Your Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) gauges your popularity with employees. Job satisfaction, employee benefits, and feelings of loyalty all factor how likely employees are to recommend your workplace to someone else. But unless you run surveys to gauge how employees feel about you, you may never know what your workplace environment really feels like to your team.
That’s where eNPS comes in. If you’ve struggled to build a positive employee culture and address key employee concerns like job satisfaction, pay, benefits, and engagement, then you’re due for an eNPS checkup. The surveys you run will go a long way in helping you understand what’s gone wrong. Why aren’t employees recommending your business to potential colleagues? What kind of reputation have you earned in the marketplace? Measure your eNPS, and you’ll have answers to these questions.
How to run an effective eNPS survey
From your employees’ perspective, an eNPS survey is a sign that their employer is at least starting to pay attention. But it’s possible to run a survey in a way that doesn’t help the situation. To enhance engagement, you’ll have to do a few things to convince low-morale employees that you’re genuinely interested in turning things around.
Step 1: Define your objectives clearly
Fail to plan, and you’re planning to fail. You should start your eNPS survey with a clear objective. What is it you want to accomplish? For starters, you’ll likely want to use your first survey to gauge the damage. Set your first objective as identifying the most problematic areas of your workplace—the real reasons employees feel disengaged at work.
You can also set long-term objectives. An eNPS survey doesn’t have to happen in a vacuum. You can schedule multiple surveys, spaced out over months and even years, to gauge your progress over time.
Step 2: Make your questions as clear as possible
Questions for eNPS software tend to be pretty clear. They might ask your employees: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend working here to a potential colleague?” That’s a good question because there’s no question what it’s asking. It’s asking people to put a numerical value on how often they might recommend your business to someone who might work there.
Stick to questions like that. If your question starts to look less like a sentence and more like a paragraph, the intent behind the question can get lost.
You should also avoid any leading questions. A leading question is one in which your phrasing aims to get the answerer to a specific conclusion.
Ask simple, direct questions. Look for honesty. Embrace honest feedback, because asking simple questions can sometimes feel like an invitation for your respondents to give you brutally honest truth.
Step 3: Ensure anonymity
The more honest your feedback is, the more helpful it is. And you shouldn’t expect feedback to be 100% honest if you ask your employees to sign their name to it. They might fear repercussions if they criticize you at all.
While it might sound pleasant to get better feedback in your eNPS survey, it actually works against you. If you don’t honestly assess your employees’ satisfaction, you’ll never know what problems you need to address. You might know there’s a problem with employee morale, but if your eNPS scores tell you that things are hunky-dory, you know something’s gone wrong.
For that reason, make sure anonymity is part of the deal. And don’t just include anonymous answers. Make sure everyone knows that the answers they provide will be anonymous.
Step 4: Analyze results by looking for patterns
When you send out an eNPS survey, the data you receive back can initially feel overwhelming. Using an eNPS platform will help you make sense of it. You should look for trends in the data, particularly:
- Top areas of concern: Some aspects of your business will naturally outperform your weak spots. Look for the most popular low scores you have. This will tell you what needs to be your top priority as you build a better business.
- Look for strength in patterns: Identifying a low rating in one particular area is not enough. You should look for ratings with high confidence throughout your organization.
The best software tools for eNPS surveys
All of the above sounds great until you realize you’ll have to buckle down and put it all together at a certain point. But there’s good news here. There is eNPS software designed to take all of the hard work out of your hands. Even better, eNPS software can help reinforce good survey habits that will ensure accuracy and high degrees of participation from your workforce.
The only question is, which software platforms will you want to consider? Here are a few:
Peoplelytics
Overview: Peoplelytics strives to create a better working environment for everyone. They do so by providing low cost HR tools for companies to use to engage with their team members to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback and turn it into action and results.
Website: https://www.peoplelytics.co
Pros:
- Peoplelytics is priced more affordably than most of the competitors in the market, who price per employee and as your company grows, so does your bill
- AI-powered recommendations based on your results will help you determine what to address, how to do it, and what tools may help you along the path so you’re closer to bringing about change as soon as the results are in!
Cons:
- Peoplelytics is an early stage startup so they lack some of the available reviews online to help make decisions based on other peoples results and experiences – but it does also come with greater attention from the company as well since you’re a bigger fish in a smaller pond for them
- There is no consulting option or customer success manager available like some companies have, although they do have plenty of free web, video, and chat support
Leverage employee feedback in your HR strategy
Get detailed insights and AI-powered recommendations with eNPS surveys and employee surveys sent through Peoplelytics.
Qualtrics
Overview: This advanced survey/feedback platform is better if you want more sophisticated features. It’s also great for larger organizations because it offers real-time dashboards. This way, you can review the results as they come in, which may help you revise and update the eNPS surveys as you bring them across different departments.
Website: https://www.qualtrics.com/people/
Pros:
- Highly dynamic, building from a variety of survey styles and add-ons that make it useable for just about any surveying and feedback-gathering purpose you can think of.
- Can edit surveys at just about any time and view when specific users finished the surveys so you know when you’re working with feedback from consistent surveys, ensuring accuracy of data.
Cons:
- The “customer experience” module has some limitations, according to the reviews on G2.
- Load times on Qualtrics can be a bit tricky, particularly as you load your dashboards up with lots of surveys—which will be the temptation, considering just how many surveys you can run with Qualtrics.
Culture Amp
Overview: Offering both employee feedback and engagement surveys, this is great for drawing in a lot of data about the culture of your business. How do employees feel about working at your company? What improvements can you make to enhance the culture? Those are the key questions you can expect to answer with Culture Amp.
Website: https://www.cultureamp.com/
Pros:
- The very user-friendly interface makes it popular for people who don’t have a lot of eNPS experience but still want to get their software up and running. You don’t have to be an HR software expert to get started.
- Plenty of helpful get-started resources if you find it overwhelming—and the odds of that are actually pretty slim.
Cons:
- Some users find that the exporting features for performance review records are a bit tangly to work with. This can make it hard to review some data.
- Some customers would have liked an email reminder to help nudge you along with making regular surveys—as well as updating those surveys to reflect the changing business landscape.
Limeade Listening
Overview: If you already have an idea that you want to conduct surveys in the long term, you’ll think of Limeade Listening (formerly TinyPulse) as a way of putting your finger on the repeating “pulse” of your company. Limeade is great for ensuring you have consistent questions so you can measure and track your key results over time, helping you build a stronger company.
Website: https://www.limeade.com/solutions/employee-engagement/
Pros:
- Limeade is great at measuring how employees feel about your company, especially with the template questions that apply to every company—which helps you measure feedback on a large scale.
- Includes features for recognizing team members and calling out great work they’ve done.
Cons:
- Identification issues: some staff may be concerned that they’re not truly anonymous when responding to these questions, particularly if you run a small company.
- You can’t manually send reminders to employees to fill out their survey, which can lead to lower participation rates if you don’t have another way of reaching out and letting employees know to submit their survey responses.
Blink
Overview: An app designed for frontline (deskless) workers, Blink has shown to help lower attrition by up to 25%, which has a demonstrable impact on employee morale—particularly in high-stress work environments where employee feedback is a must.
Website: https://www.joinblink.com/product/employee-engagement
Pros:
- Blink features all sorts of communication features, which you can customize according to your specific audiences.
- The central interface means that your staff can quickly access surveys as well as other communications tools available through Blink.
Cons:
- Some users find that the forms Blink offers aren’t robust enough—making Blink more of a communication tool than a true eNPS software option.
- It may lack the integration you want with other tools, like Outlook, to ensure that you’re gathering all of the feedback you want to receive within your favorite applications.
Leapsome
Overview: Designed as a “people enablement” platform, the idea behind Leapsome is to make your work more engaging. But you can also use its features to gauge just how engaged your employees already feel at work.
Website: https://www.leapsome.com/
Pros:
- People love the clear feedback they get, especially when it comes to using insights from the platform to drive future decisions.
- An easy-to-use platform makes it ideal for anyone who’s never used this kind of software before.
Cons:
- It works in review cycles, which means that you might not get the instant feedback you’re looking for. Think of it as a long-term investment in your employees’ engagement.
- Data comes back crystal-clear, but some users would like it if the graphs were more visually appealing and easier to read.
15Five
Overview: This performance management platform helps you find the insights that can drive higher eNPS scores down the line. It also separates your outcomes into categories like “manager effectiveness” and “employee turnover.”
Website: https://www.15five.com/
Pros:
- People find it to be a robust suite of features which helps employers drive higher engagement with employees. Features like Best Self Review and High Fives are particularly popular for encouraging employees and making them feel valued.
- Works well on mobile applications, which is great for simplifying the process.
Cons:
- There are so many features that some people can find the software a bit overwhelming to use.
- Some career goal tracking features may be difficult for employees to understand, making onboarding a challenge.
OfficeVibe
Overview: Workleap’s “OfficeVibe” helps you engage employees, recognize their work, and drive future performance by evaluating their feedback.
Website: https://workleap.com/officevibe/
Pros:
- Instantly checking out engagement metrics gives you a feel of the pulse of your office and how things are going—particularly where you can improve as the weeks go by.
- The surveys sent out to team members have a high reputation with users as being accurate and easy to complete.
Cons:
- Some users wanted to know if there were ways to “query” the platform and look for specific team members who haven’t gotten any “Good Vibes” in the previous three months, for example.
- More designed for large teams than small teams, so you might want to look for more small business-friendly options if you have fewer than 50 employees.
Reflektive
Overview: A performance management platform for scaling your team, the robust analytics here make Reflektive an easy way to keep track of engagement even as your business grows.
Website: https://www.reflektive.com/
Pros:
- Intuitive for software newbies and easy to review, Reflektive makes for an easy onboarding process if you’ve never used eNPS software before.
- The survey features are robust and give you plenty of insights to sift through.
Cons:
- There aren’t many options for prepopulated templates that can help you navigate the process earlier on, which may require some additional set-up work, writes one user.
- One user said that there is limited visibility into teammates’ goals, which can get in the way of getting insights necessary for building up teams.
Glint
Overview: With plenty of survey types designed for long-term evaluation of employee feedback, Glint helps you understand what’s going on in employees’ heads. Note: Glint is part of Microsoft Viva.
Website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/glint
Pros:
- The anonymous features are essential here, giving you transparency so upper management can get an honest look at what employees would change about your company.
- Offers 360-degree feedback surveys and spits out a well-formatted report, particularly if you use other Microsoft products and want to minimize the friction of using this product as much as possible.
Cons:
- The lack of personalization features can be challenging if you want to dig deep into the details behind each insight.
- Some G2 users question how confidential the feedback process really is.
Browse through software platforms like these, but pick one that you think fits best. Using one platform to compare your analytics over time and track your improvement easily is usually the simplest way.
SurveyMonkey
Overview: This versatile survey tool is great for publishing quick eNPS surveys while still being free to customize them as you please. There are also analytics features on the back end to look at the results without building your own spreadsheets.
Website: https://www.surveymonkey.com
Pros:
- Create and distribute a wide variety of survey types with ease, including customer satisfaction, employee ratings, and yes, eNPS reviews.
- Use “logic” and “branching” features to make your surveys more dynamic, which helps customers feel like you’re valuing their specific feedback. You’ll also get more detailed levels of feedback this way.
Cons:
- Customer support: We noticed a few reviews over at G2 mentioned that customer support was an issue here.
- Pricing: Though SurveyMonkey advertises itself as a free option, you may notice some key features like survey sharing don’t kick in until you’ve opted for the $25/month version.
- You’re also less likely to get the detailed reports that some of the tools built specifically for eNPS surveys offer.
WorkTango
Overview: With emphasis on employee retention, this is a “holistic employee experience platform” with eNPS capabilities. Formerly known as “Kazoo,” if you’re getting confused by the name.
Website: https://www.worktango.com/
Pros:
- Simple to implement and even fun for users to try, users on G2 like how enjoyable the entire process is from beginning to end.
- The incentives built into the program make it easy to offer employees motivation for meeting their goals.
Cons:
- Some users reported some difficulty for how old employees were archived, which may introduce some hiccups if you’re trying to look back at old feedback and data for comparisons.
- Other users wanted it easier to attain employee rewards at lower point levels, suggesting there’s some lack of customization here.
Get tips, industry benchmarks, strategies to boost scores, and more!
Give your company a boost in morale
Employee satisfaction can feel complicated. But once you get your eNPS surveys working for you, you’ll realize it’s possible to measure even the most vague vibes at your business. To measure employee loyalty and satisfaction, eNPS software gives you the resources to cut through the clutter and identify problematic areas in need of tweaking.
Once you know how to improve morale, you’ll have a far better chance at improving your eNPS and inspiring people to stick around your company. Step by step, you can boost your reputation and make employees happy to come to work. It’s not an overnight success story every time, but with enough consistent effort, it can be utterly transformative for you and your company. Get a demo with Peoplelytics and see how we can help you turn data into results!