What is eNPS & How Can You Improve it?

eNPS Meaning

Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) is a method for measuring employee loyalty and satisfaction. It is the in-house alternative to Net Promoter Scores (NPS) – which is a method of measuring customer loyalty.

To gauge your eNPS you will ask your employees a single question – e.g. “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or acquaintance?” You can then send out an additional question for context– e.g. “Can you tell us why?”

All answers are based on a 0-10 scale and the scores are split into three groups:

• Promoters: Engaged and happy employees who will likely stay with your company, refer others to join and become brand advocates (9-10 on the scale).

• Passives: Satisfied employees who may recommend you, but are not highly engaged or happy (7-8 on the scale).

• Detractors: Unhappy employees – high risk of them leaving and negatively speaking out about your business (6 or below on the scale).

To work out your eNPS score you subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. Passives are discounted, as they are considered as neutrals. For example, if you have 80% Promoters and 10% Detractors, then your NPS is 70. The score will be between -100 to +100. Simple right?

Benefits of eNPS

All feedback can help you improve business.

The detractors within your team will offer key insight into the areas that require focus. This can range from issues related to pay, the working environment, or even leadership. By actioning the (realistic) feedback and communicating the results, you will combat everyone’s concerns and likely see massive improvements to retention rates.

However, your promoters can also help. Their scores and feedback will indicate how to further strengthen your services and processes.

These improvements are evidenced by a case study on retention by Zane Benefits, who conducted a monthly eNPS survey: “We’ve found it invaluable. It allows us to see how employees feel about adjustments we are making to our software, about our service, and about how we conduct business. Most importantly, it tells us if our employee retention strategy is working over time.”

Provides a Benchmark:

eNPS is a widely accepted measurement method and is growing in popularity. This means the possibility for benchmarking is also growing. There are many ways you can dissect the data. You may want to draw comparisons against your competitors or even use it internally to see how different teams or departments compare to each other.

Easy to Interpret the Data:

One of the main benefits of eNPS is the simplicity of the process for the sender. You can easily send out your survey question to your employees via email, intranet or a website post.

On top of this, anyone can measure the results. You don’t need to hire a team of data analysts to bring the data to life for you. The calculation is very intuitive and can all be done easily with an excel spreadsheet. Not to mention there isn’t that much data to interpret, as you’re only sending out one question!

User-Friendly:

Completing lengthy surveys can be a chore for your employees. By sending out one main question and an optional follow-up question, you are barely taking up any of their time -but you are still gathering the insights you need to make key decisions.

This simple, speedy system is great for employee experience, which is strongly linked to increases in customer experience and satisfaction. This is further highlighted by Founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, Timothy R. Clark – “Highly engaged employees make the customer experience. Disengaged employees break it.“

Strategies to Improve Your eNPS

Improving your eNPS is the process of converting as many employees as you can into promoters. By listening and responding to everyone’s feedback, you will create positive change and earn their loyalty.

Achieving employee loyalty has a wide range of benefits. You will create a culture of engagement, productivity and trust. On top of this you will boost retention and benefit from attracting a bigger talent pool when recruiting.

Put Me, Myself and I First:

Sometimes we can spend so much time and energy on worrying about how we compare to other companies, that we completely overlook what’s important… improving the employee experience to help create engaged, happy and productive employees.

Even if you’re top of the pile and get better results than the industry average, it doesn’t mean you should stop innovating your processes and services. If you truly want to stay ahead of your competition, then it is important to focus on your own business and create an environment where people want to work.

By coupling the eNPS method with real-time pulse surveys you can gather valuable insights from staff and clients to help streamline your services, make smarter business decisions and create a healthier bottom line.

Get Your Staff on Board:

Improving your eNPS score means you are actively making unhappy employees happier. This directly benefits everyone. It’s important that everyone understands this and gets behind the initiative.

To generate engagement for the programme, you must make efforts to build up interest. Put up posters, send out emails, communicate the results and proposed action plans. Create case studies and distribute them to everyone and get your managers to create excitement for the programme within their teams. Anything you can do to drum up interest and momentum will help ensure the programme is a success.

Respond to Everyone’s Feedback:

If you want people to buy into the programme then it is essential to respond to their feedback. Your employees are taking the time to fill out the surveys, so you must reciprocate this and respond. How else will they know you are reading their feedback and creating action plans off the back of it?

Respond to both the good and the bad feedback. Thank people for taking part and let everyone know that you will be thinking of strategies to build on successes and remedy concerns. Responding to the feedback will highlight they are central to the success of the initiative. This will boost response rates, increase loyalty improve your scores.

Be Honest:

Your employees will likely be aware when there are problems within the business. People can be very intuitive and will lose respect for you and your organisation if they feel that issues are being sugar-coated or completely swept under the carpet. It is therefore key to be open and honest with your communications. Your employees and business partners will respect your honesty, which will generate trust and engagement in the programme.

Don’t shy away from the mistakes your business has made, or the troubles it is going through. Address everything and highlight the action plans and initiatives you have created to overcome these setbacks.

Communicate With Your Detractors:

If you want to see a better eNPS, you must engage with your detractors and address their concerns.  No one likes hearing criticism, but if you want to make business improvements, then you will take it on the chin. You may not agree with all the feedback, but you must accept that it is their reality, create action plans and communicate your plans to everyone.

It is important to note that very few people complain for the sake of it… so take all criticisms and suggestions seriously. Be open-minded and take the feedback as a valuable learning experience that can create lots of happy employees, who can be transformed into promoters.

Give Your Promoters Attention Too:

When it comes to improving your score, your first instinct may be to ignore your promoters and focus on converting your detractors. Don’t do it! Your promoters will still offer plenty of insight and failure to act and respond to their feedback will guarantee they don’t stay promoters for long.

Ask them how you can further improve the working environment for them and whether there is anything you can do differently. Everyone needs to be included in your process for the initiative to be a success.

Continuously Track Your Score:

You may have a high percentage of promoters, successful strategies and a great eNPS – but that doesn’t mean you should put your feet up and get complacent.

It is essential to continuously track your score and keep making improvements and adaptations to your strategy. You may have people onboard now, but that won’t last forever. Employee loyalty can be destroyed much quicker that it can be built…

Your people are the foundation of your business. Therefore, ensuring their loyalty and boosting retention rates should be at the top of your list.

Your eNPS in isolation may not be enough to improve all aspects of business – but it will help. By combining eNPS with pulse surveys and other business metrics you can generate actionable data around employee experience and combine it with other key metrics to generate a holistic view of your business.