eNPS: What employee net promoter score is & why it matters

Engaged employees are key to attracting new talent, decreasing employee turnover, fostering innovation, and increasing your revenue. Gallup research shows that companies with a highly engaged workforce are 23% more profitable and have 81% lower absenteeism and 10% more customer loyalty than others. (1) 

However, many companies are not only failing to engage their employees — they’re failing to even realize their employees are disengaged. According to Leapsome’s Workforce Trends report, HR teams significantly overestimate employee engagement. In fact, only one in three HR leaders track key employee engagement metrics, meaning they’re missing vital information that could improve their company culture. (2) 

Enter: the employee net promoter score (eNPS). Organizations have been using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge customer loyalty and sentiment since 2003, when Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, created this metric. But forward-thinking companies now understand that measuring employee loyalty is just as important.

Just as satisfied customers are likely to recommend your company, while dissatisfied customers leave negative reviews, the employee experience you offer can make or break your reputation. Tracking your eNPS can help you understand how engaged and satisfied your employees are, and see whether your workplace improvement initiatives are working.

In this article, we’ll explain what is an employee net promoter score, why it matters, and how you can start building impactful eNPS surveys — today.

1. Gallup, 2022

2. Leapsome Workforce Trends Report, 2023
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What is the net promoter score for employees?

We’ve all heard about customer NPS — but what is eNPS, exactly? Here’s our employee net promoter score definition: eNPS is an effective, easy-to-implement scoring system that helps companies track employee engagement and measure the impact of their people and culture initiatives. 

Just like the NPS that measures customer satisfaction, an ENPS survey is based on one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work for your family and friends?”

The employee net promoter score gives you insights into how workers feel about your organization. Apple was a pioneer of this metric, sending recurrent employee net promoter score pulse surveys for several years now to determine the likelihood of being recommended as a place to work.

No matter what your score is, eNPS data is meaningful information you can use to build an employee-centered workplace. A good eNPS score can tell you what you’'re doing right, as well as where to focus your efforts for continued improvement. While lower eNPS scores may feel disappointing, you can use them as the first step to understanding what’s not working in your organization — and to turning unhappy employees into engaged team members.
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How to calculate employee net promoter score

The best way to measure your employee NPS is through eNPS surveys with the question “How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work for your family and friends?”. Employees should answer this question on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the least likely to recommend your company, and 10 being the most likely. You can use dedicated survey software like Leapsome for eNPS support. Leapsome lets you send automated recurring surveys — and ask anonymous follow-up questions — to understand exactly why employees would or wouldn’t recommend your organization. 

Once you’ve collected individual eNPS ratings, you can calculate your overall employee net promoter score, which shows you the difference between your happiest and least happy employees.

We’ll explain everything you need to know about measuring eNPS below — but for detailed best practices, you can also check out our playbook on how to measure eNPS.
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eNPS scoring: Identifying promoters, passives & detractors

First, you’ll need to take your eNPS score results and use them to divide employees into three groups: promoters, detractors, and passives.

Anyone who gives a 9 or 10 is a promoter: the people most likely to advocate for the company. Employees who provide a score between 0 and 6 are known as detractors: the most likely to talk negatively about their employer.

Those who give a 7 or 8 are called passives — the calculation doesn’t take their scores into account, but they’re still considered in the number of employees. We’ll talk more about passives later on.
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💡 eNPS formula = % of promoters minus % of detractors

eNPS calculation examples

Example A

Let’s say your company has 30 employees.

10 of them are promoters, 10 are passives, and 10 are detractors.

Passive scores are not considered, but the number of employees should reflect the actual number of people working at your organization — passives, promoters, and detractors.

Now subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, and you’re left with 0% — this means your eNPS is 0.

‍Example B

Your company has 114 employees, and your most recent survey shows 24 promoters (21%), 56 passives (49%), and 34 detractors (30%).

P‍assives are to be ignored in the next step of the calculation.

As 21% (promoters) minus 30% (detractors) equals -9%, the result would be -9.

As a company should aim to have more promoters than detractors, a higher employee net promoter score shows more employee engagement.
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The benefits of eNPS‍

Finding out your eNPS is simple

The number one benefit of employee net promoter score is how easy it is — you could hardly come up with a less time-consuming way to check your employee satisfaction! Managers don’t have to spend hours thinking of the right survey questions, and employees only have to choose their score on a 0–10 scale.
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eNPS has a higher participation rate than surveys

Many of us are familiar with survey fatigue. You get an email asking for five minutes of your time and think, “Ok, fine!” But after submitting the first three answers, you’re taken to another set of questions, which can be pretty frustrating.

With the employee net promoter score, employees only need to answer a single question (“How likely are you to recommend us as a place to work for your family and friends?”), which won’t eat into their schedule.
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eNPS is an easy metric to work with

The simplicity of this metric leaves you with a single number. For this reason, it’s a super easy metric to work with. As an employer, you should track how your eNPS progresses, especially when the workplace is going through changes. Using one variable leaves no room for confusion.
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eNPS is easy to introduce

The process requires only a brief introduction. Even if some employees haven’t heard of the concept before, it’s a straightforward concept to explain: You “just” want to know if your people would recommend your organization as a workplace. What’s so ingenious is that this simple answer tells a lot about employee engagement, but it requires very little from respondents.
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eNPS is cost-effective

It is a financially safe way to check your workforce’s satisfaction levels. Since it only takes one email to kick off, you can measure employee net promoter score with few time and budget commitments. 

Combined, these advantages give you the freedom to check in with employees more regularly, giving you data on whether you’re improving as an organization.
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Things to keep in mind about employee net promoter score

For all its wonderful benefits, it’s important to remember that the method has limitations. Just because it’s an easy metric doesn’t make it an easy fix for low employee engagement.
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eNPS is a starting point — not an end

Your journey as a company attuned to the future of work and employee engagement should be one of continuous improvement.

There’s always work to be done to keep your employees happy. eNPS signals how much work needs to be done, how urgently, and helps you track employee engagement changes as you implement your initiatives.

eNPS is beautifully simple, but inadequate as a standalone assessment

The employee net promoter score doesn’t tell you how committed someone is to the organization, how immersed they feel in their role, or how fulfilled they are at work (although a very high or low score might relate to these areas). If you’re looking to conduct one survey to then sit back and relax if the score is higher than another company’s, think again.

To be truly impactful as a metric, the overview you gain (whether positive or negative) should lead to further exploration. It takes deeper digging to find out the true eNPS score meaning, i.e., the root cause of employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction. That’s why it’s a good idea to use employee engagement surveys, conversations, and feedback mechanisms to enrich your eNPS score.

It’s important to know how to measure employee engagement holistically, through a combination of short eNPS and pulse surveys, real-time feedback channels, longer engagement questionnaires, and effective 1:1 meetings and reviews.

🚀 Access our free set of 72 best-practice questions in 22 categories for employee engagement surveys!

Employees can be content in the workplace without being particularly engaged

It can even happen that an employee enjoys their job because it allows them to disengage — a trait often attributed to passives. But even promoters can feel this way. As Gallup research shows, the employee net promoter score doesn’t express the nuanced differences between various types of promoters:

Nate Dvorak, VP of Employee Experience at Avalara (and former Director of Workplace Research with Gallup), puts it well:

“Fans wear your jersey and cheer from the stands. Players put in extra practice, score points and give every last ounce of energy to win. eNPS tells you who your fans are. Employee engagement tells you who your players are.”

To better understand how employees really feel, you’ll want to combine a range of employee experience metrics, including, but not limited to, the eNPS.  

Remote workplaces face unique challenges — find out how to engage remote employees! 🌍

How to structure your eNPS cycles‍

Timing

Like OKR cycles, sending out an employee net promoter score survey once every quarter yields the best results. It keeps your results regular and gets your employees into the habit of answering the questions while corresponding with other regular business cycles. This format is ideal for detecting changes in satisfaction and how they relate to quarterly patterns.
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Anonymity ‍

‍For an unbiased eNPS, you must give employees the freedom they need to be entirely truthful in their answers. This means not only making your survey anonymous, but actively reassuring participants that their identities won’t be compromised if they give a lower rating. 

Just consider this hypothetical scenario: Your people fear there could be backlash if they were truthful in their scores. You haven’t communicated to them that anonymity is guaranteed. So you end up with a group of detractors who are actually excluded from the calculation as passives, as their actual satisfaction is more like a 4 or 5 than the 7 they submitted.

Honesty‍

Remind employees they shouldn’t give overly positive scores if they don’t feel that way. Some people might feel compelled to provide a “kind” rating to please you rather than expressing their discontent. Tell them you value their honest opinions, even if they’re not favorable.
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Reminders

Given how easy it is for employees to respond to an employee net promoter score question, participation rates should be reasonably high, so you shouldn’t need to follow up as much as you would for longer surveys. That said, it’s worth sending out a couple of nudges just in case the first email caught someone at a bad time. A short email or Slack message should do the job, and an employee survey platform like Leapsome can do all the heavy lifting for you.
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Questions to include in your eNPS survey

An effective way to get more out of your survey and show that you value employee feedback is to include a follow-up question. Just make sure you keep these guidelines in mind when doing so:

• Keep it brief. To be effective, an employee net promoter score survey should remain separate from a longer employee engagement survey. Resist adding more than one follow-up question.

• Opt for an open-ended question. While your main question asks for a specific number, your second question should give employees space to explain their opinions in more detail. Avoid yes/no questions, loaded questions, or overly specific questions.
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‍Examples of eNPS follow-up questions

1. What was the primary reason for the score you gave? 
2. What can we do better as an organization?
3. What is one thing you enjoy about working here? 
4. Would anything hold you back from referring friends to the company?
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‍Follow-up questions to avoid 

1. Do you see yourself working here in five years? [leading to YES/NO answers]
2. Are you happy with our new wellness program? [leading to YES/NO answers + overly specific]
3. What would you say if we were to implement new feedback processes? [too hypothetical]
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eNPS benchmarks & eNPS score range: What are leading companies getting?

Employee net promoter scores can land anywhere between -100 and 100. Because this differs from a percentage scoring system, managers often want to determine what score range is typically “good.” They may ask themselves: “What are the top companies getting as result?” or ”Is it OK to get a score below zero?”

Benchmarks can be quite specific, changing according to industry, company size, and geographical location. If using a platform like Leapsome to calculate your employee net promoter score, you’ll have access to benchmarks, but we recommend you focus on tracking your own company’s score fluctuation: You can figure out what went wrong (in case of a decrease in score) and how to keep up the good work if your employee net promoter score improves between quarters.
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⭐️ Top tip: Don’t despair if your eNPS is much lower than your NPS. As employees’ lives are much more intimately bound to their workplaces than consumers’ lives are to a product, employees are usually more critical when submitting a score, so NPS vs eNPS isn’t a very helpful comparison.

Effective ways to improve your eNPS

So you’ve just done your first round of eNPS questions, and the results are in. Your company’s score is 10. Not bad — but there’s room for improvement. So how can you leverage your employee net promoter score to get a better score next time?
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Measure your eNPS regularly

Having regular employee net promoter score cycles normalizes the process while giving you enough data to find trends. If you send your survey too far apart, and you won’t be able to pinpoint the changes that corresponded to each score.
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Be honest about your eNPS 

Don’t hide your results from your staff. By being transparent about the employee net promoter score of your business, your employees will feel included and invested rather than removed from the evaluation process. Similarly, be courageous in facing up to negative scores. Show employees that you’re committed to improving low results by investing in engagement, rather than sticking your head in the sand.
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Don’t be afraid to follow up with a pulse survey

‍While we’re not suggesting you run longer engagement surveys after every eNPS cycle, we recommend using surveys (a pulse survey, for example) if your most recent score showed a major increase or decrease. Longer or more specific surveys can help you understand why your score is what it is and learn about the things that it relates to, but doesn’t account for.
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Take action 

The best way to ensure you improve your eNPS is to act upon your last one. Make it clear to your employees that you’ve heard, understood, and valued their thoughts. For this reason, we highly recommend that you include that follow-up question (otherwise, you won’t know where action is most needed).
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💡 Learn all about turning survey results into action in this step-by-step guide for HR & People Ops teams‍

Communicate your own investment in the process

Continue to show transparency by talking to your people about your own reaction to the eNPS results and what you intend to do with them. Company culture improves when employees know that their views have a tangible impact on the actions of leadership, and it motivates them to keep taking part in the surveys.
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Why you should use engagement surveys after eNPS

📚 Read our step-by-step guide on how to run employee engagement surveys!

We explained that eNPS should be separate from longer surveys because its conciseness and simplicity make it effective in ways engagement surveys are not.But some things can only be discovered during an employee engagement survey, so don’t forget about them. Again, eNPS is simply a good starting point. 

Imagine you felt unwell and your doctor simply assessed you had a very high temperature, but sent you away without suggesting a course of action or asking questions. That would be a pretty unsatisfactory check-up! At your company, too, check-ups should be thorough, and extra testing may be required. So combine your employee net promoter score surveys with engagement surveys at regular intervals for a detailed picture of your company culture and the steps you should take to nurture it. 

Some topics to explore in employee surveys are:

• Accomplishment
• Autonomy and enablement
• Engagement
• Equal opportunities
• Goal-alignment
• Work environment
• Workload
• Open communication
• Organizational fit
• Psychological safety
• Recognition and feedback
• Striving for diversity
• remote work‍

📝 For a full list of engagement survey topics and best-practice questions, access our free employee engagement template.

Using employee pulse surveys to gauge the pulse of your organization

Besides using employee engagement surveys to dive deeper into issues surface in the eNPS survey, you can also kick off shorter pulse surveys to cater to specific situations.

For example, if your sales team seems unhappy, you might shoot them a department-specific pulse survey asking questions about what they feel is missing. Or let’s say your score is pretty good, but you had many passives and almost no promoters or detractors. Any of these cases would be the perfect opportunity for you to send out a survey designed to find out what’s stopping your company from becoming a top place to work. 

A survey platform with advanced analytics can make the process easy for you and your team, with cycle automations and actionable insights.
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Passives in eNPS surveys

As promised earlier in this article, we’ll take some time to talk about “passive” employees — the people who give scores of 7–8 and that we leave out of the calculation. Let’s bring them back from the sidelines and talk about why passives are still significant.

Passives are a great example of variables left out by calculations as simple as the employee net promoter score. Although they are excluded from calculations, passives are still individuals with complex experiences and opinions. Passives don’t just give sevens and eights when they lack strong feelings about their workplace. They might have done so if they:

• Feel conservative about giving a strong rating
• Would typically give a high rating, but a specific aspect or recent incident is holding them back
• Want to give a low rating, but worry that they’ll be identified and punished
• Are happy to recommend the workplace, but not engaged enough to be excited about it

It’s crucial not to disregard passives, as they can be rich sources of follow-up information. As they land in the middle of your results, passives build a bridge between promoters and detractors; they’re most likely to consider both the qualities they like about the company and things they would change.

Besides, former passives can easily fall into a lower or higher group depending on your actions after the previous eNPS. So if you’re passionate about improving your score, listen carefully to the open-ended answers of your passives, even if the equation disregards their numerical results.
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Measure engagement (including eNPS) with Leapsome’s employee engagement surveys

If you’ve never gathered employee feedback or if you’ve tried to run surveys without specialized tools, implementing new processes can seem intimidating. There’s also no use in running surveys just for the sake of it — after all, the point is to show your people that you care about what they have to say and to gather insights and turn them into action. 

🚀 With Leapsome’s Surveys module, you’ll have access to advanced people analytics with insights that are easy to digest and custom suggestions for high-impact initiatives.

Use built-in expert templates & access industry benchmarks

‍Get started with your engagement initiatives within minutes with our pre-built, best-practice question packs. Benchmark the results for each question against similar organizations — all done automatically.
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Discover employee engagement trends

Take a deep dive into any category or question to get a clearer picture of employee engagement at the workplace. Measure and track the success of employee engagement initiatives by observing changes in responses.
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Quickly spot problem areas — and know how to take action

Leapsome’s analytics provide a powerful overview of areas that need the most attention. You’ll be able to visualize problem areas, filter them by team, manager, seniority (and other filters) and access recommendations developed by our in-house organizational psychologists.
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Understand how employees feel 

It’s essential to round out your eNPS data with in-depth employee engagement insights. But identifying patterns and actions from open-ended comments is notoriously difficult. 

Leapsome’s advanced AI-powered sentiment analysis generates meaningful summaries of survey comments and gives actionable suggestions for your next steps. You’ll be able to quickly share insights on how your teams are feeling with company leaders to get their buy-in for key employee engagement initiatives.

‍And there’s so much more you can do with Leapsome!‍

We’re big advocates of employee satisfaction and engagement at Leapsome. It’s the reason we exist: to help employees feel fulfilled in their workplaces and help companies create a great culture.

eNPS is a great way to start your journey towards high employee engagement, and with the support of engagement surveys, you can support your employees all year round, wherever they are. We hope this blog post has inspired you to use (or improve!) your employee net promoter score.

Need a helping hand? Check out our Surveys module, which provides all the customizable question templates, best practices, and in-depth people analytics to take your eNPS further and help you understand the inner workings of your organization.
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💪 Dig deep into survey results for more impactful insights

Leapsome’s Surveys module visualizes qualitative and quantitative data and recommends next steps so you can take easier and more effective action.

👉 Book a demo‍

FAQs

How often should an eNPS survey be conducted?

We recommend quarterly pulse surveys to measure eNPS. That means asking just the promoter question or a short set of 10-15 quantitative questions, including eNPS follow-up questions.
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How does eNPS contribute to overall employee engagement?

eNPS itself is an indicator of engagement and retention levels. It can only meaningfully contribute to engagement levels if your company sources initiatives to improve them.
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What types of questions are asked in an eNPS survey?

The question to calculate eNPS is, "How likely are you to recommend [company] as a great place to work?” Apart from this question, you can include follow-up and engagement survey questions.
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How do I interpret and use the results from an eNPS survey?

The first step to interpreting your eNPS survey results is calculating your eNPS score. You can then look at benchmarks for your industry and company size to identify if you fall on the lower or higher end of employee engagement. Suppose your eNPS falls below your company benchmark. In that case, we recommend sending a follow-up survey to identify pain points and challenges within the organization that negatively affect engagement and need to be improved.