The connection between consumer experience and revenue is a well-researched, fully accepted business premise. But what about the link between employee experience and revenue growth? ENPS is one metric you can use to start this discovery for your organization.
What’s the business case for measuring employee loyalty? Your Employee Net Promoter Score can be used to compare snapshots of employee satisfaction over time.
Alongside other insights, ENPS can be used to inform a number of game-changing strategies, such as:
- Keep your best talent – don’t gift them to the competition.
- Decreasing staff turnover means a smaller spend on recruitment and training.
- Spend less on resolving HR issues that come from staff problems. This is also a prevention is better than cure situation in terms of reducing the risk of public ex-staff complaints damaging your brand.
- Productivity rises when everyone has everything they need to do their job – perhaps your employees are missing key things that are hampering their ability to work at their maximum rate.
- Positive employee attitudes lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction, which boosts revenue overall – a very pleasing domino effect.
ENPS is a good place to start evaluating how valuable employee loyalty is to your bottom line.
Who’s going to argue against a 50% increase in revenue?
Recent research published by the Harvard Business Review concludes: “…customer-facing employees and revenue are strongly linked, the authors find. In their research, stores whose customer-facing employee base was more tenured, had more experience in prior rotations, was higher skilled, and was more skewed towards full time, generated a 50% increase in revenue.”
This particular piece of research was exploring how employee experience impacts the bottom line of a one company, across 1,000 customer-facing stores. But the same business benefits can be enjoyed by B2B businesses.
Data-driven research that proves the link between employee attitudes and financial success is powerful. It gives real impetus to HR budget requests for employee-based resources because ROI can actually be worked out. Staff are no longer seen as another cost to be constantly trimmed down. But just as vital an investment as marketing campaigns and product development.
The employee loyalty, customer satisfaction and subsequent revenue connection is obvious. The most forward-thinking businesses use ENPS and other research insights to optimize all areas of their business.
What is ENPS?
ENPS stands for Employee Net Promoter Score and it’s a measurement of employee loyalty. ENPS is a survey with only 1 question: ‘On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend your organization as a good place to work?’
Quite a different feel to the familiar client NPS, isn’t it? There’s a lot more emotional investment if your best friend asked you this, compared to ‘would you recommend your vacuum cleaner?’
Once you’ve gathered your answers, you collate your results into 3 different categories.
- 0-6: Detractors. These employees are very dissatisfied with their work situation, are spreading negative opinion and are probably looking to leave in the near future.
- 7-8: Passives. Employees that are relatively happy, but aren’t hugely emotionally invested in the company.
- 9-10: Promoters. Employees that enthusiastically share their loyalty to your company.
To work out your overall ENPS score, you need this equation:
% promoters – % detractors = ENPS score as a %
For example, if you have 55% respondents that are promoters and 20% detractors, your ENPS score is 35%.
But what does that ENPS mean?
Your ENPS score could be anything within the range of +100 to -100. Generally, a good ENPS score is anything between 10-30%, with anything over 0 considered adequate. Anything over 30% is an exemplary ENPS score.
Benefits of Employee Net Promoter Score
There are several benefits to using employee NPS. You can usually be certain of a high participation rate, as there’s only 1 question asked in a familiar format. ENPS by itself doesn’t require any additional costs, you can just send it by usual company email and analyze the results yourself. It gives you an overall picture of what your employees feel about the company at that moment in time. It’s a very easily understood metric to track over time and its similarity to the client NPS makes it even more attractive to use.
What’s missing from your ENPS analysis?
The most glaringly obvious thing that your ENPS analysis won’t tell you is why your employees feel this way about your company. There’s no place for them to explain their reasons why they love the company, or why they’re actively looking for a new role. So there’s no indication of what to optimize, or where there’s a problem that needs urgent action.
Although employee net promoter score uses the same principle as the consumer NPS, it’s really not the same question. Advising someone to hire the same builder as you, or buy the same toaster, has much less weight than suggesting they apply to work at your company. So while the math is the same, is the comparison between the two really that valuable?
Even a positive ENPS score in isolation doesn’t give you a real sense of employee engagement. Perhaps they find it really easy to get the job done with minimum effort – and that’s why they’d recommend it. Not the highly motivated, loyal reasoning we’d like to assume from an ENPS of 35%. But unless you dig into the ‘why’ of each individual, you’ve only got an assumption.
How NewtonX helps you really understand your employees
There are ways for you to get more from your employee loyalty research using ENPS. You can simply add a Likert scale, or more open follow-up questions. But for decision quality data, you need custom findings that build ENPS into more complex research.
NewtonX creates custom research for the subtleties of your organization using strategic customer segmentation research capabilities and applying them to your staff. Using a separate market research company often makes employees more comfortable to express their honesty. Sharing their thoughts and feelings with a separate entity gives them added assurance that their responses are confidential and guards against possible negative repercussions of telling truth to power.
We don’t just deliver raw data. NewtonX market research consultants analyze your findings thoroughly and present you with actionable insights. It’s easier for you to see the positive and negative patterns across the different departments, sections and locations of your company. You won’t just understand the ‘why’, you’ll have reliable evidence to support any subsequent action.
For example, one of our top tech clients came to us to find out why they were struggling to retain and attract top talent. We implemented a 3-pronged approach to the research and their response was: “Overall fantastic project. The interviewees were even better than we imagined in the quality and relevance of the people interviewed, both in qual and quant. The insights generated from the research were so clear, our roadmap and action plan wrote itself.”
Just as with any other element of your organization, your custom findings about employee loyalty can have broader application across your business. NewtonX insights guide strategy that connects extensive employee listening to build an internal culture platform, to the performance of the brand externally. This seriously improves how everyone articulates your USP to everyone – your target audience, current employees and clients, and prospective employees and clients.
