Feedback

The NPS Is Dead – How we killed it with Incentives

I suppose most people in IT have encountered the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in some form. If you’re unfamiliar with it, just check out the Wikipedia article.

In brief, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s calculated by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. The score is then derived by subtracting the percentage of detractors (those who score 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (those who score 9-10).

It sounds good, and for a time, it served its original purpose well!

Why we need Feedback on the Feedback

“Feedback is important!” – We’ve all heard this before. It’s an old adage.

I guess we also agree that feedback without any following actions is not only useless but demotivating. People will learn very quickly that “giving Feedback” is obviously useless and thus will not give feedback anymore. – End of Feedback culture.

Don’t just ask for Feedback and Improvements

“Every employee should feel encouraged to give feedback and contribute ideas for improvement!” Who has heard this before? Probably everyone!

My (slightly provocative) opinion: “The effect was probably close to zero. So Forget it and don’t do such a shout out!”. Unless you want nothing or barely anything to change. Then do a big shout-out and send people back to work! Great show – with no effect! Of course, I made the mistake myself and didn’t notice for quite a while (years, actually). Every now and then an idea or suggestion came along (or I had one myself) and we were proud of the improvement. At some point between Retros and PostMortems I got the point: “It needs the right framework!”