eNPS: Answering Questions about eNPS v. Bridge Engage
What is eNPS?
eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), like NPS for customer satisfaction, will help differentiate promoters from detractors. eNPS usually asks the question, on a 0 to 10 point scale, “How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or a relative?” The eNPS score is then calculated by taking the percentage of detractors and subtracting it from the promoters’ percentage to give you an eNPS score from 0-100.
Using Bridge Engage for eNPS
When considering measuring employee engagement, you may wonder how to make Engage work using the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) format. Perhaps the better question is – should you? Should you use eNPS if what you want to measure is employee engagement?
The 2 Big Problems with eNPS
There are two problems inherent to using eNPS for employee engagement:
You don’t get enough information to take action
It’s not a measure of engagement
Problem #1
eNPS will tell you to what degree employees will recommend a company to friends or relatives as a place to work. It doesn’t give you any more information about why they are promoters or why they are not. Even for NPS (for customer satisfaction), NPS is only a starting point. You’re forced to dig deeper to take action and find out more about what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what you can do about it. You’re left with an even bigger question, which is, “Now what?”
Problem #2
eNPS lets you know very quickly and simply if employees would recommend the company to friends or relatives. There are many reasons people may or may not do that, but this doesn’t measure their productive motivations on the job. Gallup, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on employee engagement, has found that you have to know employees’ productive motivations on the job to determine engagement. Whether or not an employee would refer a friend or relative says nothing about their productive reasons.
Driving Engagement
If you’re going to try and measure engagement, you should get as much information from the initial survey as possible. Bridge Engage does an excellent job of that with the opportunity for employees to provide a Likert response and give more information regarding their response.
Once you have detailed information, it’s up to an employee’s direct supervisor to impact those productive motivations. Another statistic from the Gallup research is that as much as 70% of employee engagement variance is attributable to an employee’s direct supervisor.
Engage will provide managers with information they need to impact engagement, primarily if they use the more comments option with each question.
Gallup’s research on employee engagement led them to these elements as driving employees’ productive motivations on the job:
- Knowing what’s expected
- Having materials and tools to do their job
- The ability to do the things they do best
- Receiving regular praise or recognition for doing good work
- That their supervisor or someone cares about them as a person
- That someone encourages their development
- That their opinions count
- That they can draw a connection between the mission of the company and their job
- That their fellow employees are committed to quality work
- That they have a best friend at work
- That sometime in the last six months, someone has talked to them about their progress
- That they have opportunities to learn and grow
While you may want to use eNPS for simplicity, make sure you know what it’s telling you. If you want to know if people are engaged and the factors impacting their engagement, you’ll need more information.
About Bridge
Bridge is a Learning & Performance platform that uniquely combines learning management, career & skill development, and performance management, all in one solution. With Bridge, you can turn stale and ineffective learning & performance review programs into a seamless, dynamic, and engaging experience for employees and managers alike. Used by more than 800 companies worldwide, Bridge helps companies achieve their strategic people development goals by facilitating connection, alignment, and growth across the entire organization. Learn more at www.getbridge.com.
