The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has jumped from use as a customer retention measure to use as an employee retention model. Despite criticisms of NPS, it remains popular because it is well marketed, easy to understand and its model makes intuitive sense: every organization wants more promoters than detractors.
As a result of this popularity, NPS has crossed over to employee loyalty research, where it is known as ENPS, the Employee Net Promoter Score.
Symantec, Atlas Copco, Holcim and Celanese are international brands that have adopted ENPS.
Holcim Ltd., a global provider of building materials, uses ENPS worldwide to measure the loyalty of its 90,000 staff, but doesn’t benchmark staff in different countries against one another, finding that cultural differences contribute to dramatic measurement differences, according to Christian Birck, a senior vice president of Holcim.
Celanese, a chemical producer, was an early adopter of ENPS, embracing it in September of 2007. Alan Maxwell, Vice President of Corporate Human Resources, said, “From a Six Sigma perspective, there was a need to baseline current state and track progress as the model/programs were implemented. ENPS hit the mark for us.” Since quarterly tracking began, Celanese has seen its ENPS steadily increase, from -8% to -3% to 7% to 24%. Further, KPIs have also improved, with turnover dropping by half, for example.
ENPS offers a model that makes intuitive sense, but—while Fred Reichheld contends that NPS correlates to company growth for eight industries—no such correlation has yet been demonstrated for employee loyalty. Further, employees can be willing to recommend you and yet still disloyal, as shown by this Walker analysis of the true cost of low employee loyalty.
Of course, if your primary concern is around recruiting, ENPS can be a good choice. ENPS is simple to implement and is good for organizations looking to “do it themselves”, whereas Gallup Q12 and Walker Loyalty are copyrighted instruments of their respective organizations, and can only be implemented by those firms or their partners.
ENPS does not provide much in the way of actionable information that organizations can use to improve. Gallup and Q12 offer an extensive program of organizational-effectiveness consulting that can be used to drive greater results. Walker—a Vovici partner—provides a detailed battery of items to evaluate, and includes a detailed and segmented prioritization of attributes that affect employee engagement.
With only 4.3% of North American organizations surveyed by Vovici using employee-satisfaction benchmarking, your organization should look at the opportunities offered by such benchmarks.