Your Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is more than a number; it’s a thermometer for your company’s health, reflecting employee satisfaction, engagement, and advocacy. But what happens when that number starts to decline? Understanding the “why” behind a falling eNPS can empower you to make the necessary adjustments and keep your team’s morale on the upswing.
Quick takeaways you’ll get from this article:
- Recognizing the critical factors that contribute to a dropping eNPS
- Strategies to effectively address each underlying issue
- The importance of consistent, quality employee feedback mechanisms
1. Lack of Employee Recognition
When employees feel undervalued or unacknowledged, engagement plummets, directly impacting your eNPS and likely much more across your business. Lower engagement likely means lower drive to resolve problems, grow, and improve processes. If that’s the case, your business will not operate as competitively in your space and risks receding.
How to address it:
- Implement Regular Acknowledgment: Whether through ‘Employee of the Month’ awards, shout-outs in team meetings, or a company-wide bulletin, recognizing hard work is vital.
- Personalized Appreciation: Go beyond generic thank-yous. Personalize your approach by acknowledging specific achievements or unique contributions of your employees. It doesn’t always have to be in meetings or on regular cadences. Some employees will appreciate impromptu appreciation or casual mentions of gratitude more than awards or the spotlight.
2. Poor Communication Transparency
If your communication channels are flawed, employees may feel out of the loop or unheard, leading to frustration and disengagement. Worse yet, if you have communications saying one thing, but variations of that are happening, this could lead employees to believe you are not being completely truthful or forthcoming in what you say leading to distrust and reduced engagement. Example: saying you will revamp your benefits offerings, and merely adding dental coverage isn’t quite a revamp.
How to address it:
- Open-door Policy: Encourage leaders to be approachable, welcoming employee input on various issues. And bubble these issues up to leadership for evaluation of trends and concerns from the front line employees.
- Regular Updates: Use newsletters or regular company meetings to keep everyone informed about organizational changes, successes, and challenges. These can be high level or you can deep dive on specific areas each month.
- Feedback Platforms: Invest in tools that facilitate anonymous employee feedback, showing you’re committed to hearing honest insights and concerns. Survey tools like Peoplelytics can help with this. There are also alternatives Trakstar.com, CultureAmp.com, and Reflektive.com.
3. No Clear Career Advancement Path
Ambitious employees might hit a roadblock if they see no room for growth, which could be prompting them to be detractors on your eNPS survey. They may even enjoy their time there and only come through as a Neutral in your eNPS surveys — but something will be missing which will eventually lead them to leave and pursue growth externally (with a competitor or in another industry entirely).
How to address it:
- Transparent Pathways: Clearly outline what steps employees need to take to reach the next level in their career journey within your organization.
- Skill Development: Offer opportunities for training and upskilling, showing you’re invested in their growth and success.
- Check-ins: Regular discussions about career goals and progress with supervisors can help employees feel seen and supported in their advancement efforts. Having allowances for external trainings, conferences, and education reimbursement could be several options to explore to retain your top talent.
4. Work-Life Imbalance
Overworked employees are often unhappy ones. If work-life balance is skewed towards all work and no play, employees will struggle to stay positive and productive. In certain roles, wider availability may be required. However, if their role is 9-5, and they’re getting frequent requests outside of those hours or have subtle expectations put on them that they need to be connected to work outside the office it’s likely to be more of a cause of burnout than growth for the company.
How to address it:
- Flexible Schedules: Whenever possible, offer flexibility in work hours or remote work options.
- Time-off Encouragement: Create an environment where taking allotted time off is the norm, not the exception.
- Support Systems: Introduce wellness programs, mental health support, or even simple decompression activities to help manage stress.
- Resetting Expectations: Communicating with managers to reiterate availability needs, and boundaries can be vital to help this. Also, taking a top-down approach to having your leaders live your guidelines can send a powerful message as well.
5. Inadequate Compensation
Feeling underpaid can quickly turn a satisfied employee into a disengaged one, influencing them to rate your company lower on an eNPS survey. And while many studies show that compensation isn’t the most important thing to most employees — particularly the younger generations — nobody wants to feel like they’re struggling to keep their head above water when it comes to finances. If your staff are underpaid, it’s going to become a pain point in some way — either attrition of employees, dissatisfaction, lack of engagement, laziness, or all of the above.
How to address it:
- Regular Market Analysis: Ensure your compensation packages are competitive within your industry.
- Transparent Compensation Framework: Help employees understand why they’re paid what they are, and what they can do to achieve higher compensation.
- Non-Monetary Perks: Sometimes, benefits like health insurance, gym memberships, or childcare can be just as effective as a pay raise.
6. Diminishing Company Culture
A toxic or diminishing company culture can be one of the most detrimental factors to your eNPS, as it directly affects everyone within the organization. This is a wider and likely more pervasive issue that likely has myriad of reasons for it’s existence. This is where written feedback counts more than just a number. Your employees will tell you what’s going on in eNPS surveys and engagement surveys and it will be your job to prioritize what to address and how to prioritize those items.
How to address it:
- Culture Committees: Establish a team dedicated to monitoring, preserving, and enhancing company culture.
- Team Building: Regular team-building activities can foster a sense of community and belonging.
- Values in Action: Don’t just state your company values; live them. Recognize and celebrate when team members embody these principles.
In Closing
Understanding the reasons behind a falling eNPS allows companies to take action before it’s too late. The key lies in being proactive, listening to your employees, and continuously striving for improvement in the workplace. If you know there are issues and can’t be proactive, there’s no time like the present to start addressing things. Six months from now you will either have months of positive progress, or six more months of pain for your employees. And remember, changes don’t need to be monumental; even small adjustments can make a world of difference in how employees perceive their professional environment. Sometimes, for employees, just knowing that you’re working on it and that you care can help boost numbers and KPIs while they wait for changes to come — as nothing happens overnight. Want some context for what a good eNPS score is in general? We’ve answered that here.
Ready to get ahead in understanding and improving your team’s dynamics? Sign up for Peoplelytics to send better employee surveys and enhance employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Embrace the journey toward a more engaged workforce!
