Employee Satisfaction Today [Infographic]

Employee engagement has been a hot topic for several years now, and many organizations are trying to measure and improve it. We’ve simplified this process with our product, BambooHR® Employee Satisfaction. By focusing on employee satisfaction and the factors that influence it, organizations can understand what may be fostering or inhibiting engagement among their employees—and then get to work on making the right changes.

How Does eNPS Work?

Typically, an organization first sends an employee Net Promoter Score® (eNPS) survey to its employees, asking how likely they are to recommend the company as a place to work. The employees then answer the question on a scale of 1 to 10 and explain their answer in a comment. Those who select 9 or 10 are considered promoters, 7 and 8 are neutral, and 6 and below are detractors.

The final score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters, giving you a score between -100 and 100. The higher the score, the more promoters your organization has, and the more satisfied your employees are.

What Is a Good Employee Net Promoter Score?

Naturally, when you start assigning scores to anything, you want to know what makes a good score or a bad score. How does your organization measure up? Is your eNPS what it should be?

We recently analyzed the anonymous eNPS data of 194 organizations that use BambooHR® Employee Satisfaction to answer that question and others. Here are some of our most important findings.

Average Employee Net Promoter Score

Across all participating organizations, we found the average score to be 53. That means most of the organizations have more promoters than detractors, suggesting their employees are more satisfied than not.

However, the average participation rate is only 54 percent. When organizations only get to hear from half of the workforce, they are missing out on a lot of valuable feedback. Harvard Business Review writes that many employees don’t respond to surveys like these “because they don’t believe management will do anything with the answers. A 2014 survey found that 70 [percent] of employees do not respond to surveys and nearly 30 [percent] of them think they are useless.”

If that’s the case, then doing nothing with employee input is more damaging than never asking for it in the first place. In order to improve participation rates, and ultimately measure employee satisfaction and engagement, organizations must be willing to take employee feedback seriously. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to implement every suggestion; it does mean that you need to be transparent and communicative so employees know they’ve been heard.

Leaders are More Satisfied than Other Employees

When we examined all employee ratings (their answers on a scale from 1 to 10), we found those in leadership roles were much more likely to be promoters. On the surface, this idea makes sense: Those who have more control over how the organization runs would likely be more satisfied. However, we were surprised by just how large the difference is between leadership and the other groups.

This spotlights an important question for every organization: do your employees experience the same culture at every level and on every team? It can be difficult to spot culture issues when they are contained within one team or department. That’s also where eNPS surveys can come in handy. Gathering feedback from every part of your organization can help you identify gaps in the employee experience.

Longer Tenure is Linked to Greater Satisfaction

In analyzing employee tenure alongside the number of promoters, we found that the newest employees and most veteran employees tend to be the most satisfied. The excitement and enthusiasm of a new job likely play a part in this trend, and you can see that the honeymoon phase seems to end around the second or third year, where the number of promoters dips the lowest.

Employees who have worked at a company for several years are also more likely to be promoters. This makes sense, as workers don’t normally stick to a job they don’t like for more than a few years. If an employee is willing to work 16 years or more at one organization, they probably enjoy their job and feel highly satisfied.

However, this could also suggest that a dip in satisfaction is normal after an employee’s first year and that a bounce-back is possible. Perhaps greater satisfaction comes with time.

People at Work Make or Break the Employee Experience

Finally, we looked at some of the most commonly mentioned topics within the eNPS comments, both among promoters and among detractors and neutrals. The most common topic for both groups was People at Work. Despite the importance of compensation, benefits, job stability, autonomy, and everything else, the people at work seem to be the most decisive factor in whether or not an employee feels satisfied at work.

Harvard Business Review came to a similar conclusion in their research on employee engagement. Between two employees with similar job situations, the primary difference in their engagement was whether or not they felt like they were part of a team.

Organizations, then, should prioritize hiring, retaining, and promoting the right people who will create a healthy culture and positive work environment if they want to keep their people satisfied.

Download the Infographic

Research on employee satisfaction and eNPS is in the early stages, but these data bring up some important points for organizations to consider. To view the rest of our findings and understand how your organization compares, download the full infographic here.

eNPS® is a registered service mark of Bain & Company, Inc.