Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): A Complete 2024 Guide

The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a single, powerful metric derived from one core question: how likely are your employees to recommend your company as a great place to work?

It’s essential for measuring employee engagement because it captures advocacy and evaluates workplace satisfaction.

This guide provides a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know about eNPS: what it is, how to measure it, and how to use it to create a highly engaged workforce.

What Is eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)?

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) measures employee engagement and loyalty in businesses and organizations.

It’s derived from the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology that helps you assess customer satisfaction and loyalty.

eNPS tracks your employees’ willingness to recommend their workplace to others as a great place to work.

It’s usually deployed as an employee survey that asks a single question: “How likely are you to recommend your company as a great place to work?”.

This way, you can quickly measure employee satisfaction and identify employee engagement trends in your company.

Here’s how it works: Employees respond to the eNPS survey with a score from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Based on this score, you’ll categorize them into three groups:

• Promoters (9-10): These are your vocal advocates, the highly satisfied employees who are happy to recommend your company.
• Passives (7-8): The neutral group. These employees might be content but aren’t likely to actively promote your company.
• Detractors (0-6): These are the unhappy or disengaged employees.

Top Benefits of Tracking eNPS

Measuring the employee net promoter score offers numerous advantages.

While it’s very easy to implement, it generates important insights into employee loyalty and produces valuable employee feedback.

Here are the main reasons why you should regularly measure eNPS and what it can help you achieve:

✅ Measure employee engagement: eNPS taps into a core indicator of engagement—employee advocacy. A high eNPS signals a highly engaged workforce that’s not just content but actively enthusiastic about recommending your company as an employer.

✅ Identify areas for improvement and bottlenecks: Analyzing the breakdown of Promoters, Passives, and Detractors in your eNPS surveys provides valuable insights into employee sentiment. You can then follow up with open-ended questions to dive deeper and understand the “why” behind the scores.

All this helps you pinpoint areas where your company creates a positive employee experience and spot opportunities to improve employee satisfaction.

✅ Boost retention and improve recruitment: Engaged employees are happier and more likely to stay with your company, reducing costly employee turnover. A high eNPS also helps you build a strong employer brand and attract top talent.

✅ Improve customer satisfaction: Research suggests a strong correlation between engaged employees and satisfied customers. Happier employees are more likely to go the extra mile and create a better customer experience for their clients.

✅ Enable benchmarking: By continuously tracking your eNPS over time, you can benchmark your score against industry standards or your own historical data.

Finally, the beauty of eNPS lies in its simplicity. It only takes a couple of clicks to set it up and is very easy to analyze, especially if you leverage specialized survey software.

How to Measure and Calculate eNPS

Measuring the employee net promoter score is simple and straightforward.

1️⃣ Start with creating your eNPS survey. As we already established, you only need to ask one question that can sound like:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work to a friend or colleague?”

Use employee survey software like Honestly to set it up in a couple of clicks:

Once you’ve collected survey responses, it’s time to analyze the results.

2️⃣ Start by categorizing the responses:

• Promoters: Scores of 9-10
• Passives: Scores of 7-8
• Detractors: Scores of 0-6

3️⃣ Finally, calculate the score. The actual employee net promoter score is calculated using a simple formula:

• eNPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

The resulting score ranges from -100 to +100. A higher positive score indicates greater employee satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a Good Employee Net Promoter Score?

There’s no universal “good” eNPS, as benchmarks can vary by industry and company.

For example, HubSpot’s eNPS is 74, Apple’s eNPS is 18, Johnson & Johnson’s eNPS is 25, Revolut’s score is -36, and Ryanair’s score is -15.

However, here’s a general guideline:

• Negative score (<0):
  • Indicates more Detractors than Promoters and suggests serious issues with employee satisfaction and engagement that require immediate attention.
• Neutral score (0-10):
  • Represents a balance between Promoters and Detractors. Indicates that while your company is not going through a crisis, there is room for improvement in employee satisfaction and loyalty.
• Positive score (10-30):
  • Reflects more Promoters than Detractors. Shows that the majority of employees are satisfied, but there are still areas for enhancement.
• Strong positive score (30-50):
  • Indicates a high level of employee satisfaction and loyalty. Suggests that employees are generally happy with their workplace and are likely to recommend your company to others.
• Excellent score (50-70):
  • Showcases outstanding employee satisfaction and loyalty. Demonstrates that the company is doing a great job of building a positive work culture and environment.
• World-class score (>70):
  • Represents exceptional employee satisfaction and loyalty. This indicates that the company is among the best at creating an engaging and supportive work environment.

Remember, the raw eNPS is just one piece of the puzzle. You need to understand the drivers behind the employee responses to make eNPS surveys actionable.

To achieve this, follow up with open-ended questions and analyze patterns within the response categories.

For example, you could ask about:

• Specific reasons why you’re employees are frustrated (or vice versa)
• Their stance on the recent company changes
• Your employees’ satisfaction with various work-related areas—from the workload and leadership, to benefits and office premises

Then, make sure to use survey analytics to spot trends and make sense of your data.

Here’s how analytics dashboards look in Honestly:

It can even help you analyze text responses without spending hours of your time. Its AI features go over employee feedback and generate comprehensive summaries.

Example of an employee net promoter score

💡 For instance, if you have 42% Promoters and 38% Detractors, your eNPS will equal 4% (42%-38%).

This means that your employees are 4% more likely to recommend your company as a great place to work.

It also indicates that you have a neutral eNPS score - while not immediately alarming, it shows that there’s a lot of room for improvement.

When to Measure eNPS?

There are various use cases for strategically incorporating eNPS surveys throughout the year. For example:

✅ Regular intervals: You can establish a routine for measuring eNPS - for instance, quarterly or biannually. This approach allows you to track trends in employee sentiment over time.

✅ Following important events: Send eNPS surveys after major changes like the introduction of new policies, mergers, or leadership transitions.

✅ New hire onboarding: Use eNPS to collect valuable feedback from new employees’ initial experience with your company.

✅ During other ad-hoc events: You can schedule eNPS surveys after other important employee interactions, such as company exit or training.

However, it’s important to avoid creating survey fatigue and look for a balance. Launching surveys too often can have the opposite effect and demotivate your employees.

Best Practices for Launching eNPS Surveys

To achieve success, you’ll need to ensure maximum survey participation and create a strategy based on the survey results. Here are some tips for making your efforts more efficient:

1. Set Clear Goals

It’s always a good idea to launch surveys with a clear objective in mind. Specify your goals and design a roadmap as your first step.

For example, you could measure overall employee engagement, track employee sentiment after important changes, or assess your company culture.

2. Encourage Honest Feedback

It’s important to guarantee anonymity for your employees.

Emphasize that employee responses will stay confidential to collect realistic feedback, both positive and negative.

Survey software tools like Honestly simplify this process - all responses remain anonymous even when you download the results as a spreadsheet.

Then, send a follow-up survey to understand the motivations behind your employees’ responses.

This can help you find sources of frustration and figure out what works well in your company.

3. Promote Participation

It’s important to generate excitement around your eNPS surveys.

First, you’ll need to clearly communicate its purpose and show how you’ll use this feedback to improve employee experience.

Then, choose a platform for distributing your surveys. It’s best to use several channels to increase reach and get as many employees involved as possible.

For example, tools like Honestly let you promote surveys via email, mobile app, or QR codes.

You can also use additional methods like posting on Slack channels and mentioning the survey during company meetings.

4. Look for Hidden Insights and Patterns

Calculating the overall employee net promoter score is the essential first step. However, you can dive even deeper.

Look for hidden trends and patterns to get even more value from your data. For example, you can compare and segment survey data by department, team, location, or other relevant factors.

This will help you identify areas where employee sentiment might vary and allow you to come up with efficient improvements and takeaways. For example, you may find that a specific department has a consistently lower eNPS than others.

Honestly’s trend charts and heatmaps can help streamline this task. You can use them to easily compare data across different groups and segments.

Analyzing their responses and conducting follow-up surveys can help you pinpoint the root cause and develop strategies to address the situation.

5. Close the Loop and Act on the Feedback

Remember that the whole goal of conducting employee surveys is to develop a strategy based on the feedback you collect.

First, communicate the overall eNPS survey results with your teams. Highlight positive aspects and pinpoint areas for improvement.

It’s important to demonstrate your commitment to creating an action plan and sticking to it.

Then, conduct regular check-ups and track how eNPS is changing in your company.

How to Increase Your eNPS

A healthy employee net promoter score showcases that a company has a strong culture and happy employees. Here are a few tips for improving your eNPS.

✅ Focus on Internal Improvements

Don’t get too caught up in comparing your eNPS to industry averages. Yes, it’s important to benchmark, but it’s not enough.

Instead, focus on improving the employee experience within your organization.

Conduct additional qualitative and quantitative research such as employee engagement surveys and interviews to get to the bottom of the challenges affecting your organization. Such challenges could include micromanagement, lack of transparency, or inadequate training.

✅ Create Excitement around Surveys

Generate engagement and momentum for your eNPS surveys. Make sure everyone in your company knows your goals and understands how your actions will drive positive change.

Share proposed plans and communicate the benefits of conducting surveys across the organization.

For example, Honestly managed to create a tradition of sending weekly pulse surveys. Everyone has access to the dashboard with anonymous results, and our employees see this as a way to have a voice and improve together.

It’s also a good idea to involve executives and managers to help you spread the word.

✅ Transform Negative Feedback into Action

Analyze your Detractors’ concerns and create a plan to address them.

Their feedback can become essential to improve employee engagement in your company.

For example, you can use your follow-up surveys to analyze negative comments and identify recurring themes.

Are there common complaints about workload, communication, or lack of training? Focusing on these issues can help pinpoint areas needing improvement.

If your survey platform enables this, segment the Detractor responses by department or team. This can help identify specific areas within the organization that might be struggling.

✅ Encourage Your Promoters

It’s important to focus on “converting” Detractors, but you should also pay attention to your Promoters.

Keeping your most loyal employees engaged is extremely important.

For example, you can implement a company-wide recognition program that allows employees to publicly acknowledge their peers’ contributions.

For instance, at Honestly we have the “Warm shower” tradition, where the goal is to give someone compliments. The employee that gets the warm shower turns off their camera and listens to how other team members discuss the things they appreciate about them.

It’s also important to understand what works well and create a positive work environment. Think flexible work schedules, wellness programs, and opportunities for professional development.

✅ Ensure Continuous eNPS Monitoring

Having a high (or average) score doesn’t mean you can let go and relax. Employee loyalty and sentiment can change quickly, and it’s important to introduce ongoing monitoring.

Introduce regular eNPS surveys, track your progress over time, and add necessary fixes.

Top eNPS Limitations and How to Address Them

eNPS is a useful metric, but it has certain limitations and can’t become the only tool in your employee listening program.

#1: eNPS focuses on a single number

The eNPS surveys alone do not provide enough context or actionable insights.

How to fix it:

• Add open-ended follow-up questions to gain deeper insights into employee sentiment

#2: eNPS creates a potential for employee biases

Just like with any employee survey, there’s a risk of response bias. For example, some employees might choose a higher score than their true sentiment, particularly if they feel pressure to portray a positive work environment. Or vice versa.

How to fix it:

• Consistently communicate the importance of honest feedback and how you’ll use it to improve the employee experience
• Guarantee anonymity of all survey responses

#3: eNPS might lack actionable insights

eNPS is most valuable when paired with other employee feedback tools. In fact, it’s the only way you can get the full picture.

How to fix it:

• Use eNPS in combination with more in-depth employee experience surveys (e.g.,employee satisfaction surveys)
• Add frequent pulse surveys to the mix and track employee sentiment over time.

What is The Difference Between NPS and eNPS

NPS (Net Promoter Score) and eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) are both surveys that measure loyalty and advocacy, but they serve different purposes:

✅ NPS focuses on your customers. It asks one question: “Would you recommend our brand/product/service to others?”. This metric helps you understand customer satisfaction and assess their experience with your product.

→ A high NPS suggests strong customer loyalty.

✅ eNPS asks employees a similar question: “Would you recommend our company as a great place to work?”. This helps understand employee satisfaction and engagement.

→ A high eNPS suggests strong employee loyalty.

Conclusion

The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a useful tool for tracking and boosting employee engagement and loyalty.

It offers a quick way to assess employee morale and check if your workers would recommend your company as a good place to work.

A high employee net promoter score suggests a happy and engaged workforce, which can also lead to improved business outcomes and a stronger employer brand.

However, eNPS doesn’t provide an answer to everything and requires using other feedback tools for employee listening.

Are you ready to get started?

Launch employee surveys of any kind and collect actionable insights with Honestly—a powerful solution for understanding your employees and improving workplace engagement.