The Great People Index™
Measuring the right employee things!
You heard us explain before how you can’t achieve superior customer experience without focusing on employee experience as well.
But we have not yet looked at how to measure employee satisfaction in an organization. The widely used Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is pretty much useless as a metric when it comes to measuring your ability to attract and retain the right team. While the Net Promoter Score is great for use in customer experience, it is too easy to manipulate in the employee space!
Why Net Promoter Score is Useless in the Employee Space
Our main concerns against the use of NPS in the employee space are the many ways in which you can manipulate your audience as well as the ubiquitous distorting influences which let your NPS fluctuate erroneously over time.
Manipulating Your Audience
Different from the use of Net Promoter Score in the customer space, it is very easy to manipulate your employee audience when measuring employee Net Promoter Score.
We have seen division leads inform the teams in all hands meetings that “only tens and nines a good scores” and in the next eNPS survey that particular division’s score jumped up 40 points.
Distorting Influences on Regular eNPS Surveys
A second reason why we dislike the Net Promoter Score in measuring employee loyalty is that there are plenty of possible unrelated influences that can spoil your Net Promoter Score without you knowing it.
One year, for example, you might run your NPS survey prior to the annual performance appraisals. The next year it might happen thereafter. All of a sudden, the disappointment of merit increases having happened or not happened will impact your eNPS to an unjustified degree.
Other examples of influences strongly changing your eNPS scores without fundamental reasons can be the announcements of acquisitions, the appointment of new leadership or the dismissal of key personnel that has been either very popular or very unpopular.
Figure 2: Distorting influences on eNPS
So with an audience as easy to manipulate as your employees, it doesn’t seem wise to measure only one metric in order to conclude the loyalty and fit of your team.
Introducing the Great People Index™
Instead, we suggest the Great People Index (GPI) as a collection of employee related KPIs to get a pulse check on how loyal your team is and to what degree you are capable of attracting and retaining the right talent in you organization.
Because, let’s face it, with eNPS we only measure how loyal the existing team in your organization is towards your firm. That is completely independent of how desirable it is to actually retain such talent. Instead, the Great People Index™ allows you to measure your ability to form the perfect team that supports your company vision.
Employee Net Promoter Score
The wrong question:
Are our Employees loyal
to the company?
Great People Index™
The right question:
Do we attract, have and retain
the right people?
Pragmatic and Flexible
The Great People Index™ is an index based metric (as the name indicates), which is made up of several KPIs that already exist in your organization. Figure 1 gives you a few examples – categorized into the 4P of employee experience – for which measurements might already exist in your organization and can contribute to forming the Great People Index™ in your company.
The advantage of the Great People Index™ is that you can start with what you have and add additional KPIs to the index as your measurement infrastructure becomes more sophisticated. As such, the GPI is a very economical way of measuring employee engagement.
How the GPI is calculated
Figure 2 shows you an example of how the GPI in an organization is growing from one measurement forming the index to several different KPIs contributing to it.
In period 1 you use what you already have in your organization, in this example the bonus achievement. You will then use your current reading of this KPI and index it to 100. Hence, in period 1 your GPI is 100.
In period 2 you do two things: Firstly, you collect your second reading of the measurement that you already use (the bonus achievement in this example). As you can see the measurement has gone up, and (indexed) it now reads 108.
Secondly, you are now ready to add your second measurement. In this example it is the workspace score from your annual employee survey. Again, since this is the first period in which you measure this KPI, your current reading is indexed to 100 and then it is weighed with a tool specific weighing factor (30% in this example) with which this second metric contributes to your GPI in the second period.
This scheme continues in the third and fourth period. As a third (trainings delivered) and fourth measurement (charity hours served) are being added to the GPI, the individual weighing factors change and give each of the four KPIs an individual contribution to the GPI.
Measures contributing to the GPI
GPI Calculation Example
Figure 1: Examples of KPIs contributing to the GPI
Figure 2: Example how to calculate the GPI in an organization
Less Fluctuating and Ready for the Future
The advantage is obvious. Not only does the GPI become more and more stable since it will fluctuate less as the number of contributing KPIs increases (see figure 6). In addition to that, the historical readings of the KPI will remain intact and the company retains its ability to compare results over time and see to which degree it is improving its ability to attract the right talent and retain it within the company.
This historic comparability of GPI results, despite the fact that you might be adding KPIs as you move on, is the key advantage of GPI over every other measurement method you can use to measure employee engagement. Traditional measurement systems will lose historic comparability whenever you change the measurement method, the KPI, or any other parameter of your measurement system.
Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in introducing the Great People Index™ to your organization. Will be happy to explain the method and help you introduce this unique and efficient measurement structure into your organization. Start now to leverage employee experience for creating a sustainably stellar customer experience.
Great People Index: Increasingly Stable
Figure 3: The more measures contribute to the GPI, the more stable it becomes
“Why should we introduce the Great People Index at our Organization?”
Your six biggest benefits from using GPI
Customized instead of one-size-fits-all
GPI will select the KPIs that matter most to you and weigh them individually to form your organization’s Great People Index. This way you will have reliable and consistent measure of your ability to attract and retain the right team.
Pragmatic and affordable instead of yet another big project
The introduction of GPI to your organization is a project of a 2-4 weeks with no IT infrastructure or security requirements over what you already have in place.
Consistent with your employee measurements so far
There is no need to change your surveys, increase frequencies thereof or start costly consulting projects around employee satisfaction. GPI builds on what’s already there and makes it more visible within the organization. It aggregates KPIs that have been hidden across several places in the organization into one coherent measure for your ability to attract and retain the right team.
Steady instead of erratically fluctuating
Measures like the Net Promoter Score are made for large audiences that are not repeatedly presented with the measurement question and do not understand the underlying algorithm. When used with employees, the sources for error or manipulation are plentiful. As a result, eNPS and other employee measures fluctuate erratically, making the results almost useless. GPI, instead, grows more and more stable, the more KPIs you add to the ingredients. As a result, you can focus on changes over time and draw real conclusions from stable and reliable data.
A great way to boost your Employee Experience – and Customer Experience – efforts
Measuring your ability to attract and retain the right team is just the first step on your journey towards treating CX and EX as two sides of the same coin. From here you will see where to improve, invest, and integrate. And as a result you will not only boost your EX but you will also re-energize your potentially stalling CX program. Great CX is only achievable through a sustainably great EX!
Figure 1: Examples of KPIs contributing to the GPI
Figure 2: Example how to calculate the GPI in an organization
Future ready instead of painting you into a corner
GPI is created with your choice of EX related KPIs, all being weighed with an individual weighing factor based on each KPI’s importance and reliability. This allows you to grow your GPI and carefully add KPIs to the index as you improve your EX program. With new KPIs joining the GPI with a neutral year-1 value of 100 (indexed), you never lose historic comparability of your data. This loss of historic comparability is what lets organizations stick to unreliable and erratic measurement systems – they have painted themselves into a corner. GPI is future ready and evolves with you as your EX evolves as well.
“How can we introduce the Great People Index in our Organization?”
A pragmatic 4-step process to let you use GPI
Introducing GPI to your organization is pragmatic and straightforward. Here are the typical four steps that you want to perform:
1. The Employee Experience Audit
In this step you want to produce the employee experience profile across the 4P (pay, play, productivity, purpose) for key parts of the company’s employee communities – e.g. by region or division. Interviews with key stakeholders from HR, leadership, as well as selected employee interviews will allow you to map your organization as to whether it performs evenly across 4Ps or has blind spots in certain areas. In addition, this step will give you a good first impression on how you perform as compared to other companies competing for the same talent as you are.
2. The Corporate Value Inventory
This very important step will provide you with a profile of corporate values as well as an analysis of the intensity with which these values are present in the organization. Is your leadership clear on how the organization should operate in relation to society and the environment? If yes, have these values been communicated and are they lived by the team? Or haven’t they made it beyond posters in the cafeteria?
3. The Data Inventory
During your EX Audit you will have found out which data sources with EX related information exist throughout your organization. Now you create a qualified inventory this EX related data. You can now also evaluate benefits and challenges for each of these data sources, e.g. global availability or frequency of collection.
4. Design of your Great People Index
You have arrived! It’s time to create the first version of your organization’s Great People Index – together with all contributing KPIs, weighing factors, regional KPI differentiation (where necessary), as well as a roadmap for potential expansion of the GPI for around 3 years into the future.
You achieve this through a selection of the contributing KPIs from the Data Inventory based on the company’s priorities as per the Value Inventory as well as the EX Audit. The selection of KPI specific weighing factors will then allow you to create the GPI most appropriate for your organization.
Let us help you!
Not only have we supported more organizations in introducing Great People Index than anyone else in the world – we have invented the GPI! So turn to the experts and have us help you! The first step is a virtual cup of coffee on the phone where we discuss your status-quo and describe to most pragmatic way for you to use GPI. Click here to let us know that you like coffee and we’ll take care of the rest!
A head-to-head comparison of Employee Net Promoter Score and Great People Index
eNPS
One number – only one aspect (loyalty only)
Tells you how loyal employees are
Asks – easy to manipulate and distort
Strong, erratic fluctuations
Unrelated to other EX measures
Change method – lose history
No link to the 4P of EX
One size fits all
Great People Index™
One number – unlimited aspects covered (pay, play, productivity, purpose…)
Tells you your ability to attract + retain the right team
Observes – difficult to manipulate
Stable, no erratic fluctuations
Can encompass all EX measures
Maintains history as index evolves
Can cover all 4P areas
Customized