Ask an HR Expert: How to Make the Most of Your eNPS Surveys

According to a global survey report by Slack, 82% of employees cite happiness and engagement as key productivity drivers. But how do you know what your employees honestly think about your company? How do you know what to change to create a better workplace?

Measuring employee satisfaction can answer those questions. It helps you understand the most pressing employee concerns and what you can do to improve the employee experience and your business outcomes.

Employee satisfaction and engagement go hand in hand. Satisfied employees are often more passionate about their work and invested in the company's success, and they can also contribute to an attractive brand image for job candidates. In contrast, unhappy employees are likely more disengaged and cost the global economy $8.8 trillion.

In our Ask an HR Expert series, we chat with the HR pros who help make BambooHR a great place to work. In this article, Cassie Whitlock, our former Director of HR, explains how to get the most from your BambooHR® Employee Satisfaction with eNPS® survey data and create effective HR strategies that improve employee satisfaction.

What is eNPS?

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is an evaluation system used to assess how your workforce feels about your company. This survey method for the workplace is based on the Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS®), which was originally developed by Fred Reichheld at Bain & Company to gauge customer satisfaction.

A BambooHR eNPS survey asks employees a simple question: How likely are you to recommend your organization as a place to work? Employees anonymously respond on a scale from zero to 10, and the system categorizes the results. Each category says something different about the employee experience at your company:

• Promoters (scoring 9 or 10): These are happy, highly engaged employees who likely see your business as a great place to work.
• Passives (scoring 7 or 8): Also called neutrals, these employees are content enough in their roles but not overly engaged.
• Detractors (scoring 6 or lower): These employees aren't as likely to recommend your business, which means they're at risk of leaving or becoming a negative influence.

Once the system tallies the ratings, it calculates a final score between -100 and 100 that reflects the majority opinion (% promoters - % detractors = eNPS).

What is a good eNPS?

Good eNPS results are typically between 10 and 30, and anything higher is considered fantastic. So, the closer to 100 you are, the more promoters your organization has. If your score is on the lower end of the spectrum, your workforce could have mostly detractors—this means it's time to dig in a little deeper and find out how you can improve the employee experience.

Regardless of how they answer the first question, BambooHR eNPS surveys also ask your employees a follow-up: What changes could your organization make to be a better place to work? These responses are also anonymous, which helps people feel more comfortable being open and honest about where the company can improve. HR leaders can see the overall score and how it trends over time in their HR software, making it easy to benchmark the data and gauge the impact of any changes you've made.

See our software in action.

How often should you send out a BambooHR eNPS survey?

Survey timing is key in ensuring that you'll gather useful data. We recommend sending it out a minimum of twice a year, which is how often we do it at BambooHR, but no more than once a quarter. Otherwise, you’re liable to get survey fatigue, which will negatively affect the quality and quantity of responses.

Be mindful of how often you’re sending surveys or asking for feedback from your employees overall. If you ask so often that you don’t have time to act on it, employees may lose trust that you're listening.

Is there a bad time to survey your employees?

Be thoughtful about when the eNPS survey goes out relative to the cyclical pressure in the company. For example, it wouldn’t be wise to send out a survey the same week you hand out bonuses, during your busy season, or amid a hot sales cycle. Instead of measuring your employees’ opinion of the business’ overall trajectory, you could end up skewing your results and only measuring their reactions to recent events.

And while you may need to understand how these affect your employees, that’s not what the BambooHR eNPS survey is for. So, be sure to send it out during more neutral times to yield the most accurate results possible.

How do you encourage employees to take a BambooHR employee satisfaction survey?

As with any data, the more information you can gather on employee satisfaction, the better. Ideally, this means you want a lot of employees to answer your Employee Net Promoter Score questions. However, doing any kind of overt encouragement can backfire. From an employee perspective, the most important part of the survey is that it’s supposed to be anonymous. If you put pressure on them to fill it out, suddenly it doesn’t feel so anonymous and optional anymore.

We learned this lesson early on at BambooHR. We tried to encourage more participation by sending out more email reminders and having managers mention it during their daily standups. However, we got pushback from employees because they felt they were being checked in on and monitored on their participation.

While unintentional, we knew we needed to fix this. We came together as a senior leadership team and decided on an acceptable benchmark of participation: 60% to 75%. This benchmark encourages us to worry less about participation levels if we’re at or above it, and it helps us react if we end up not hitting it. Keep in mind that coming in below your expected participation benchmark is feedback in and of itself and could point to potential issues. For example:

• Employees don't trust HR or management.
• Something's preventing people from participating (e.g., they don't have time during your busy season).
• Employees have shared ideas before but don’t feel heard.

Ultimately, your strategy for using eNPS with BambooHR should be to think of it as a tool with a specific purpose—measuring employee satisfaction—and to use it in combination with other resources and metrics. In the end, you shouldn’t put unnecessary pressure on one survey to measure every aspect of employee experience or your business.

How do you balance listening to employees and visibly making changes with the overall health of the organization?

First, determine your strategic framework for the eNPS survey: Why and how are you going to use it? At BambooHR, the “why” is that it’s meant to be a company-wide satisfaction measurement tool, and the strategic responsibility for responding to the data and feedback lies with the senior leadership team. The “how” is that we look for company-wide patterns. Sometimes that’s expressed in different ways in different departments, but we’re mostly looking for trends across the board.

Once you've gained clarity about the why and how, communicate these sentiments to your employees. They need to understand that the survey isn’t a democratic tool for directing the business—it’s impossible to act on everyone’s ideas. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore anything that’s not echoed by the majority. Sometimes, we see one-off comments worth responding to, either because it’s an urgent problem that we must take care of or it’s just a good idea that no one's thought of yet.

How do you make company decisions based on the scores?

It’s a natural human tendency to fixate on the numbers, especially when it comes to detractors and what people are saying you aren’t doing well. However, these distractions can steer you away from the bigger picture.

When measuring employee satisfaction with BambooHR, your main concerns should be identifying company-wide patterns and finding ways to grow your strengths. Focusing on strengths can have a greater impact than if you focus on weaknesses (as long as the weaknesses aren't extreme). Here are three simple tips for digesting the data:

1. Listen to promoters, and be mindful of detractors.

Your promoters are the most engaged people in your workplace, and they can give you a good idea of what your strengths are. However, if a majority of your employees are detractors, that’s obviously a serious issue you need to address.

2. Note where employee experiences differ.

If you get mixed messages within the same department or team, ask yourself what you need to do to create a more consistent employee experience. For example, if your employees provide positive and negative responses about the same topic, you might need to look into manager behaviors and double down on values so that everyone's doing their part.

3. Think about how to turn neutrals into promoters.

Don’t dismiss your neutrals—there's a good chance they can be swayed. Small changes have the potential to make a big difference and turn passives into promoters. Examine the feedback to learn the most common pain points.

How often do you go back to analyze past data?

We don’t go back and look at previous survey data in between the times it’s submitted. This is a conscious decision we’ve taken at BambooHR because of the reasons we’re asking for the data. We asked, our employees answered, and now we need to prove we’re listening to them by acting on the feedback they give us.

This means we spend our time between surveys executing changes and investing in solutions. Some changes are ongoing commitments, such as communication or professional development. Other changes might be one-and-done solutions, like providing reusable silverware employees can use during lunch breaks.

What should you keep in mind when making changes?

After taking the time to do a survey, your employees will be waiting to hear from you. One key step you don't want to skip is communicating the changes you've enacted during this response phase. Otherwise, you might get the same feedback over and over again because employees might not read a particular change as the one they've asked for.

For example, some employees asked us for a pool of dedicated sick leave, but we decided to add more PTO instead. That way, they'd have fewer restrictions on how they can use their time off. We made sure to communicate that there was now enough PTO to cover the sick time they'd asked for to ensure our employees felt heard.

Key Takeaways

When measuring employee satisfaction with BambooHR, think about your purpose and goals for performing the survey, and interpret the data with the big picture in mind. Look for organization-wide trends, avoid getting sidetracked by detractors, and look for new ways to grow your strengths.

Remember: Communication is a big part of the equation. Let your employees know what you’re doing to improve things and that their opinions truly matter. That way, you can measure your impact more effectively, and your employees will feel more valued and appreciated in the end.

Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered U.S. trademarks, and NetPromoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.