Survey frequency—or the cadence at which you solicit the Voice of the Employee, whether for satisfaction or engagement—is critical, and will differ by organization.
Too-frequent surveys can create survey fatigue, and lower the quality of the data, while too-infrequent surveys can fail to give you the information you need in the time you need it.
correlating enps with performance
One way to understand your team ENPS score is by correlating it to team performance.
When you begin to map satisfaction to performance over time, within the context of a team, you can use that model to forecast performance potential, relative to incremental improvements in satisfaction.
Once you measure enough times, you can equate changes in your ENPS score to particular performance metrics.
This is a great way to identify performance-based justifications for improving satisfaction, because you can calculate whether or not certain satisfaction initiatives will ultimately yield a positive return on your investment!
correlating enps with revenue
Another valuable way to analyze your ENPS score is to correlate it with revenue, specifically correlating ENPS score with your revenue per employee metric.
The research consistently shows that you can expect revenue/employee to climb as your ENPS climbs. By how much? That depends on a number of factors (industry, # of employees, type of employees, etc.).
The value is not necessarily in comparing yourself to others, but comparing your own scores over time.
For instance, if you do an ENPS measurement in one quarter, and find that ENPS improved by 10 points in the next quarter, you can also compare that to your revenue per employee for that quarter to come up with a model that equates a single point improvement in ENPS with a dollar amount in revenue per employee.
Bear in mind that revenue will be a lagging indicator of employee satisfaction, so you could see your biggest boost from one quarter’s ENPS gains in the following quarter’s financial performance. For some companies this could be a 2-3 quarter lag. You won’t know until you start to test it.
But once you start to see that boost—for instance eNPS improves by 10 points, and in that same quarter revenue per employee improves by 3%—you now have a model you can use to forecast.
Given enough time, you can use your demonstrated correlation between ENPS and financial performance as the foundation of your business case to invest in further actions to improve ENPS.
One note on this, when it comes to forecasting. ENPS, like almost anything else, is likely to follow the 80/20 principle. 80% of the results (in this case, improvements) will likely come from 20% of the work. This is also known as the mastery asymptote. In whatever you do, your earliest actions will likely product the biggest results (in general).
So over time, the amount of time/effort it will take to reach the same point-gains in ENPS is likely to climb.
For more illustration on how employee satisfaction improvements yield in-market results, visit our Principle page on Employee Satisfaction here.
COMPARING enps with NPS
When you get your ENPS score, it can be tempting to compare it to your NPS score. But remember: in the same way that what ENPS means can vary greatly from team to team, it can vary even more greatly than NPS.
That’s because now you’re comparing an internal metric (ENPS) to an external metric (NPS) measuring two totally different populations, each of which are rating you on very different measures.
In fact, don’t be surprised if your ENPS score is much lower than your NPS score.
This is because employees hold your company to a higher standard than customers do since they have more time and energy and identity invested in it. They also spend a great deal more of their life with you than customers do.
For these reasons, employees can be tough critics.
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