What to do when your employees are detractors, passives or promoters of your organisation
As we discussed previously, creating an employee NPS is a fantastic and easy way to gather employee feedback. But the score is just step numero uno. And I dare to say, not the most important one.
Indeed, the NPS is an entry-point for conversation and better understanding. And the score is like a photograph — it’s what employees think at a given moment. What really matters is the follow-up: the improvements that will you will bring to life following employees’ feedback.
But what to do with the opinions from your detractors, passives and promoters? That is the question. Let’s try to answer it.
‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning’ — Bill Gates
Unfortunately, disgruntled employees are found in a vast majority of organisations. As we’ve covered in our last post, surveys that seek to understand employee (un)happiness often reveal damning results — 57% of employees globally wouldn’t recommend their organisation as a good place to work, for example.
As a leader, knowing that you have detractors inside your business is hard to take in. You’ve devoted your time, energy and feelings to take your organisation to where it’s at today, so knowing that it’s failing to fulfil your employees can be somewhat chilling.
However, your employee NPS will enable you to root out the different pain points. Detractors tend to be vocal, which is not a bad thing if you want to tackle organisational problems.
According to Zendesk, 63% of customers who submit a bad rating leave feedback, while only 25% of those who submit a good rating do. They also tend to leave longer comments which, again, is good news.
These stats are based on external customers but I would imagine that comment rates would be even higher for employees. Considering how much time, energy and feelings they invest at work, it only makes sense for them to hold their employers to a higher standard than external customers do.
Once detractors have given their feedback, it’s crucial you do something about it because, as the saying goes, one bad apple can ruin the bunch. Research on contagiousness of employee fraud has found that ‘even your most honest employees become more likely to commit misconduct if they work alongside a dishonest individual. And while it would be nice to think that the honest employees would prompt the dishonest employees to better choices, that’s rarely the case.’
Unhappiness breeds unhappiness, so make sure to reach out to detractors before destructive behaviour becomes viral.
Close but no cigar
Passives are discarded from NPS scores, but ignoring them is nothing short of foolish. In some organisations, passives can be the silent majority.
The challenge with this cluster of people is that they’re not just passive in their rating, but also in their tendency to provide feedback. Per Zendesk’s data, only 37% of them do leave open feedback, which means 2 in 3 don’t disclose what’s missing for them to become brand ambassadors.
Of course, being passive at work is better than being a detractor. But if you want to understand passives, your task may be harder than addressing complaints from detractors. Detractors want change, and with the lengthy feedback they provide in their employee NPS, they’re ready to guide leaders on how to make it happen. However, due to their lack of engagement, a typically passive person would take the status-quo as something they can’t shake off.
(Heskett et al., 1994)
As a leader, your role is to reach out to these people and ask what, in the organisation or in their work, is missing for them to be truly fulfilled. The difference between someone being passive or a promoter can be slim, and it’s your role to understand the reasons why they would rate your organisation 7 or 8, and not 9 or 10.
Again, once you’ve collected feedback from passives, act on it. You will never turn a passive into a promoter until you show that their opinion can have a positive, tangible effect on the organisation. Actions speak louder than words.
Promoting your promoters
Those are your brand ambassadors and you should treat them with the same care as you do with detractors and passives.
The first thing leaders need to do is identify what it is that make them happy at work, and consolidate that. But adopting the ‘let’s keep on doing what works’ mind-set isn’t enough. Over time there’s a risk that what makes them promoters today will be taken for granted. For example, if an employee is enjoying a flexi-hour policy to accommodate their school run today, over time they can grow numb to it.
On top of this, I believe there are two additional questions that leaders need to ask: one to their promoters, and one to themselves.
First, ‘What more could we do for you?’ is a good way to tighten the bonds between the organisation and its promoters. And secondly, ‘How can we create an environment where promoters can positively influence others?’ is one area that leaders need to ponder. Turning promoters into evangelists is the real (but beautiful!) challenge.
Ask, listen, learn, repeat
As with the traditional framework, it’s important to develop a survey cadence with your employee NPS, because detractors can become promoters and vice versa.
What your employees think of your organisation today doesn’t matter as much as what they’ll think of it in the future.
Let’s chat @wakanouka.
This is the 3rd of my series on Internal Marketing. Previous posts:
