September 23, 2025

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): Definition and Best Practices

By David Dungay

Retaining talent has never been tougher. Right now, 74% of employers say they’re struggling to hire, and nearly two-thirds of SMEs admitted they were finding it hard to keep staff. Skill shortages are just part of the problem. The real issue? Employees aren’t happy.

Unhappy employees don’t just keep it to themselves. Productivity drops, customers feel the difference, and the company’s image starts to suffer. Gallup’s data shows the upside: teams that are engaged cut turnover by up to 43% and boost profitability by 23%. When engagement slips, though, the losses add up fast – billions each year.

That’s where the employee net promoter score (eNPS) comes in. It’s one question: “How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?” Simple, but revealing. Promoters (9–10) are advocates. Detractors (0–6) are at risk of leaving, and often the first to air their frustrations online.

For businesses, advocacy matters because it compounds. Employees who recommend their workplace stay longer, perform better, and attract others.

But asking the question isn’t enough. Companies that get value from eNPS close the loop: they act on feedback, communicate change, and build trust. Done right, employee advocacy measurement turns into a competitive advantage. Done poorly, it’s just another ignored survey.

What is Employee Net Promoter Score?

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) is a quick way to check the temperature of your workplace. It comes from the customer world, where the Net Promoter Score tracks loyalty. The twist here is simple: instead of asking if you’d recommend a product, you ask if you’d recommend your company as a place to work.

Answers are split into three groups:

• Promoters (9–10): people who feel proud to work here.
• Passives (7–8): sitting on the fence.
• Detractors (0–6): unhappy, and likely to share it.

Your eNPS score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. It can be anywhere from -100 to +100.

That number on its own won’t tell the whole story, but it gives leaders a sharp signal. According to Hive HR, the average benchmark reached 27 in late 2024, a positive but hardly glowing result. The gap between promoters and detractors is where the truth lives.

The appeal is its simplicity. You don’t need a 50-question survey to see if people feel engaged. One straightforward question is often enough to expose whether your culture is attracting advocates or creating critics.

Why Measure Employee Net Promoter Score?

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) looks like “just a number.” That’s true on the surface; it’s a single score that can sit neatly on a dashboard. But beneath it, eNPS works as a pressure gauge for the entire employee experience. It’s simple, quick to capture, and one of the most effective early-warning systems a business can use.

• It signals trouble early: People rarely wake up one morning and decide to quit. The decision builds over weeks or months, often hidden in frustration about recognition, workload, or a lack of leadership clarity. An eNPS dip is usually the first visible sign; catch it early, and you’re more likely to keep your staff.
• It builds trust when you act: Running a survey and ignoring the results is worse than not running one at all. Employees quickly learn when feedback disappears into a slide deck. But when companies close the loop, it builds credibility.
• It connects directly to business outcomes: High-engagement companies see fewer sick days, less staff churn across different roles, and stronger profits. In the UK, firms ranked as “great workplaces” have beaten the FTSE 100 by around 400% over the past twenty years. Those outcomes link directly to whether employees would actually recommend the business.
• It strengthens the employer brand: Today, your employer brand lives and dies on Glassdoor reviews, TikTok stories, and what staff say to their networks. Running a serious employee advocacy measurement program, anchored by eNPS, signals that feedback leads to action. That makes you far more appealing to scarce talent.

At its best, eNPS gives leaders a way to ask a deceptively simple question, listen closely to the answers, and act on them before problems escalate.

How to Measure Employee Net Promoter Score

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) is simple on the surface: ask one question, crunch the numbers. But if you actually want to learn something useful and make changes that stick, you need to be intentional about how you run it.

Here’s how to set it up so the results drive action:

Step 1: Get Leaders on the Hook

If employees think eNPS is “HR’s pet project,” they’ll treat it like background noise. That’s why it needs to start with leadership.

• Tie it to business outcomes: Show executives that retention costs real money. Replacing one employee can run to 50–200% of their salary. An eNPS dip is an early warning that attrition costs are about to climb.
• Make results public: Share scores at town halls or all-hands meetings. Don’t just bury them in HR reports. Even if the score isn’t great, being open about it builds credibility.
• Link to incentives: Some companies now tie part of executive bonuses to eNPS or engagement results, just like customer NPS ties to rewards for salespeople.

CultureAmp, Qualtrics, and Glint all allow you to share dashboards directly with senior leaders, so the data isn’t filtered before it reaches them.

Step 2: Avoid the Common Traps

Four mistakes come up over and over:

• One-and-done surveys: Running eNPS once a year is like weighing yourself annually and hoping for insights. Use quarterly pulses instead. Tools like Peakon or Lattice automate recurring surveys.
• No follow-up: Nothing kills trust faster than asking for feedback and going silent. The fix: publish a “You said, we did” update after every survey. Even a short Slack post makes a difference.
• Only looking at averages: A company-wide score hides the hotspots. You might have a +40 overall, but a -10 in one team. Segment by manager, tenure, or geography to see the real story.
• Treating the score as the end: The number tells you what is happening, not why. Always pair eNPS with a follow-up question.

Think of eNPS less like a test result and more like a thermometer. If the temperature’s off, you don’t just note it, you look for the cause.

Step 3: Design Surveys That People Actually Answer

The best surveys feel effortless to answer. If it’s quick and straightforward, people are far more likely to be honest.

• Keep it short: One main question, plus one or two open-text follow-ups. Tools like Typeform or Google Forms work fine if you’re small. Larger teams often use Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey Enterprise.
• Protect anonymity: Don’t ask for names unless you really have to. Employees won’t be honest if they think their boss can trace it back. Platforms like CultureAmp automatically anonymise responses until a minimum number is collected.
• Time it wisely: Quarterly or biannual surveys work well. Add “event-based” surveys after big changes, like post-onboarding or after a return-to-office mandate. That’s when emotions run highest, and the data is most useful.
• Communicate purpose: Always explain why you’re asking. A quick line in the invite, like: “We want to understand how changes to our hybrid policy are landing,” is enough.

Done right, answering an eNPS survey should take less than two minutes. Any longer, and you risk fatigue.

Step 4: Segment the Results or Miss the Story

A single company-wide employee net promoter score hides more than it reveals. If you stop at one number, you’ll miss the real issues brewing inside the business.

The smart move is to break it down:

• By tenure. New joiners often see things differently from long-tenured staff. An eNPS of +30 from people in their first year might look good, but if veterans are at -10, you’ve got a retention problem coming.
• By team or manager. Leadership quality is one of the biggest drivers of eNPS. Segmenting by manager can expose “hot spots” where culture is thriving or collapsing.
• By demographics. Different generations have different expectations. Gen Z, for example, places enormous value on recognition and regular feedback, not just a paycheck. Ignoring that can drag scores down.
• By work setup. Hybrid vs. fully remote vs. in-office. Many organisations now find their remote employees scoring higher on autonomy, while office-based staff often cite “pointless meetings” or poor communication.
• By region. Cultural norms matter. A “good” eNPS in Germany might not look the same as one in the U.S. Global companies should compare like with like.

Without segmentation, you’re left with a flat number that tells you little about where to focus. With it, you can target action where it matters most.

Step 5: Use Follow-Up Questions to Find the ‘Why’

The number itself is only the starting point. The real value lies in what people write afterwards. That’s why pairing eNPS with open-text prompts is essential:

• “What’s the main reason you chose that score?”
• “What’s one thing we could improve?”
• “What’s one thing we should never change?”

Give employees space to explain their thinking, and you get themes to act on.

If you’re collecting feedback at scale, the comments can quickly run into the hundreds or thousands. The solution is coding. Most organisations categorise them into themes such as leadership, recognition, workload, wellbeing, career development, and communication.

Modern tools like Qualtrics Text iQ or CultureAmp can auto-tag themes using natural language processing, saving hours of manual sorting.

One caution: watch out for “eNPS scammers” – responses that look positive but are vague or superficial, like “everything’s fine.” If employees are afraid to be candid, your data won’t reflect reality. Anonymous surveys, reinforced by visible action, reduce that risk.

Step 6: Benchmark and Interpret with Care

So, what’s a “good” employee net promoter score? The honest answer: it depends. But benchmarks can give proper context.

• Global average: According to Hive HR, the overall benchmark reached 27 in 2024; Culture Amp says the average number is closer to 17.
• Interpretation tiers: NewtonX and Great Place to Work suggest:
  • 0 or above = adequate
  • 10–30 = good
  • 30+ = excellent
• Industry benchmarks: SurveyMonkey shows that tech firms often post higher eNPS than retail or healthcare firms, reflecting talent competition and investments in culture.

The danger is obsessing over external comparisons. What matters more is your trend line. A move from -10 to +5 is far more meaningful than sitting at +25 while flatlining.

Internal benchmarking tells you whether your initiatives are working, while external benchmarks give you a rough sense of where you stand. The best practice? Use both. Track your own score over time, and glance at industry ranges to keep perspective.

Step 7: Know the Risks and Limitations

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) is powerful because it’s simple. But that simplicity is also its biggest weakness. There are four pitfalls worth keeping in mind:

• Over-simplification: One number can’t capture the whole employee experience. eNPS tells you if there’s a problem, not what the problem is. That’s why follow-up questions and other EX metrics are essential. Pair eNPS with engagement surveys, wellbeing data, or exit interview analysis to see the bigger picture.
• Gaming the system: If managers know their bonus is linked to eNPS, some will “encourage” staff to give higher scores or steer them away from criticism. That creates a false picture. The fix is to keep surveys anonymous, run them through neutral tools, and publish results openly so the process stays trustworthy.
• Survey fatigue: Ask too often, and responses get lazy or sarcastic. Ask too rarely and you miss trends. The sweet spot for most organisations is quarterly, with the option to trigger an extra pulse after major events like restructures or policy changes.
• Over-reliance: Treating eNPS as the only measure of culture is risky. Use it as an entry point, then layer in deeper listening: focus groups, manager 1:1s, and pulse surveys.

Remember, eNPS is a great thermometer, but it isn’t the full medical exam.

Step 8: Decide Who Owns It

One of the quickest ways to kill momentum is to treat eNPS as “HR’s job.” Employees see through that immediately. If the survey results don’t connect to leadership decisions, the score becomes another ignored HR metric.

Share ownership between HR and leadership. HR runs the mechanics – survey design, analysis, reporting, but leaders must own the outcomes. If a business unit has a -10 score, the manager of that unit should be responsible for turning it around.

Some companies have gone further by creating cross-functional employee experience councils. These typically include HR, IT, Operations, and Finance. The reason is simple: most pain points flagged in eNPS aren’t pure “HR issues.” They’re often about broken tools, clunky workflows, unclear policies, or a lack of resources, all things other departments control.

When ownership spreads across the organisation, eNPS becomes a management tool. That’s when the results start to shift in a meaningful way.

Step 9: From Data to Action

The most important step is closing the loop. Employees don’t expect every issue to be fixed overnight, but they do expect acknowledgement. That can be as simple as:

• A “you said, we did” email after survey results are analysed.
• A short presentation at an all-hands showing the top three themes and the actions being taken.
• Managers are holding team-level discussions to explore their local scores.

This transparency builds trust. Without it, scores stagnate or decline as employees lose faith in the process. Look at TechnologyOne. The enterprise software firm transformed its culture with eNPS at the centre. A decade ago, scores were below zero.

By 2024, they had climbed to +37. The turnaround came from consistent listening, stronger wellbeing support, and perks with substance, share options, gym passes, and volunteer leave. Around one in five employees also received a promotion that year, reinforcing career growth as a valued part of the culture. The result was better retention and a place in Australia’s top 15 employers.

The Future of eNPS & Employee Advocacy

The employee net promoter score (eNPS) isn’t going anywhere, but how companies use it is evolving fast. A single number on a dashboard is no longer enough. The future is about depth, speed, and integration. Expect to see:

• Continuous listening instead of snapshots: Annual surveys are too blunt to catch how people really feel. Many employers now send short eNPS pulses every quarter, alongside always-on feedback channels staff can use anytime.
• AI-driven insights: New platforms can scan open comments for themes like stress or workload pressure long before the score shifts. Qualtrics Text iQ and Perceptyx are two examples. Some companies are even trialling predictive models that tie eNPS trends to HR data to flag turnover risks before they hit.
• Integration with recognition and wellbeing: eNPS doesn’t live in isolation. O.C. Tanner’s 2025 Global Culture Report showed that companies with strong recognition programs are 15 times more likely to see employees thriving. Pairing eNPS with recognition, wellbeing, and career development data gives a more complete view of advocacy.
• Global context: Hybrid and remote work have shifted expectations. Employees no longer compare only with local competitors; they’re weighing their experience against any company offering flexibility. That’s why ongoing eNPS tracking has become essential.

Acting on Employee Net Promoter Score

What your people say about your workplace predicts almost everything else: retention, productivity, even profitability. But eNPS is not magic. It only works if leaders treat it as more than a survey. That means:

• Running it regularly, not once a year.
• Segmenting the data to find the hotspots.
• Pairing the score with follow-up questions to uncover the “why.”
• Acting visibly on feedback and closing the loop.
• Sharing ownership across HR, managers, and executives.

Done right, eNPS is a cultural signal. It tells employees their voices matter, and it tells customers they’re dealing with a company where people are proud to work.

So don’t let eNPS sit in a report. Use it as a lever. Treat it with the same seriousness as customer feedback. Because when employees are your strongest advocates, everything else gets easier.