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The Employee Net Promoter System

The Employee Net Promoter System

The Net Promoter System® for People unleashes the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of your workforce to fuel productivity and innovation.

Very few companies can achieve or sustain high customer loyalty without a cadre of loyal, inspired employees. Inspired employees are enthusiastic about their work and their company. Their enthusiasm is contagious and rubs off onto other employees and customers. Employee promoters power strong business performance because they provide better experiences for customers, approach the job with energy—which enhances productivity— and come up with creative and innovative ideas for product, process, and service improvements.

In short, engaged employees play a vital role in creating customer promoters.

Leaders, therefore, have good reason to want to earn the enthusiastic loyalty of their employees. This means understanding employee inspiration levels and how to improve them. The traditional once-a-year employee survey process, however, simply doesn't meet the needs of most companies.

As a result, Net Promoter practitioners have developed an approach to employee inspiration based on the Net Promoter System itself. They identify and strive to improve workplace characteristics that support an energetic, enthusiastic, and creative workforce ready to earn customer loyalty. To reinforce the culture provided by the Net Promoter System, they align their approach to collecting and acting on employee feedback. They explicitly tie together their customer system and their employee Net Promoter System by measuring Net Promoter Score and employee NPS (or eNPS).

Net Promoter® for People

Only 19% of employees feel truly satisfied and inspired. We focus on unlocking your employees’ discretionary energy to increase their engagement—and deliver memorable customer experiences.

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Measuring eNPS

Measuring eNPS

Most adopters of employee Net Promoter Scores, such as Apple, have settled on one central question to determine employee inspiration: "How likely would you recommend this company as a place to work?" However, eNPS is an emerging science.

Bain & Company has found that the classic "likelihood to recommend" question is the best predictor of retention, but a second question can yield even more information as the best predictor of energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. The second question is typically a variant of this: "Please indicate your level of agreement with the statement, 'My job inspires me.'"

Employee feedback must be kept confidential to encourage honest feedback. That means no follow-up conversations as would be typical in a customer NPS feedback request. But, that doesn’t mean you should ask about everything; in the same spirit as customer NPS, eNPS surveys should only be a few questions—that is, significantly shorter than the typical annual employee survey.

The primary purpose of these eNPS requests is to help teams and team leaders recognize and prioritize issues at the team level.

Because eNPS is meant to be part of an ongoing operating system that can support coaching, action, and continuous improvement, companies often adjust the frequency of the feedback to ensure a steadier stream of input than is provided by traditional annual employee surveys. Most commonly, companies request eNPS feedback monthly.

Typical non-Net Promoter annual employee satisfaction surveys generate a large amount of data that often requires weeks or months of effort to analyze and understand before any action can be contemplated.

In the Net Promoter for People's eNPS approach, the feedback requests are short, and emphasis is placed on sharing (disguised) feedback as quickly and as fully as possible with supervisors and leaders. This supports virtually continuous focus on experimentation and action at the individual, team, function, and enterprise levels, with rapid feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

From Feedback to Action

From Feedback to Action

Net Promoter for People makes the people side of the business far more transparent. It supports learning and experimentation. Companies can discover which departments represent liabilities and which offer potential best practices. They can see which team leaders are doing the best job and which ones need more coaching. Ultimately, companies can also understand which elements of employee sentiment and inspiration most affect customer loyalty and advocacy so they can identify ways to improve both.

However, leaders should heed one note of caution: Employee Net Promoter Scores can be substantially lower than customer scores. Employees often hold their company to even higher standards than do customers. So before you initiate the employee survey process, be ready to process some tough feedback and respond with appropriate action.

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We offer unparalleled analytic and organizational tools for the Net Promoter System. Together, we can create an enduring customer-centric culture.