Engagement
Would you recommend working here?
One rating and two written questions. We would run it quarterly, keep it off the board slide, and spend most of the reading time on the comments.
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All three questions
If a friend were looking for a job like yours, how likely would you be to suggest they apply here?
0 = Not at all likely, 10 = Extremely likely
What is the main reason for the score you gave?
Written answer, optional
What would need to change for you to give a higher score?
Written answer, optional
We wrote these questions for this survey and they are not a validated scale. You can edit them once the survey opens in Gists. If you copy them into another tool, check what it records about who answered.
Who sees the comments
Results show only when 5 or more people answer. A team below 5 rolls up into the team above it. A group is also held back when comparing it with another group could reveal a small team. HR and named leaders see every team with 5 or more answers. Each manager sees only their own team. Employees see no team scores. Themes only by default. Word-for-word answers are a company setting, off unless turned on, and employees see a notice before they write.
Before you run this
Count this against everything else you send. Four of these a year on top of an engagement survey is fine; adding it to every other survey is how people stop answering.
The decision it helps with
Is how people feel about working here moving up or down, and do you need to look further?
Running it
The same week each quarter, to everyone. The rating alone can't tell you why someone scored as they did, so question 2 asks for the reason and question 3 asks what would need to change. Don't drop either.
What the results might look like
These are made-up examples to show the patterns, not real data.
Score steady, reasons change
+14 then +15, but mentions of workload double in the written answers.
- What it means
- Sentiment is holding while the cause is moving.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean nothing needs attention. A steady number can hide a problem that's growing.
- What to do
- Read the written answers as themes and pick the one that's growing.
A swing of a few points
+20 to +14 at a 40-person company.
- What it means
- Possibly nothing: a couple of people moving between 8 and 9 can do that.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't show that morale fell.
- What to do
- Wait for a second quarter in the same direction before you say anything.
What to tell people afterwards
Share the themes from question 2 and the change you will make from question 3. The number on its own tells people very little.
What to measure next, and when
If it falls two quarters running, send the engagement survey to find out which part of work is behind it.
How much weight it can carry
We wouldn't hang much on it. The recommend question comes from customer loyalty work, where Reichheld argued that one number could stand in for growth (Reichheld, 2003). When Keiningham's team tested that with data from 21 firms and over 15,500 interviews, they could not replicate the claim that Net Promoter was clearly better than other customer measures (Keiningham et al., 2007). Those are studies of customers, and we don't know of good evidence that the employee version works as a validated measure.
That said, Wanous and colleagues found single-item measures of overall job satisfaction correlated .63 with full scales across 17 studies (Wanous et al., 1997). That is job satisfaction, a different question from whether you would recommend your employer.
Short measures can work: Fisher and colleagues evaluated single items for 18 organizational constructs and found some useful where a longer scale wouldn't fit (Fisher et al., 2016). That is general evidence, and it doesn't validate this particular question for employees.
When you want causes
Move to the employee engagement survey. A recommend score can tell you sentiment fell; it has no way of telling you which part of work caused it.
Related
Sources
- Reichheld, F. F. (2003). The one number you need to grow. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org/2003/12/the-one-number-you-need-to-grow
- Keiningham, T. L., Cooil, B., Andreassen, T. W., Aksoy, L. (2007). A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth. Journal of Marketing, 71, 39-51. doi:10.1509/jmkg.71.3.39
- Wanous, J. P., Reichers, A. E., Hudy, M. J. (1997). Overall job satisfaction: How good are single-item measures?. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82, 247-252. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.82.2.247
- Fisher, G. G., Matthews, R. A., Gibbons, A. M. (2016). Developing and investigating the use of single-item measures in organizational research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 21, 3-23. doi:10.1037/a0039139