detractors by your total number of responses (this yields your % of Promoters and Detractors), and subtract Detractors from Promoters as you can see above, and you have your eNPS score.

Why Measure eNPS?

As we touched on before, the point of measuring eNPS is to generate employee engagement. Employee engagement, then, yields two major benefits: better service and increased employee retention.

And the stats back it up. ‘Service’ wise, surveys have found that engaged employees only take 2.7 sick days off per year, compared to 6.2 for those that are disengaged, and that’s just the beginning of bottom line value that satisfied, effective employees provide.

Happy employees also tend to provide better customer experiences, leading to increased customer loyalty to your brand and decreased customer churn, both of which have proven to be more valuable than traditional marketing in the long run.

Greater employee retention, on the other hand, leads to employees with longer tenures who provide better work than a new hire in their spot. It also saves money on hiring managers, hiring services, and new hire training.

6 Tips to Step Up Your eNPS

eNPS, like NPS, is most useful when used as a benchmark increment to measure progress. By gauging eNPS at one point, then taking stock of it again at the end of the quarter, you can see which way your employee satisfaction is trending. From there, you can take the necessary steps to either right the ship or continue improving.

Below are our six most essential tips to improving your eNPS.

1. Understand eNPS vs. NPS

Your employees know your business more intimately than any customer, and this directly affects the average of their eNPS scores. Trends have shown that eNPS scores tend to be less extreme than NPS scores. Customers who have a bad interaction with a business tend to give very low NPS scores. Employees on the other hand, understand the problem and are more likely to be empathetic and give less of an extreme score.

Conversely, satisfied customers are happy doling out 9’s or 10’s, whereas employees, knowing all the red tape they had to run around to achieve this result, may score lower.

2. Targeted Survey Questions

Properly targeting your survey questions with specific, strategic intent is key to eliciting actionable feedback. We are talking about the additional open-ended questions that you will follow your basic eNPS question with.

These follow ups should:

Have a unified objective: This means a singular key decision-maker who makes the final choice so that your objective is clear and not muddled.
Focus on one objective: Similar to above, always ask yourself ‘why’ you’re asking each question.
Tailor your questions to your brand: When you read your own questions, make sure they are tailored to your specific company and its needs, not general queries.
Implement cognitive modeling: This means understanding how the employee answering the survey is processing your questions as they read and think about them.
Send the right signals: Understand the subtext of your questions – if you ask if their superiors check in on them daily, they will assume this is the norm.
Properly scaled: As with our basic eNPS, make sure there are negative, neutral, and positive response options to avoid result skewing.
Benchmarked: If possible, ask questions that can be compared to company and industry benchmarks.
Non-mandatory: Making a survey mandatory defeats its purpose and may draw spiteful or lazy results, defeating the purpose. Also, eNPS results skew to the negative if surveys are mandatory, so making your surveys optional, or even incentivizing responses, can generate a greater number of, and more in depth, responses.
Not overwhelming: Think of your survey takers and don’t make your series of follow-ups overly long or complicated.

3. Employ Proper Tools and Software

Utilizing the best NPS software currently available is a shortcut to success, and the right fit will save you untold time and money.

In the current, competitive online markets, piecing together your own system for NPS distribution and analysis approach is akin to trying to build a spaceship using a hammer and some wood beams- you’re just making it unnecessarily hard on yourself.

Luckily, today’s cutting-edge NPS software is built to work straight out of the box, making the entire eNPS process easier for your company from start to finish. Choose the right eNPS tools to:

Help design and optimize questions and layout
Distribute survey to most significant demographics
Gather and analyze responses
Visualize the results for decision making
Disseminate actionable results to interested parties (HR managers and teams)

4. Make the Most of Open-ended Feedback

While we at MonkeyLearn know how valuable word clouds can be, there are other powerful and intuitive tools you can use to delve much deeper into your data.

Text analysis opens the door to dissect, quantify and deliver actionable results from open-ended responses.

Try our NPS Analysis Template that combines text analysis techniques like keyword extraction and sentiment analysis. to turn archives of text into useful data for forming future strategy.

5. Maximize Your Results Analysis

Using powerful data analysis software such as the MonkeyLearn Suite can take your results to the next level – you’ve gotten this far, now it’s time to let data visualization tools do the work.

This is also where it becomes key NOT to throw out your ‘Passive’ responses. Although the ‘Passives’ aren’t used in the eNPS equation, they can still be mined for their attached survey question data, and help drive a greater understanding of why these employees are caught in the middle.

Plugging all of your data into one, easily viewable place, like the MonkeyLearn dashboard (see below), is the final step in your eNPS process as it allows your team to easily visualize all of your data, and pull what it needs to go more in depth into.

In this example, we are using NPS feedback (not eNPS feedback):

We have filtered the Passive responses that contain negative sentiment in MonkeyLearn’s dashboard – a great example of why throwing out Passives is a misstep. Using machine learning empowered keyword extraction, our AI isolates the negative sections within the Passive responses. By doing so, it identifies problem areas that, if addressed, can actively turn Passives into Promoters.

Notice that ‘Usability’ is highlighted as a topic and ‘Phone’ is the largest word in the word cloud. This could mean that there are some usability issues with watching Netflix on mobile.

6. Take Action

One of the biggest mistakes a given business can make is to collect and analyze its data and then just let it sit. Employees will feel that their feedback is falling on deaf ears, friction points will remain and accumulate and new problem areas will crop up.

Your strategy teams need to listen to your HR and CX teams, or risk treading water. Using employee feedback to make your employees happier is known as a positive feedback loop.

Closing feedback loops, meaning solving them for positive gain, is the most surefire way of creating vocal advocates for your company. Closing positive feedback loops, aka addressing employee concerns, shows your employees that you care about them and are willing to devote resources to solving their specific needs.

This leads to employees that are happier to invest more time and effort in the company.

Takeaways

eNPS provides a metric that can both improve bottom line and make your business a great place to work. It’s an empathetic, in-house option that should be done anonymously and it shouldn’t feel like a chore to your employees.

The key to achieving both of these is transparency, both with your gathering process and with the measures you take in response. If your HR, CX, and other strategic decision makers keep your employees in-the-know you will promote an enviable team-like company culture.

For all the other stuff, and for industry-leading data analysis to back up your eNPS approach, there’s MonkeyLearn.

Schedule a free consultation with one of our data experts, and we’ll make a custom software fit to suit your business. Or, jump right in with a free trial.