Employee Engagement
The Employee Engagement node represents the degree to which your employees are fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work, and consequently, likely to take positive action towards advancing your Purpose.
Employee Engagement is measured in two ways:
Your Employee Engagement Score is the percentage of survey respondents who either agree or strongly agree with the following statement:
This is an industry standard question that gives a high level picture of employee engagement.
The second way Salpulse measures Employee Engagement is through the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). This is a common method which has its origins in the widely used Net Promoter Score (NPS) technique used to gauge Customer Loyalty. Salpulse uses the answers of the recommender question (outlined above) to calculate your eNPS.
Whilst your eNPS score can be very helpful, we recommend that you also consider a deeper dive into engagement at the individual level to make sure you don't loose critical people or allow disgruntled employees to infect others and damage the culture.
eNPS scores range from -100 (all employees are detractors) to +100 (all employees are promoters). Whilst the intepretation of your eNPS score is not an exact science, a guide to interpreting your eNPS score is given in the following table:
eNPS score | Meaning | Intepretation |
|---|---|---|
+51 to +100 | Excellent | Employees are delighted and passionate. They are advocates and ambassadors for the company. They likely, go above and beyond their duties and inspire others to do the same. Celebrate this awesome achievement and continue to nurture your great culture. |
+31 to +50 | Very Good | Employees are happy and engaged. They are enthusiastic and proud of working for the company. They actively recommend the company to others and contribute to its success. Encourage employees to Send a Recognition Salp to share their positive experiences of the culture and encourage their peers. |
+11 to +30 | Good | Employees are satisfied and committed. They are loyal and supportive of the company. They may recommend the company to others, but they may not be proactive about this. Continue to build engagement by looking at what factors in your Salpulse culture survey could be improved. |
-9 to +10 | Average | Employees are indifferent and passive. As a whole, they are probably neither loyal nor disloyal. Some may stay with the company for convenience or lack of alternatives, but not be enthusiastic or motivated. Find ways to increase employee involvement and recognition and foster a sense of purpose and belonging. |
-49 to -10 | Poor | Employees are unhappy and uncommitted. They are likely to look for other jobs or complain about the company. Identify the key drivers of employee dissatisfaction and implement changes to improve employee engagement and retention. |
-100 to -50 | Very poor | Employees are very unhappy and potentially disloyal. There is a strong change people will leave the company soon or could sabotage its reputation. Take urgent action to address the root causes of this dissatisfaction. In your Saluplse Culture Survey, look for clues in the scores for Organisational Trust and Psychological Safety. |
Sources: Perceptx, Officevibe, Elective, AIHR, Frankli
Typical eNPS scores vary by industry. According to Perceptx, here are some typical eNPS benchmarks by industry:
Industry | Benchmark eNPS |
|---|---|
Telecommunications | 27 |
Manufacturing | 13 |
Information Technology | 26 |
Healthcare | -6.5 |
Whilst eNPS is often measured on an 11 point (0-10) scale, for consistency with the rest of the Salpulse survey, we measure Employee Engagement using our standard 5 point Likert scale - Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither Agree nor Disagree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. eNPS is then calculated as the percentage of promoters (an NPS term - respondents who selected Strongly Agree) minus the percentage of detractors (an NPS term - respondents who selected Strongly Disagree, Disagree or Neither Agree nor Disagree). Research has shown that using a 5 point scale for an NPS will result in scores that differ from an 11 point scale by only about +/-4% on average.
It is possible that your engagement score has gone up since your last survey and your eNPS score has gone down, or vice versa. This is because the way these two scores are calculated is different. In order to make the Engagement score consistent with other scores in the survey, it is calculated as the percentage of people who Agree or Strongly Agree. eNPS is calculated in an industry standard way, as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detracters (see above for the formula). So if some people who selected Strongly Agree in the last survey, selected Agree, in the current survey, this can result in a drop in the eNPS without a drop in the Engagement score.
By default, Salpulse includes only one engagement question. Whilst extra questions can be added if needed, we usually don't recommend this. For the purposes of the Salpulse Survey, it is sufficient to measure the high level overview of engagement that the Employee Engagement Score or eNPS gives.
Whilst, the process of building and activating a purpose-drive Culture Code will naturally result in higher engagement levels, it can be very helpful to dive deeper into engagement at the individual level to make sure you don't loose critical people or allow disgruntled employees to infect others and damage the culture.
For this deeper dive into employee engagement at your organisation, we recommend running a Harrison Assessment, which takes a different approach to engagement than most engagement survey tools. In Harrison, understanding engagement involves a personal, two-way conversation between the employer and the employee and involves mutual obligation.
The employee ranks factors that are important to them (eg: Wants Development) and the level of fulfilment they have in those factors, as well as ranking a number of behavioural preferences. Then, the conversation with an individual employee can be very specific around what important factors are they feeling unfulfilled in and is there anything the organisation can do to remedy that. Also, Harrison measures an individual's supporting traits; ie: what they can do to support being fulfilled. For example, an employee who wants development opportunities can greatly assist themselves by exhibiting the behavioural traits of being enthusiastic towards goals and desiring self-improvement: