Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): How to Calculate It and Run It in a Small Team

Open the team survey templateDownload the eNPS survey kit (PDF)

What eNPS is

Employee Net Promoter Score borrows the customer NPS method and points it at your staff. Bain & Company's page on Net Promoter for People says most adopters have settled on one central question, which it gives as "How likely would you recommend this company as a place to work?", answered on the same 0 to 10 scale.

The score works exactly like customer NPS: the percentage of promoters (9 or 10) minus the percentage of detractors (0 to 6), with the passives (7 and 8) counted in the total only. It runs from −100 to +100. Bain adds two observations worth knowing before you start. Employee scores can be substantially lower than customer scores, because staff tend to hold their employer to higher standards. And a second statement, a variant of "My job inspires me", rated from strongly disagree to strongly agree, can tell you more about energy and enthusiasm than the recommend question alone.

The calculation, with a worked example

A business with 14 staff runs its first round. 12 people answer:

• 5 answer 9 or 10: promoters, 41.7%
• 4 answer 7 or 8: passives, 33.3%
• 3 answer between 0 and 6: detractors, 25%

eNPS = 41.7 − 25 = +16.7, usually written +17. You can check it in the free NPS calculator by typing 5, 4 and 3, or by pasting the 12 raw answers.

With 12 answers the score is very sensitive: one person moving from a 6 to a 9 would change it by more than 16 points. That is why, in a small team, the trend over several rounds and the written reasons matter far more than the number itself. Our guide to the NPS margin of error shows how wide the uncertainty is at small sample sizes.

Keeping it honest in a small team

Bain's page is direct about confidentiality: employee feedback must be kept confidential to get honest answers, which means no follow-up conversations of the kind you would have with an unhappy customer. In a company of 2,000 that is a matter of process. In a team of eight, where everyone knows who writes in short sentences and who was annoyed last week, it takes deliberate rules:

• Ask nothing that narrows it down. No name or email, and in a small team no role, department, location or length-of-service question either. Two of those together can identify a single person.
• Make the reason optional. Some people will only give a number. That is fine.
• Set a minimum before sharing. Do not look at or share a score until at least five people have answered. Below that, a single answer can be traced.
• Share themes, not quotes. "Three people mentioned the rota changing at short notice" is useful; a verbatim comment with a distinctive phrase is not anonymous.
• Never ask who said what. If anyone suspects you are trying to find out, the next round's answers will all be 8s.

Keep the survey short as well as anonymous. Bain contrasts eNPS with the traditional annual employee survey, which generates so much data that it can take weeks or months to analyse before anything changes; its advice is a few questions, asked more often, with the results shared quickly. For a small team that means two or three questions at most.

Bain also notes that companies most commonly ask monthly. For a small team, monthly can feel like a lot; quarterly is a reasonable rhythm, as long as each round leads to something visible.

Step by step: run a round

1. Set up the survey

The free form builder's Team pulse check template is a short staff survey shown one question at a time. It contains two agree/disagree statements, the 0 to 10 question "How likely are you to recommend working here to a friend?" and an open question about the one thing people would change, and it asks for no name or email. Keep the 0 to 10 question as it is; edit or remove the others to suit.

2. Publish and share the link

Publish with your email and share the link in your team chat or by text, with a short note on what it is for and when you will share the result. The PDF with this post has a message you can copy.

3. Read the score

Once at least five people have answered, open the form's Summary tab. For a 0 to 10 question it shows the average, the spread of scores and the NPS figure itself, which for this question is your eNPS. The video above shows the Summary tab.

4. Report back within a week

Share the score, the two or three themes from the reasons, and one change you will make before the next round. The change is what makes the next round worth answering.

5. Repeat on the same rhythm

Same question, same timing, same rules. Compare each round with the last, not with other companies; our guide to judging an NPS score explains why. And if you want to set the staff score next to what customers say, NPS vs CSAT covers the customer side. Fynl's paid plans add the rest of the business around the same forms: customers, bookings, quotes and invoices in one place.

The NPS calculator sits with the lifetime value calculator, the form builder and the other no-cost tools on our free tools page.

Questions people also ask

Sources

• Net Promoter System (Bain & Company) — Net Promoter for People / employee NPS
• Net Promoter System (Bain & Company) — Measuring your Net Promoter Score