Employee Net Promoter Score does not Capture Employee Engagement

“Measure what is important, don’t make important what you can measure” – Robert McNamara.

Employee engagement is critical to organizations’ success, but can be difficult to measure. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a commonly used metric of customer loyalty and engagement that in recent years has been repurposed to measure employee engagement. While the Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) is a valuable metric, which can capture loyalty to company and leadership, it fails to show the complexities that surround employee engagement. In our consulting work at Sitoumus, we have developed simple tools that can measure diverse elements of engagement and provide a roadmap for organizational change.

Introduced by the Harvard Business Review in 2003, NPS has become the most widespread tool to measure customer experience. It is is a simple calculation based on the question: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague?” As increasing research shows the effectiveness of NPS in measuring customer engagement and loyalty, it is understandable that this same approach would be used to try to measure employee experience as well. Employee Net Promoter Scores (ENPS), have spread across the HR and employee engagement space, and are now commonly recorded by many organizations when surveying employee experience and workforce well-being.

Employees are not Customers

ENPS has many advantages – it’s easy to collect, analyze, and interpret. It also gives employers an idea about the state of their employees’ attitudes. However, since this measure is being used beyond its original purpose, it is important to think about the advantages and limitations of using it on employees. From the company’s perspective, the motivations and value-drivers for customers and employees are and should be fundamentally different. Put simply, employees are not customers. This means that while NPS can accurately capture customer engagement, it can only tell part of the story when it comes to employee engagement.

Customers who are satisfied, repeat business, and promote a product or service are highly engaged with that brand. There’s little else a company could want from their customer base. However, employees who simply show up, complete their own work, and speak highly about their employer may not be fully engaged. Real employee engagement requires employees to actively seek to improve processes, relationships, and the organization as a whole. In this sense, full employee engagement can be seen as a much higher threshold than full customer engagement. Although this is a higher standard, it comes with an even higher return on investment. 

Employee Engagement Decoded

When a company is able to fully engage its employees, they will become champions for company initiatives. This can mean exponentially higher success in the company’s sales, development, and customer experience efforts. When companies launch initiatives with fully engaged employees, they won’t need to coax buy-in from employees who feel detached from the outcomes of the firm. Instead, there is a real sense that all players are pulling in the same direction – that a win for the company means a win for everyone involved. In this sense, investment in employee engagement has a compounding effect that can be felt throughout an entire organization.

Employers need simple and accessible tools to assess employee engagement, which is partly why ENPS has become so widespread in employee surveys. However, overly simple measures often hide underlying issues that can seriously affect the employee experience and have real financial consequences to the firm. In our research we have found that ENPS is highly correlated only with employee engagement to their company and leadership, and has a much lower correlation with other aspects of engagement, such as individual work, teams, or customers.

What employers really need is a metric that is straightforward, but also captures employee engagement on a multi-dimensional level. Using an approach that measures employee attitudes towards the company, leadership, teams, customers, and their individual work is the best way to accurately capture the state of employee engagement. This approach has the added benefit of providing a roadmap to improvement. By understanding which aspects of the working environment employees find most disengaging, employers can target their efforts in the way that will generate real returns for the company and its employees alike.