By Bennett Fisher
For years, companies tried to figure out how to measure and manage customer loyalty without the complexity of traditional customer surveys.
A few decades ago, Andy Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, introduced an innovative and simple idea to do this that focused on the most enthusiastic customers who were most likely to recommend a particular service to their friends.
This new methodology, which evolved into what is known today as the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), was based on a single question. The simplicity of it caught fire in popularity and many industries began adopting their own version of an NPS.
The HR world, as an example, embraced the idea of an employee net promoter score or eNPS. eNPS measures how willing employees are to recommend their company as a place to work to their friends.
eNPS is a great tool to help measure the overall health of a company's employee base. But what about the people entrusted to maximize the happiness and productivity of those employees themselves (ie managers)?
Many of us managers continuously wonder whether we are doing a good job at team management. Could we better? Where could we improve?
So, Pulsify set out to create a way to quantify how managers are doing, track that progress over time, and benchmark it against peers (anonymously).
Without further ado, we'd like to introduce to you the first NPS for people leaders - the Net Manager Score™ (NMS)! The NMS is now available as part of Pulsify's manager augmentation platform.
How is it calculated?
The Net Manager Score™ (NMS) is a quantitative way to understand how effective you are at managing a high performing team. It’s simple to calculate, yet incredibly insightful.
Similar to the NPS, the NMS is based upon a system of Promoters (we call them Contributors) and Detractors.
Contributors are To Dos that are recommended by the platform and subsequently completed by managers within a defined period as it pertains to a team member's goals, feedback, sentiment, performance and more. Detractors, on the other hand, are To Dos that are recommended by the platform but not completed by managers within a defined period as it pertains to a team member's goals, feedback, sentiment, performance, etc.
To calculate the score, we subtract the total detractors from the total contributors across a manager's entire team, divide that number by the total number of opportunities, and multiply by 100.
------------------------------------------ X 100 = Net Manager Score™
Total # Opportunities
What’s considered a good score?
The goal of Pulsify's Net Manager Score™ is to provide you with a starting point that can guide you to improve and become your best manager self especially now with many of us managing virtual teams.
The NMS ranges from -100 if you don't do any of the recommended To Dos for your team to 100 if you are doing all of the suggested items.
Above 0 is OK, above 30 is Good, and above 70 is Great. You don’t need to be perfect all of the time, but try to stay out of the negative territory…nobody likes red, negative numbers on their homepage.
How do you stack up?
Many of us are curious how our scores compare to that of others.
With that in mind, we added a few features for those that like to flex their competitive muscles a bit more.
As shown on the right, the Leaderboard illustrates the top ten Net Manager Scores across your team and/or company. Don't see your name on that list just yet - attack your To Dos and you will soon!
The platform also provides a few different benchmarks so you can see your score against the company average, peer groups, and others in the larger industry – all anonymously, of course!
How can you improve?
There are three important things to keep in mind with respect to the NMS and great team management.
First, it is not hard to figure out what actions to take when and on which team members. Pulsify's AI and analytics automatically provide recommendations in the form of To Dos as to your best next steps. Follow those and you'll be GREAT in no time.
For example, imagine you have a person on your team that hasn’t checked in on their goals in a while and/or hasn’t received any feedback form anyone recently…we’ll give you a nudge on when and how to engage with that individual and a related To Do will show up on your dashboard.
As you complete all of those To Dos, your score will positively reflect that. If you don’t and they hang out there for a while (similar to how your team member is probably feeling), your score will negatively reflect that.
Second, your score represents how you are doing at the current point in time. It’s a real time calculation so depending on the actions you take or don’t take, your score will update accordingly.
And finally, its important to keep in mind that your NMS is not the be-all and end-all of being a strong leader. Proactively doing the things you should be doing as a manager is clearly important. It doesn’t guarantee success, but success is hard to achieve without it.
Give it a try and, as always, let us know what you think!
"Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld."