Organisations do not lack levers to act on motivation. Development, recognition, training, career prospects, mobility notably, and on the perceived side, meaning, culture, the quality of management. The frame was set out among the HR levers in [[remuneration-in-its-rightful-place]], which proposes, with the help of a table, to read them through several lenses, including the tangible and the perceived.
What remains is to be able to assess these levers. This is the function of engagement and motivation indicators, and the eNPS survey is among the most widespread tools. The score is calculated on a single question of recommendation of the employer, rated from 0 to 10.
Around it, the survey gathers the reasons for the rating and sometimes a few closed questions on management, workload or tools. Of this whole, it is the single figure that is sent up to the executive committee, presented as the thermometer of engagement.
There is one scene where the HR department had obtained a very poor score, far from being an ambassador of its own company. The manager gathered the team to ask how to raise that score, which he considered embarrassing for HR.
At no point was the question asked of how to raise the team's wellbeing itself.
The displacement sits entirely in this gap. Asking for a better score means asking people to produce the sign of their wellbeing without changing anything about what determines it.
Yet an injunction to be well is psychologically untenable. The very term congruence says it: it designates the agreement between what one lives and what one shows. Asking someone to show what they do not live is asking them to be incongruent.
This is the perceived lever cited above. A score is its measure. It is not its means.
What the survey brings, and what it costs
The instrument has real qualities. A short questionnaire, answered in a few minutes, which encourages participation. A single figure, comparable from one quarter to the next and from one entity to another, provided you compare comparable contexts, and readable in thirty seconds. And an open question that gathers the reasons for the rating, that is, material particularly useful for action. The paradox of the exercise sits here: the survey collects the why, and only the figure circulates.
The calculation follows a convention worth knowing. It sorts the answers into three categories: ratings of 9 and 10 count as promoters, those of 7 and 8 as passives, and all the others, from 0 to 6, as detractors. The score subtracts the percentage of detractors from that of promoters. The passives count on neither side, but they count in the calculation base.
A point deserves to be known by those who read the results: a rating of 6 weighs as a detractor. A workforce whose answers mostly sit in the upper half of the scale can therefore show a negative score.
What the indicator captures
The question the score answers is that of the recommendation of the employer. It captures a disposition to speak favourably of one's company, and this disposition follows general job satisfaction fairly well. It also follows, and this is a key point of the instrument, the intention to leave.
The exit interview
The exit interview is a rare moment when speech is less guarded and can come out. It is a unique opportunity, and many organisations treat it as an administrative formality.
What remains is to make something of it. It is conducted by someone other than the manager concerned, late enough for the decision to be irrevocable. Above all, it is read in the light of the other departures. On a single analysed factor, one departure is a low count, ten departures that invoke the same motive are a signal, and this signal disappears as soon as you content yourself with counting departures without reading their motives.
Confidentiality is its condition. What is said there is entrusted, not deposited. HR plays here a role of communications professional: gathering, then returning in an aggregated form that does not make it possible to trace back to the person, and that the organisation can hear, without betraying the word given and without turning the finding into an indictment.
Raw, named feedback closes the channel for all those who will follow, and above all it allows the finding to be discredited by referring it back to the personality of the one who formulated it rather than to the situation it describes.
As pointed out in the article cited in the opening: the declared motive, often salary, frequently masks the real cause. All the more reason to investigate these interviews.
Only human
All human, and yet, in some companies, HR have been renamed, by their detractors, humans without resources.
The HR function is the guarantor of a certain respect and a responsibility towards the people who make up the workforce. Situations of psychosocial risk occupy a major place in this practice, and they do not appear in a score. They are spotted elsewhere: in absenteeism, in team tensions, in closely-spaced departures notably. Staying attentive to these signals is part of the profession, as much as reading the results of a survey.
Some scenes jar: an employee's level validated in passing, in a toilet doorway. A person's career is worth more than that moment. It is not a question of procedure, it is a question of consideration.
The HR function loses its credibility when it places employees in extreme situations and addresses them, at the same time, with disconnected questions. Asking someone whether they would recommend their employer at the moment when their place is being redrawn does not call for a sincere answer.
There is a limit the measure will never cross. You cannot expect the engagement of a person whose position has just been eliminated, who has been asked to find themselves a place internally, and who is then expected to present this mobility as their lifelong career plan. The organisation then asks two incompatible things: endure a decision and display enthusiasm for it.
The same mechanism plays elsewhere. An organisation calls on two experts and installs them in a steering committee. Their views concur, and diverge from what was expected. It sidelines them in turn. It gets exactly what it has built, a presence without voice. Consulting is a role, not a courtesy. The one who is consulted is consulted before the decision, and their view may displease, otherwise all that remains of the role is its appearance. This role is described in [[comp-ben-governance-instruments]].
One CHRO grows weary of the requests for schedule adjustments from young mothers, until the day she becomes a mother herself. Nothing had changed in the requests, everything had changed in the way she looked at them.
Decisions taken hastily have unsuspected consequences in the lives of employees. A change of site can throw into crisis the organisation of a family with young children or children in school. The organisation's social responsibility is undeniable, and anticipating the consequences of a change, even when it seems innocuous, is part of it.
No score corrects this, no action plan either. The answer is on the side of respect and of a change of perceptual position, that is, on the side of conditions, never on the side of the measure.
Changing by doing the same thing
Companies evolve constantly and no one disputes this. Structures change, tools change, perimeters are redrawn. But when it comes to calling into question an established practice, an accepted idea, a habit that no one questions any more, you often hit a wall. You change a lot, and often by doing the same thing.
That is where the signal is lost. A score can drop, a verbatim can be crystal clear, nothing moves if the organisation refuses to look at what it has always done. This capacity to call oneself into question has become a condition of adaptation on the same footing as the others.
The governance of the measure
An indicator is governed like the rest. Who owns it, how often you survey, from how many respondents a team result is published without exposing anyone, who decides on actions and where they are traced. These questions arise before the first survey, not after the first poor score.
One rule prevails over the others: never read the score alone. It is placed alongside the participation rate, the distribution of answers, the open answers the survey already gathers, absenteeism, departures and events that occurred during the period. Governance does not consist in finding the unquestionable figure, it organises the confrontation of imperfect signals.
The same mechanism, elsewhere
The displacement is not specific to engagement surveys. The level describes the place of the function among the levels in the structure, and it becomes the coveted object for its own sake, as described in [[the-life-of-levels]]. The salary remunerates a function, and it becomes the answer to a problem located elsewhere, as in the article cited in the opening. The score informs on a feeling, and it becomes the thing to raise. In all three cases, the representation takes the place of what it was representing.
A quantified objective belongs to the same family. Attention shifts to what is counted and away from what is not.
The essentials
A measure serves to know where you stand. It does not produce what it measures.
A score informs on a perception, it does not produce it. The work is done on the levers, on the conditions, on the coherence between what the organisation says and what it has people experience. The figure follows, or it does not follow, and it is then one more piece of information.
Knowing what an indicator measures, who answers for it, what it triggers and what it will never be able to correct: this is the frame that the HDH (HR Decision Hub) platform makes it possible to set and to maintain, on functions, levels, evaluations, journeys and remuneration.