Loyal and engaged employees are essential for a company’s ability to not only sell a product or service, but also to create brand ambassadors that will promote it as a great place to work.
If you want to grow your business, you need happy and proactive employees who will constantly go above and beyond, provide exceptional customer experience, make informed decisions, and come up with innovative ideas for business development.
Besides, plenty of hard evidence proves that happy employees lead directly to better performance and higher profits. Thus, it actually pays off to invest in employee satisfaction.
Employee Net Promoter System® or eNPS is becoming increasingly popular among different companies, but what is it and how should you use it to boost employee satisfaction?
eNPS Methodology
Employee Net Promoter Score® (eNPS) is a derivative of the popular Net Promoter System framework. Originally a customer satisfaction metric measuring the likelihood of recommending a company, it was later used internally on employees instead of customers to evaluate their engagement.
Apple, Rackspace, and JetBlue were among the first companies that adopted eNPS. They recognized the importance of employees being promoters themselves, since only an employee that genuinely believes that the service they are selling is the best in the market can turn a customer into a Promoter.
The key benefit of this type of survey is that it requires just two or three questions, keeping the burden on the employee low. Although many adopters of eNPS (including Apple) have settled with only one main question,
“On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?”
there were many other companies, which found that asking a second question would yield even better results:
“What is the primary reason for your score?”
This second “why” question is where the real power of eNPS gets unleashed. Employees can provide accurate, unbiased qualitative feedback in their own words, without being confined by predefined survey answers.
Employee Net Promoter Score is then calculated by segmenting respondents into three categories based on their opinion of your company:
- 9-10 – Promoters: These are happy and loyal employees who love your company and are likely to refer it to their friends.
- 7-8 – Passives: They have little enthusiasm about your company and are not likely to recommend it to others.
- 0-6 – Detractors: They are unhappy with the company and are likely to damage your brand reputation with negative word-of-mouth.
From here, working out your eNPS is just a matter of subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. Hence, follow this calculation formula: eNPS = (% of Promoters) – (% of Detractors)
After this, you’re left with a positive or negative score between -100 and 100.
It’s important to mention that, as a rule, employee Net Promoter Scores are substantially lower than customer scores. Employees are strict critics and often hold their company to even higher standards than customers. So don’t be surprised if your eNPS is lower than your NPS.
Loyal employees are more productive
Whether you’re managing a startup or a big enterprise with thousands of employees, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that happy employees will go the extra mile to improve the organization.
A study by economists at the University of Warwick found that happiness led to a 12% spike in productivity, while unhappy workers were 10% less productive.
If employees feel attached to your brand, they will come up with creative and innovative ideas and go beyond their everyday duties to achieve common goals.
Loyal and engaged employees make better decisions, excel at managing their time, and possess great self-motivation skills. In addition, happy employees make better leaders.
High job satisfaction leads to lower costs
As mentioned, loyal employees are more productive, which results in increased profitability.
Kenexa Research Institute revealed that organizations with highly engaged employees achieve twice the annual net income of organizations whose employees lag behind on engagement.
Another interesting fact is that money is not necessarily a motivation factor for engaged employees. Of course, you have to pay them an appropriate salary, but the happiest and most engaged employees feel they work for something more than just money.
It’s the intrinsic motivators they care about, things like the sense of accomplishment for doing the job to the best of their abilities or the sense of meaningfulness for accomplishing something of real value – something that matters in the big picture.
Well-executed eNPS programs should be considered an investment and not an expense. The insights you’ll get from them will prove to be priceless with time.
Happy employees stay with you longer
Higher employee loyalty reduces employee turnover. Many companies spend a tremendous amount of time and money investigating the causes of the turnover rate due to significant business costs of replacing employees.
On average, it costs about 20% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them. For example, the cost to substitute someone earning $50,000 annually – which covers three-quarters of all workers in the United States – would be $10,000.
There are many factors affecting this, among which are:
- Cost of hiring, such as advertising, interviewing, and hiring;
- Cost of onboarding a new employee, including training and time management;
- Lost productivity: it might take 7-8 months for a new employee to reach the same productivity;
- Cost of time for the unfilled role;
- Cost of customer satisfaction at risk due to poor customer service.
To avoid these costs, you need to know how your employees feel about your company and continuously measure your eNPS to prevent them from leaving.
Employee loyalty is tied to customer loyalty
Imagine you’re working as a customer service agent with a ton of other people. Every day, you sit in a small office with dim light, your manager never shows any signs of gratitude despite your hard work and extra hours, you are exhausted, and nobody cares about how you feel.
This is the face that represents the company and talks to clients. And this is one unhappy face.
While you can’t please everyone, you want your employees to be at their best, care about your company and its customers, and for that, you have to put yourself in their shoes. These are the people who work on or sell your product, and it’s only when they are promoters themselves that they can turn a customer into a Promoter.
Happy employees provide better customer service. According to Monetate, 73% of consumers would consider purchasing from a brand again if they had a superior customer experience. At the same time, John Goodman, author of “Strategic Customer Service”, found that customers who are delighted by superior service are 10-30% more loyal than customers who have not been delighted.
And there is a lot of work to do since only 38% of U.S. consumers and 46% internationally feel that employees they interact with truly understand their needs.
Treat your employees like you want to be treated and value them as highly as your customers, not only because it will lead to more productivity or profitability but because this is the right thing to do.
Track eNPS to increase employee satisfaction
If you haven’t considered implementing eNPS in your company, then perhaps you should. When implemented as part of an ongoing operating system, it can help team leaders identify and prioritize issues, as well as work on continuous improvement.
These surveys can be conducted at different stages of employment, such as:
- right after training
- performance review
- work anniversary
- one-on-ones
eNPS surveys provide quick feedback on what employees like and dislike about your organization. These results are easy to interpret and serve as a useful predictor of growth.
When shared with supervisors and team leaders, the feedback gathered from eNPS surveys leads to better team management and helps to diversify product development strategies.
It also enables tracking employee satisfaction by office or department. This feature is especially valuable for large corporations with several offices scattered around the globe. By filtering this data, they can better understand what is working and what’s not for this specific department or office.
Overall, eNPS is a short and efficient survey that can help you bridge communication or organizational barriers, letting you capture honest, unbiased feedback.
Conduct anonymous eNPS surveys with Retently
Engaged and loyal employees lead to higher customer satisfaction, lower costs, more ideas and faster growth. To put it in numbers, according to Gallup, unhappy employees cost the world a whopping $8.8 trillion in lost work. That’s almost 9% of what the world earns annually.
But when companies do get it right and their teams are engaged, they see great benefits. They get 10% more loyalty from customers, earn 23% more profit, and see an 18% boost in sales work. Plus, they don’t lose as many employees – up to 43% less in some cases.
It all shows how important it is for employees to be invested in their work. This understanding is essential as we look into the Employee Net Promoter Score. eNPS is the tool that will help you measure employee satisfaction and take appropriate steps to improve it.
Still, there is an important thing to keep in mind when considering eNPS surveys: they should be anonymous. While it’s tempting to know the name of the indignant employee, only confidential answers will encourage honest feedback.
Retently makes it easy to keep your employee anonymity intact while being able to get the valuable feedback you need to recruit and retain your talent.
You can always ask employees to expand on their answers. If someone comes up with a brilliant idea, give them the possibility to provide details. If an employee leaves negative feedback, ask them why they feel this way and take appropriate action. Retently allows you to add as many questions as necessary to get the needed results. Make sure to test it out in a free trial.
Greg Raileanu 
Alex Bitca 
Christina Sol 
