How Guru Uses eNPS Metrics to Measure Employee Engagement

Guru’s number one business objective is to cultivate record-setting employee engagement and motivation. Why do we focus so much on engagement? Diverse and distributed teams that find purpose, enjoyment, and opportunities to reach their potential in their work tend to perform better. Having the right insight and data around employee engagement can tell you a lot about the health of your organization. That’s why we use a variety of tools, including Guru itself, to learn as much about our employees as possible.

The Guru difference in employee engagement

Using Guru for people ops communication is an investment in employee engagement and the employee experience. When people ops teams use Guru as a single source of truth, that shows that they’re dedicated to creating the best employee experience possible. Rather than allowing information to exist in different systems, we have a single source of truth for all work knowledge so employees can stay focused and engaged.

Our employees expect to interact with people ops experts through Guru and know how to use Guru to find answers to their most pressing work questions. On the flip side, the people ops team can use knowledge consumption data through our built-in Analytics to better understand employee behavior.

Measuring engagement via eNPS

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple yet proven method for companies to understand their customers’ happiness with the products or services the company offers. NPS is measured by asking, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?”

In people ops, our employees are our customers. Therefore, an eNPS, or Employee Net Promoter Score, helps us understand whether our employees are happy with the experience of working at Guru. While other indicators like the Vega Factor, inclusion surveys, and other audits and polls support our engagement analysis, eNPS is our most consistent source of insights.

Why eNPS matters

You’d be surprised at how much information we get from asking, “How likely are you to recommend working at Guru to a friend or family member?” The results from an eNPS survey can provide your people ops team with a reliable and extremely quick indicator of engagement.

When we analyze our eNPS results, we can:

1. Gauge the success of our people ops work
2. Gain insight into our employee engagement and perceptions
3. Uncover opportunities to invest in the employee experience and improve retention

Employee engagement is impacted by whether employees feel their feedback is heard and acted upon. While eNPS gives our employees a voice, Guru helps us communicate how we listen to them. Employees know we’ll share the eNPS analysis and commitments that people ops and leadership make following their feedback. They also help keep us accountable by tracking and commenting on our commitments in Guru.

How to use Guru to improve eNPS results

If you want to get more out of your eNPS data, you need Guru. Our people ops team uses Guru to help encourage eNPS participation, disseminate results, and communicate action items from employee feedback. Here’s some insight into how our team uses Guru to get even better eNPS insights.

Provide urgent eNPS reminders

eNPS surveys can only be valuable if enough employees take them. Having a sense of urgency around eNPS surveys helps improve participation and ensure we get our results on time. In the past, we used Slack messages to announce and remind employees of our upcoming eNPS survey. There’s nothing wrong with using an @channel for company-wide comms, but that didn’t give us much in terms of tracking or analytics.

Now we use announcements to inform employees about upcoming eNPS surveys. This gives us better insight into who sees our message, and the system can automatically remind people if they haven't clicked "I read it." Since we've switched over to using announcements, we've noticed an uptick in survey participation and on-time completion. Not bad for a quick platform change!

Deliver new comms

One big benefit of using Guru to communicate eNPS news with employees is that we have extra insight into employee behavior through analytics. By looking at data around Card views, I noticed that even though people were filling out eNPS surveys, they weren’t checking out the analysis and actions we were putting together in Guru.

Guru helped identify an issue with engagement, so it only made sense to use Guru to help solve the problem. With some help from our internal comms pros, we were able to:

1. Request employees follow the Card to stay tuned into these communications
2. Collaborate with our internal communications team to:
3. Announce the Card when commitments and analysis are added
4. Place the Card in Guru knewsletters
5. Reference Cards in Town Hall
6. Post the Card to our people ops channels and platforms like Slack and Asana

All of these were minor changes on their own, but they’re starting to make a noticeable impact on engagement. We’re still testing out other methods, but we know we’re on our way to building an even more robust system for gathering and distributing feedback.

Organize important eNPS content

So much work goes into scheduling, creating, distributing, and analyzing eNPS surveys. Keeping as much helpful information in Guru as possible makes managing our eNPS work as efficient as possible. Guru helps me be more proactive and ensures that our eNPS survey process is repeatable by anyone on the people ops team (after all, you never know when sick time or a beach day will pop up).

So, just how many cards do we have dedicated to eNPS work? We have cards that run the gamut, outlining procedures like:

1. Generating an appropriate survey population via our HRIS
2. Building and sending the eNPS Survey in our People Analytics tool, ChartHop
3. Announcement language to use for every survey share
4. How to perform the eNPS analysis
5. Handing off eNPS follow-ups to people business partners
6. When and how to perform a follow-up with an employee
7. Descriptions of system automations (G Suite, Asana) using Zapier that document and track eNPS follow-up conversations
8. Running a meeting with people business partners and people ops leadership to outline key highlights from follow-up conversations
9. Prepare results for Executive Business Reviews to ensure their understanding of eNPS feedback and key commitments
10. Template: eNPS Tracking and Results

This eNPS card ecosystem keeps our team accountable to our employee’s feedback in a fashion that outlives my role at Guru. Keeping Cards in Guru goes beyond storing everything in one place. Having a running record of all of the procedures we’ve practiced and changes we’ve made makes it even easier for us to innovate and improve. Oh, and that last Card? Guru Assist helped me build it!

Assist allowed me to build a “Quick summary / TL;DR” from an actual Key Result card in which we’ve shared eNPS analysis and commitments. I highlighted sections individually and prompted Assist with inputs like, “What is the objective of this section for my audience?” and “Explain the purpose of this section so it may be used in a template for people ops professionals.”

I even took the language Assist generated and had it “Decrease words / Shorten” or “Simplify vocabulary / Remove jargon.” Assist gave me a hand by generating the base content for every section, and I topped it off with the details only a human can provide.

Bonus: That Card is also a public template! Feel free to use it for your own eNPS work.

Outshine industry standards with Guru

The simple, fast, and accurate knowledge sharing of eNPS results through Guru ensures our employees understand how valuable their insights are. No information is lost in the noise of chat, email, and video fatigue, and everything is stored in our single source of truth.

When employees trust verified eNPS information, it gives our people ops team back valuable time. If you spend most of your time answering questions from employees, you don’t have a lot of time to focus on strategy or other parts of your job. Using Guru creates a positive feedback loop:

1. Employees consume information about how we’re invested in their engagement
2. People ops spends more focus time enhancing the employee experience to create more engagement.

Ultimately, we experience more output on our people ops team and across the company– without the risk of burnout and attrition–because the importance of employee engagement is made clear.

Our attention to eNPS is starting to pay off. As of today, our average eNPS is 64. Considering that the industry average is at 28, we’re very proud of the work we’ve done. If you want to see those results for your company, it’s time to get Guru.