Can You Really Measure Workplace Experience in One Question?

We’ve always believed that good data comes from many places, not just surveys.

That said, the global workplace survey is still a staple of most large corporates. It’s their chance to understand how the portfolio is performing from an experience point of view. Which buildings need some attention. What’s working well and why. It gives regional teams data they can use in annual planning and budgeting.

That’s why we often find ourselves in conversations with clients about how best to use Audiem alongside those surveys. Blending the scoring approach that senior leaders expect with the qualitative insights that help you understand the story behind the scores.

And when it comes to scoring, there’s one I always point to: Employee Net Promoter Score® (eNPS®).

Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) was introduced in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix as a way to measure customer loyalty with just one question: “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” It was designed to be simple, memorable, and predictive of growth. If your customers were happy enough to promote you, the theory went, you’d do well. If not, you’d lose ground.

The format was straightforward. People scored their likelihood to recommend on a scale from 0 to 10, and depending on the score they gave, they’d be grouped as promoters, passives or detractors. The final metric was a single number: the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Easy to calculate. Easy to track. And most importantly, easy to communicate at board level.

That simplicity is what helped NPS spread so widely (Forbes estimated that it's used by two thirds of the Fortune 1000). It became a staple of customer experience teams around the world, often seen on dashboards, in investor decks and at the centre of satisfaction strategies.

Over time, organisations started applying the same thinking internally swapping “our company” for “your employer” and pointing the question at employees instead of customers. That’s how Employee Net Promoter Score® (eNPS®) emerged: a neat, familiar way to measure how people feel about working in your organisation.

Here's why I think it makes a strong ‘North Star’ in a world stuffed with property certifications, benchmarks and abstract indexes.

Its roots in customer satisfaction, and the level of boardroom respect it earned in that space, gives it a head start. It doesn’t need a big introduction. Senior colleagues from other corners of the business will probably know what it is, even if they’re a bit fuzzy on the finer points.

It’s also refreshingly straightforward. Most scoring systems (psychometric profiles spring to mind) throw a pile of questions at you, then run your answers through some mysterious algorithm to arrive at a score. NPS just asks one thing: where are you on a 0–10 scale when it comes to recommending this place?

But the real win, for me, is in what it helps us focus on.

As a sector, we talk about measuring workplace experience but rarely ask what we’re actually trying to achieve with it. For me, it’s always come back to talent. Great workplaces help you attract and retain brilliant people. Yes, productivity matters. It always has. But productivity only becomes meaningful once you’ve got the right people in the building. Otherwise, you’re optimising the wrong variable.

And that’s where eNPS comes in. Because when you ask someone whether they’d recommend this place to someone they care about, you’re cutting straight to the heart of that talent question. Would you want someone you trust to work here?

There’s clearly an overlap with HR here, and it’s important to call that out. For too long, HR and FM (or CRES or WP depending on your flavour) have been seen as separate functions. That’s not just the view from outside the industry either. Some within it have clung to that division too. It’s a debate I’ve been part of more times than I care to count.

And of course, within that overlap, there’ll be plenty that influences eNPS scores which falls outside the typical remit of an FM or workplace team. That’s not a problem. It’s a reality of modern work. People’s experiences aren’t neat. They’re shaped by space, tech, culture, leadership, systems, process, all of it.

So rather than trying to tidy it up and box everything off, we should embrace the mess. Workplace and HR aren’t rivals. They’re partners in creating better conditions for work. And if an eNPS score is giving you a read on how people feel, that shared ownership is a strength, not a weakness.

Right. Soapbox away.

Where do we come into this? Well, if you’ve got this far and you like the idea of eNPS as your performance barometer — a simple way of asking, “Would you recommend this place to someone you care about?” — then the next step is understanding how to shift the score. What’s driving the positive sentiment? What’s fuelling the frustration?

That’s where we’ve been helping clients. We keep the scoring question, but layer on a few light-touch, open-ended prompts. Things like:

• Why did you give us that score?
• What’s one thing we could change to improve your workplace experience?
• When it’s working well, what does that look or feel like?

Then we use Audiem’s qualitative analytics engine to turn those comments into action. You can dive into what your detractors (those scoring you 0 to 6) are saying. Spot recurring themes, pain points, or patterns across teams, buildings, or functions. Is it localised? Is it widespread? Is it something you can influence?

You can even use our cluster analysis tools to explore how experience varies by work style or location preference. A little bit of Jeremy Myerson’s ‘typologies’ thinking, baked into your feedback model.

And when you plug that into other data — FM helpdesk tickets, always-on feedback tools, location sensors, whatever — you start building a genuinely 360-degree view of experience. One that lets you track and improve that top line number over time.

Because it’s not the score that matters. It’s what you do next.

‍

Find out how we can help you find your North Star! Get in touch with the team.

‍