eNPS - or employee net promoter score - is a useful metric for understanding employee satisfaction. Satisfaction is absolutely part of the wider engagement puzzle, but it’s far from the whole.
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a quantifiable statistic that encapsulates how people feel about your business, its service, and its apparent ideals. So, while basic NPS deals with things like customer satisfaction, eNPS reflects how employees feel about your business, its service, and its workplace culture.
A promoter is simply someone who would be willing to talk positively to others about the business, while the score is a performance metric. “Net” simply refers to whether the results are positive or negative in total.
Essentially, eNPS is a short-hand stat for assessing the likelihood of employees talking positively about and advocating for your business. So, you can see why some might think that eNPS is a good measure of employee engagement.
However, satisfaction isn’t the same as engagement.
Employee engagement is the level of emotional affection and commitment an employee has to their work, the company's goals and purpose, and their peers.
Picture an employee who does little work and never gets pulled up for it.
That employee is quite possibly very satisfied by not having to work hard. They could happily recommend others get a job with your company because it’s easy to coast by. They might even like the products or services their employer sells. In theory, that means they’d give you a high eNPS rating, but nobody in their right mind would call that person an engaged staff member.
Just to be clear, we’re not saying that eNPS stats are useless. We’re saying that, firstly, they aren’t a single measure of engagement in any sense, and shouldn’t be taken as gospel. And secondly, eNPS is only one facet of the questions you should be asking to give managers and HR the insight they need to help employees thrive at work.
Read the full blog on why eNPS shouldn't be confused with engagement for a more in-depth discussion.