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

Understanding your organization’s employee engagement level can be a daunting task, with many different metrics and approaches to consider. The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a measurement meant to serve as a single, clear, top line indicator of employee engagement. 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 closely with positive client experiences and organizational success.

Rather than a complex series of questions or measurements, eNPS is praised for being easy to administer and easy to 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 administer on a routine basis. 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 level.

Explaining the Employee Net Promoter Score

The term “eNPS” is a take off 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. Similar in use, the eNPS has been adapted to specifically measure employee engagement.

The Employee Net Promoter score is derived from the single 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 actually 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 loyal 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 key to your organization’s success.

Passive Promoters (7-8)

These employees are broadly satisfied with their experiences in your organization, but there is something holding them back from being active promoters. When forced to consider things on a whole, they can probably identify one or two things they are not happy with off the top of their heads. Their feedback can be very valuable as they may not be far from 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 amount of satisfaction is considered a detractor, whether it be a 1 or a 6. They often have multiple issues that are top of mind 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 in order to understand the issues they are experiencing.

The Calculation

The eNPS 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 is the result of your Detractors subtracted from your Promoters.

For example, if your organization has 25% Promoters, 40% Passive Promoters, and 35% Detractors, then 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 eNPS score may shed light on how your employees feel, but it does not explore why they feel 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 important to examine yet impossible to scrutinize through the lens of a single score on its own.

The eNPS score is best applied as a starting point for further exploration. Once your organization has a broad view of how employees feel, it can begin to drill down into the employees’ experiences in more detail. With the correct follow-up tools, you can begin to identify what aspects of employee experiences are driving and/or hurting employee engagement. When you address these specific issues over time, the eNPS score will then reflect these changes as more engaged employees identify as Promoters and Passive Promoters.

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