Once you have your results, now it’s time to think through what to do with all of this information.
This page can be your guide on planning the right way to disseminate and respond to that feedback.
what to do with your results
Track Change Over Time
Identifying the degree of satisfaction and sentiment in your teams is an important step, especially because it allows you to track change in sentiment over time.
Now that you have your current state sentiment score, you can go about trying to positively affect it, and then measure the change you’ve made in that time.
We recommend measuring satisfaction at least quarterly. Because ENPS and ESS are such easy surveys to take, you may find value in measuring satisfaction monthly, with a deeper Engagement survey done quarterly.
In this way you use Satisfaction as a more regular barometer of overall cultural health.
Dive Deep
The next step is to dive deeper to identify what is causing dissatisfaction, or equally important, what is creating satisfaction.
Getting down to the “why” of your team’s satisfaction rating is what really matters. It’s what will help you identify the things you need to start doing, the things you need to stop doing, and the things you need to continue doing.
Map Team Satisfaction To Team Engagement
One way to dive deep is to compare your team’s satisfaction with the team’s engagement results.
Because Satisfaction represents the overriding sentiment they have at work, when you compare it with the team’s engagement results, you may find that some Elements, while missing, don’t have a big impact on overall satisfaction. Conversely, you may find that certain Elements, when missing, have a disproportionate impact on overall satisfaction.
That’s extremely helpful to know, so you can know where to invest your time, effort and resources for maximum cultural and emotional impact.
Keep in mind that these are likely to be be team-specific. What Elements (or other drivers) matter most to some teams, will matter less to others. So when you’re doing your comparisons, be careful to not extrapolate too far beyond that team, unless you feel like you have other teams with sufficiently similar attributes (e.g. two sales teams).
Focus on incremental change
Satisfaction scores, like most things, are not likely to change overnight. Once you have your score, be patient as you learn what are the drivers behind that score, and go to work making changes to positively impact the next score.
As long as your trajectory is positive (it’s getting better over time), that’s what really matters, and that’s what employees will feel.
Click on the following links for much more on Satisfaction, ENPS, and ESS.
recommended actions
Adding a few more columns to our model, you can see how each of the Emotional Stages of ESS (and their ENPS scores) map not only to engagement, but likely to performance.
Because sentiment always ultimately impacts performance, we can use current sentiment as an early indicator of future performance.
You can’t expect someone who rates your organization (or team) at a 4—who is experiencing growing animosity, solidifying resolve in disengagement—to be high-performing. There’s likely to be a performance gap there.
The level of that performance gap will likely correspond to how far out they are on that spectrum.
Of course, performance has three primary variables (time, talent, and energy) and this only maps Energy, but presumably the person you hired was previously vetted for talent, and you’ve given them ample time.
Still, it’s important to note that while Energy matters most when it comes to performance over the long term, we need to look at all three variables when solving for performance.
promoter teams
bright-spot analysis
On Teams where you find a predominant amount of promoters, there is an opportunity for executives and leaders to do a bright-spot analysis.
A bright-spot analysis is simply where you dig in and find out what’s going right and what can be replicated.
It’s a bit of an art as much as it is a science. It should be noted that not everything that appears to make up a magical formula for one team will work equally well for another team (which is why ENPS tends to mean different things to different teams), but there can be much learned by looking at high-performing, highly satisfied teams, especially when comparing them to similar teams.
passives and passive detractors
high impact intervention
These two groups represent your biggest opportunity to positively impact ENPS and your overall organizational sentiment.
Passives, with just a little work, can become promoters, actively advocating for your organization. They become cultural amplifiers, moving from ambivalence to satisfaction—usually with very little work. Mostly, the burden is simply in just taking the time to listen, and investing in just a few key things to shift them up a level.
Your Passive Detractors also represent a high-impact leadership opportunity. They haven’t yet crystalized into toxicity yet, and can usually be moved into the “Passive” category with a relatively small amount of effort.
Very often your Passive Detractors won’t become Promoters (and the energy required to generate the thrust needed to move them up two levels is often significant). But just getting them out of the category of “animosity” will reap major dividends inside your organization.
active detractors
extreme intervention
For teams who fall into the Active Detractor category, some big decisions have to be made, and there’s some urgency to make them.
These are individuals who often work actively, overtly, and aggressively against the organization. They experience a degree of animosity that has graduated into anger and can show up as vengeful behavior.
Often organizations choose to keep these individuals around, because they are viewed as lynchpins, or the cost to replace is just too high.
While likely not being high-performing, at least relative to their total performance capacity, they’ve often put themselves into a position where the organization relies on them. Often they have what is perceived to be irreplaceable institutional knowledge. Whatever it is, they often use this as leverage against the organization, holding the organization hostage to their volatility, because they know how valuable they are.
Certainly, without that level of value, it’s easier to make a decision to either invite them to pursue excellence elsewhere, or invite them to re-engage, working together to figure out what that looks like.
But when you do have someone who seems irreplaceable, you’ll need to be sure to consider the cultural cost of having someone that disenfranchised remaining at the organization.
Often these individuals become orbits unto themselves, creating and telling narratives to nearby employees, attracting them into the orbit of their negative perspective. And their “lynchpin” status often gives them credibility, adding to their gravitational pull.
Left unchecked, they can create what we call “orbital wobble,” where you have employees oscillating between who they are more loyal to. If you have a situation like this, and would like help, please be sure to reach out to one of our consultants.
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