An Introduction to Employee NPS Scores: A Key Employee Engagement Metric

Understanding your organization’s employee engagement levels can be daunting, with many different metrics and approaches to consider. The Employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measurement meant to serve as a single, clear, top-line indicator of employee engagement levels. It is built around employee loyalty and experience and measures how willing employees are to recommend their workplace to family or friends. Moreover, its score has been found to track positive client experiences and organizational success closely.

Benefits of Employee NPS

Rather than a complex series of questions or measurements, eNPS is praised for being easy to administer and understand. It is administered as a single question and generates an easy-to-understand score between -100 and +100. Its simplicity avoids any issues with survey fatigue and makes it easy to distribute routinely. Moreover, the widespread use of eNPS makes it effortless to benchmark against similar organizations or industries. These advantages make it the perfect starting point for understanding your organization’s employee engagement levels.

Key Metric for Employee Engagement Levels

“eNPS” is a takeoff of the original phrase “Net Promoter Score,” a metric used to measure customer satisfaction and engagement. The original NPS metric has become a cornerstone of measuring brand engagement. Similarly, the eNPS has been adapted to measure employee engagement precisely.

The Employee Net Promoter score is derived from the question, “How likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work?” measured on a 0-10 point scale. The goal is to ascertain the difference between your happiest and unhappiest employees.

Even though responses are scored on a 0-10 point scale, respondents are placed in one of three categories:

Promoters (9-10)

These employees represent the most loyal and enthusiastic members of your team. These are the people who are overt ambassadors of your organization and stay faithful even in tough times. Highly engaged employees see a future in the organization and care about its success. Because of this, they are willing to put in extra effort and encourage others to do the same. Understanding what drives these feelings is critical to your organization’s success.

Passive Promoters (7-8)

These employees are broadly satisfied with their experiences in your organization but need to be active promoters. When forced to consider things as a whole, they can identify one or two things they are not happy with off the top of their heads. Their feedback can be precious as they may be close to moving in one direction or the other.

Detractors (0-6)

These employees are dissatisfied to the point where they may lower the performance of those around them through apathy, disengagement, or frequent negative sentiments. Any employee whose response falls below a minimal satisfaction level is considered a detractor, whether a one or a 6. They often have multiple issues at the top of their minds when considering their experiences at an organization. These employees may have already disengaged and stopped providing feedback. They need to be actively reached out to understand the issues they are experiencing.

The Calculation

The NPS calculation compares these three categories to yield a single score by weighing the percentage of “Promoters” in an organization against the percentage of “Detractors.”

The Employee NPS score results from your Detractors subtracted from your Promoters.

For example, if your organization has 25% Promoters, 40% Passive Promoters, and 35% Detractors, your eNPS score would be -10.

Getting Started with eNPS

What makes Employee NPS so elegant and easy to use is also what makes it inadequate as a lone metric when trying to understand employee engagement. The NPS score may shed light on how your employees feel, but it does not explore why they think the way they do. In addition, over time, it is generally a slow-moving score as it represents the cumulative effect of many small changes. These changes are essential to examine yet impossible to scrutinize through the lens of a single score on its own.

What makes Employee NPS so elegant and easy to use is also what makes it inadequate as a lone metric when trying to understand employee engagement. The NPS score may shed light on how your employees feel, but it does not explore why they think the way they do. In addition, over time, it is generally a slow-moving score as it represents the cumulative effect of many small changes. These changes are essential to examine yet impossible to scrutinize through the lens of a single score on its own.