Ask your team the one question they will only answer honestly if nobody is watching.
Employee Net Promoter Score borrows the NPS® question and points it at the people who work for you. It is a good measure and an easy one to ruin, because the moment somebody suspects their answer is traceable, you stop measuring morale and start measuring caution.
eNPS asks how likely somebody is to recommend your organization as a place to work, on a scale of zero to ten. The math is identical to NPS. Nine and ten are promoters, seven and eight are passives, six and below are detractors. The difference is entirely in who you are asking and what it costs them to be honest.
Percentage of promoters minus percentage of detractors, on a scale from minus one hundred to one hundred. Employee scores run lower than customer scores as a rule, so do not read a modest eNPS as a crisis without a trend behind it.
Twice a year is a sensible rhythm. Often enough to see a trend, rarely enough that people still bother. Run it at the same point each time so a seasonal dip does not read as a decline.
The questions, in full
Every one of them is on this page before you sign up for anything. The line under each question says what it is for, and what it is deliberately not asking.
The chart that suits the question, and a paragraph under it.
Numbers get the widget built for them. Written answers get grouped into the things people kept saying, with a count on each and every original answer still readable underneath, word for word.
Everything a results page holdsWhat goes wrong with a enps survey
- Collecting department or team on a small team. Four people in a department is not anonymous, whatever the survey promises.
- Running it straight after a redundancy round or a reorganization, then treating the dip as a trend.
- Promising anonymity and then asking a question only one person could have answered.
- Sharing the score with leadership and never sharing anything back with the people who answered. It is the fastest way to kill your next response rate.
Is eNPS actually anonymous here?
Answers are anonymous unless you add a question asking who somebody is. Nobody needs an account to answer, and no name is attached to a response by default.
How is eNPS different from an engagement survey?
eNPS is one question and a number you can track. An engagement survey is longer and tells you which specific things are driving that number. Most teams run eNPS often and a full engagement survey once a year.
How small is too small to run this?
Below about ten respondents, treat the score as a conversation starter rather than a measurement, and be careful about segmenting it any further.
Often run alongside this one
Employee engagement survey
An engagement survey is the long one, run once or twice a year. Its job is not to produce a number, because eNPS already does that in one question and does it more often. Its job is to tell you which specific parts of working here are holding the number down.
Pulse survey
A pulse survey is short, repeated, and always asks the same core questions so you can watch a line move. The point is not the score in any single month. The point is the shape over six of them.
Exit interview survey
The face to face exit interview has a known problem: almost nobody uses it to be candid, because they want a reference and they want the last two weeks to be pleasant. A written survey, sent after the notice period rather than during it, gets closer to the truth.