How to Measure eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)

TL;DR: Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS for short, is a tried-and-true metric for measuring employee engagement. Measuring eNPS is easy: Just send out a one-question pulse survey, then follow a simple formula to calculate your score.

The simplicity of eNPS is exactly what makes it so appealing — it’s a quick and easy way to “take the pulse” of your company. But for best results, combine your eNPS surveys with longer engagement surveys to get an in-depth picture of what’s going on.

What is eNPS?

Perhaps you’ve heard of eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), a popular metric used by many companies to measure employee engagement. But what exactly is this metric? Where did it come from, and why should you use it?

The precursor of eNPS is NPS, or Net Promoter Score, a metric that’s been used to measure customer satisfaction for decades. It was created in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company. Over time, NPS was adopted by many businesses around the world and evolved into new types of metrics — including eNPS.

Companies have long understood the importance of customer satisfaction. When satisfied customers recommend your product to friends and business partners, this strengthens your brand and grows your user base, creating a “virtuous cycle”: Satisfied customers lead to more satisfied customers.

The same principle applies to employees. Satisfied employees will perform better and help you build a reputation as a great place to work, enabling you to attract even more great talent.

Besides helping build your talent brand, employee engagement also has a positive effect on many business outcomes. According to Gallup, these include productivity, turnover, and profitability.

Along with your existing employee engagement survey program, eNPS is a quick, easy, and effective way to measure engagement in your company. So how can you successfully calculate and measure eNPS?
‍

How to calculate eNPS

To calculate your company’s eNPS, send your employees a short survey with the question “How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work for your family and friends?”; this question should be answered on a scale of 0 to 10 — with 0 being the least likely to recommend your company, and 10 being the most likely. Then, divide the answers into the following three groups:

Detractors: Employees who give an answer between 0-6 are known as detractors. They have a negative opinion of your company.‍

Passives: Employees who choose a 7 or 8 are called passives. They have a neutral opinion.‍

Promoters: Employees who answer with a 9 or 10 are promoters. They are very satisfied and can help you actively promote your company.

Finally, follow this simple formula to calculate your score:

eNPS = % of promoters minus % of detractors

‍

How to measure eNPS

As straightforward as it seems to calculate your company’s eNPS with a simple formula, you won’t receive results without the relevant data. And this is the tricky part: The process of measuring eNPS is much more than a simple equation. It’s everything that comes before that. This playbook provides a step-by-step guide to setting up engagement surveys and collecting data that will help you measure your eNPS correctly.
‍

🚀 Want to measure your company’s eNPS effectively?

Leapsome offers automated features to make this process quicker, easier, and more efficient — helping you act upon the results and improve your workplace.

👉 Learn more

‍

Photo of a group of employees sitting around a big table, working on their laptops.

‍

eNPS is a good place to begin when measuring employee engagement at your company. Whether you’re already running employee engagement surveys or just starting with your survey program, eNPS is an excellent complement to your other data-gathering efforts.

Since eNPS surveys are easy to run, low-cost, short, and require a low time commitment from employees, you can get started with them right away.

A platform for sending out pulse surveys

To measure eNPS, you’ll need a way to send out regular pulse surveys to your people. If you do this using spreadsheets instead of a dedicated pulse survey tool, things can get messy and disorganized quickly. Consider using an employee survey platform like Leapsome to easily administer surveys and analyze your data, all in one place.

For the most accurate results, keep your eNPS surveys anonymous (and make sure participants know they’re anonymous).

Encourage employees to give their frank and honest opinion.

Because of their short format, eNPS surveys typically have high participation rates. To get those participation rates even higher, you can send out a reminder or two for employees to complete the survey. Make sure the deadline is clearly communicated.

Keep your eNPS surveys short and make sure they’re administered separately from your longer employee engagement surveys.

An employee engagement tool like Leapsome can help you collect survey data in an organized, accurate way, without needing to use multiple spreadsheets.

1. Enter your eNPS question

To get started with measuring your eNPS, the first step is to use your survey software to create your first eNPS survey.

eNPS surveys are a type of pulse survey — short surveys designed to “take the pulse” of your company. As mentioned before, they usually consist of one rating skale question: “How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work for your family and friends?”
‍

2. Add a follow-up question

You may want to add a quick follow-up question after your eNPS question to gain a deeper understanding of the scores you received.

For best results, try to make this second question short and open-ended. After all, the point of an eNPS survey is to be quick and easy. Use a simple question, like “What was the primary reason for the score you gave?”

By using a follow-up question, you can get a better understanding of your eNPS survey results. This question can help clarify what individual employees mean by their scores, since people may rate you differently depending on their personal understanding of the rating system.

For example, you might have two happy employees. One rates you a 10 and the other gives an 8 or a 9, with the thought that there’s always room for improvement. And of course, if many employees are giving your company low scores, you should want to know why, so you can figure out the source of the problem and fix it.

If you choose to use a follow-up question, be sure to avoid overly specific or leading questions. For example, don’t ask something like “Do you feel unhappy with our new wellness program?”, since this assumes the scores your employees gave have to do with the wellness program rather than something else. Specific questions are better suited to a longer employee survey.
‍

3. Send out your eNPS survey

eNPS surveys should be sent out at least once per quarter. The more frequently you send out surveys, the more closely you’ll be able to track changes in employee engagement.

If your company is growing fast or if you’re in a fast-moving industry, this is even more important — major changes often come with fluctuations in employee engagement.
‍

4. Review your data

Once you’ve sent out your surveys and received responses, it’s time to analyze your data. Have a look at the eNPS scores you’ve received and organize them into the three categories: detractors, passives, and promoters.
‍

5. Calculate your eNPS

Now that you’ve figured out the number of detractors, passives, and promoters you have at your company, it’s time to calculate your eNPS score to understand how your company is doing with employee engagement.

Here’s the formula again:

‍eNPS = % of promoters minus % of detractors

Let’s say your company has 50 employees. 12 are promoters, 20 are passives, and 18 are detractors. Here, 24% of your employees are promoters, and 36% are detractors. By subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, you get an eNPS score of -12.

‍So what exactly does this score mean? A higher eNPS represents a better result, while a lower score represents a worse result. In the example above, the company with an eNPS score of -12 had a slightly higher percentage of detractors than promoters, meaning they still have some work to do on employee engagement. eNPS scores vary from -100 to 100, with 0 being a “neutral” score.

‍

Follow-up best practices for measuring eNPS

Use longer employee engagement surveys alongside eNPS

While eNPS is a great metric to use for a quick snapshot, don’t forget that it’s just a starting point. To get a full picture of how you’re doing with employee engagement, you’ll need to run more in-depth surveys alongside the eNPS.

Sometimes, an employee feels satisfied but not necessarily engaged in their work. They may give you a higher eNPS score but aren’t a high performer. To understand these nuances, it’s important to dig a little deeper with a longer employee engagement survey.
‍

Send out eNPS surveys regularly

Sending out at least one pulse survey per quarter to recalculate your eNPS and keep results up-to-date has the added benefit of getting your employees into the habit of filling out questionnaires. The quarterly rhythm also corresponds with regular business cycles, making it easy to evaluate how any changes in your eNPS relate to quarterly patterns.
‍

Share survey results with employees

Make sure your employees know their concerns are being heard and acted on. Regularly share survey results with them and always provide an action plan for how you’ll address issues.
‍

⭐️ Don’t know where to start with your surveys? 🧘 Take a deep breath. We’re here for you! Start by reading our step-by-step guide to running an employee engagement survey.

And did you know there’s even more you can achieve with employee surveys? Check out our playbooks on running diversity surveys, onboarding surveys, and exit surveys. 😉

‍

Measure eNPS with Leapsome

Leapsome is the only platform that closes the loop between performance management, employee engagement, and learning. With all your people data in one place, the software is giving you unmatched people analytics and insights.

Easily measure the pulse of your company culture with engagement surveys, track changes in customizable dashboards, and get actionable, data-driven recommendations for increasing your employee engagement.
‍

User interface of the Leapsome people enablement platform, with engagement survey results

If you’ve calculated your eNPS score for the first time and you’re feeling disappointed, take a deep breath. eNPS scores tend to be lower than customer NPS scores, since employees typically hold their companies to an even higher standard than customers do. Any score above 0 is considered a “good” or “acceptable” eNPS score. If you’re looking for a more detailed vision, you can use the following scale to get an idea of how you’re doing:
‍

Less than 0: Needs improvement‍

0 to 30: Good‍

31 to 50: Excellent‍

Over 50: Exceptional

Keep in mind that these numbers aren’t set in stone. Scores may vary a lot between industries and in different types of companies: A score in the low negatives (closer to zero) may not necessarily be a cause for concern.

eNPS scores may even be culturally relative, depending on where your company is located; some say that Europeans tend to give lower scores than US-Americans, for example, because of differences in the way grading works in their respective education systems.