Want to Improve Your eNPS?

By Eric Knauf

All organizations, large and small, tech and non-tech, thriving or not, experience a change in employee engagement.? In some cases, the chance is over time and imperceptible.? In others, the change is stark.? We experienced a significant transformation at a tech company. After a substantial restructuring and having to say goodbye to 50% of the organization, our eNPS hit an all-time low of -73.?

The Talent and Culture team first began a two-day proceeding, during which they expressed their candid feelings about the company and the restructuring, and they held nothing back. Borrowing tenants of Appreciative Inquiry, I initiated a program with the talent team, allowing them to “get the poison out.” We spent an entire day citing frustrations, concerns, and challenges that the team was experiencing with management and executive leadership, including me. The feedback was brutal and painful to see. However, on the second day, it was a different story. By leveraging transparency and active listening, we focused on what the best version of us looked like. We sought conditions that allowed us to be our best and identified a sustainable path forward.

We expanded a modified approach for the entire company.? The team implemented Voice of the Employee, focus groups that allowed employees to voluntarily express their feelings about the company’s recent decisions and direction. This program allowed all employees to address their grievances and has already begun leading to long-term, systemic organizational change.

Feedback from the program included:?

• “I’ve been through multiple reductions in force across my career, and they’re never easy — and I think we still have wounds that we are healing from that day,? but when I look back and reflect on that time, in my mind, it was a mark of maturity for our company.”
• “We spent the first 30 minutes talking about how this was a safe space, and I think that context opened up the group to share the most important feedback,” “I definitely said stuff in my session that I would be worried about if it wasn’t a safe space.”
• “Objectively, scaling back was the right decision for the business, and transparency from leadership helped paint the picture of what happened and what we can learn from it,” “Voice of the Employee was about culture — how to recreate a space people want to be in.”

The Voice of the Employee did not appear in a vacuum—it came from the Talent and Culture team’s sincere need to process change events honestly. The team recruited volunteers from every department (15% of the company) and held multiple three-hour sessions among groups, where they were sincerely encouraged to speak their minds. As the facilitators were members of the Talent team (who went through the initial workshop), their empathy helped create a safe place for their colleagues.

The discussions covered various topics, from benefits to leadership and beyond. The facilitators led a dialogue that generated over 100 pages of quotes. We ultimately asked, ' What do we think about leadership?’ or ‘What do we think about the product?’ and we’d go from there.

The conversations (input from the Employees) produced 76 recommendations for improvements that leadership could make. We distilled the feedback into themes and provided the input, including the quotes and quantitative analysis, to the leadership. The leadership focused on three significant targeted changes and reported the progress to the employees monthly.

We identified five themes: advancement and development, benefits, perks and recognition, mission and values, people and culture, and technology innovation. The most essential of these is trust in leadership. The employees must trust that leadership listens, follows through, and makes decisions for the right reasons.?

“One of the biggest things we heard was that leadership had to be more transparent. We started having all-hands meetings more often and being open about the good, the bad and the ugly,”?

“We have regular fireside chats with our executive teams now,” “I’m pretty sure they have them scheduled for a different small sub-team every week. Also, for our next QBR board meeting, they’re kicking off a mini version of the board meeting for the entire company that we’re all going to be going through.”

The feedback yielded quantitative changes, including a vacation stipend and personal development budget to help refocus employees after the restructuring.?

As a follow-up to Voice of the Employee, we created an ongoing organizational health index to address the five themes, asking the same monthly questions.? We continued soliciting feedback and quotes and determined how to spend our time and resources based on that feedback.? Further, we reported the findings of the health index (in full transparency) back to the employees at each all-hands meeting. In addition, we identified opportunities for small wins from the list of the 76 recommendations we had fulfilled behind the scenes to demonstrate that leadership was taking action based on feedback.

“I’ve never been more optimistic about being here than I am today and right now,”?

“I left (the tech company) for a year to chase a dream and came back right before the RIF happened — and every day since then, I’ve become increasingly excited about our future.”

After six months, our eNPS was +8.

External Findings:

• Companies that seek and act on feedback have an 80 percent average engagement rate, compared to 40 percent for those that don’t. (Qualtrics 2020 Employee Experience Trends)
• Leaders in the top 10 percent of asking for feedback averaged in the top 14 percent of leadership effectiveness. (Forbes)
• Managers who practice active listening can reduce feelings of job insecurity in their employees. (Penn State Research)