When did we start measuring people like products - and why do we keep doing it?

If you have ever worked in a corporate of almost any size, HR has probably sent you a survey built around a single question: How likely are you to recommend our company to others?

And if you are like most people, you scratched your head and wondered why this even matters, and why they cannot just leave you alone to do your #job.

2026 has been a year of massive change, and we are only halfway through. Despite all the layoffs, restructures and reorganisations, your company is still bugging you with the same question. Of course, part of you is thinking this is the perfect moment to give them a piece of your mind. Rate them a nice round zero. That will show them.

Before you do, it helps to know what that number actually is, where it came from, and what it can and cannot see. Because that single answer can tell you something useful about your own situation, if you know how to read it.

Where the number comes from

The metric has a name. It is the employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, and it is borrowed almost word for word from marketing.

Back in 2003, a Bain and Company consultant named Fred Reichheld published a piece in Harvard Business Review with a confident title, “The One Number You Need to Grow.” Instead of long customer surveys nobody read, ask people the one, most important thing: How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague? The scoring formula is also pretty basic: Score them from 0 to 10. A 9 or 10 makes you a promoter. A 7 or 8 makes you a passive. Anyone from 0 to 6 is a detractor. Subtract the detractors from the promoters and you land on a single figure, somewhere between minus 100 and plus 100.

It was built to measure customer loyalty. However, somewhere along the way, someone in HR looked at it and thought, why not point this at our own staff. Swap “this company” for “this company as a place to #work,” and a customer metric became an employee metric.

Why companies keep asking

The appeal is obvious once you have sat in the meetings where it gets discussed. One number is easy - you can put it on a slide, track it every quarter, compare it to last time, and hold it up next to your competitors. It gives leadership something clean to point at in a room full of messy human problems.

I know this because I used to be the person running the survey and reporting the numbers.

What it looked like from the other side

For years, as Head of People, presenting the eNPS number was simply part of the job. Every cycle it went into the report, up to the CEO, into the conversation about whether things were moving in the right direction and why. Standard practice in my entire, global field.

However, I never believed that one number could tell me what was really happening with a few hundred people - it just felt oversimplified and reductive. A score climbs after one good month and drops after one bad reorganisation, and neither swing tells you much on its own.

So, wherever I could, I ran longer surveys with room for people to actually write something. I also sat in focus groups and I held as many 1:1 conversations as I could manage where the real story tended to surface about ten minutes in, once people decided it was safe to talk. Only when I put all of that together did I get closer to the truth - and even then, I was merely capturing the most recent opinions and emotions. And, as we all know, our personal perspectives adapt to changing circumstances.

What the number cannot see

Start with the question itself. Recommending your employer is a more complicated question than it looks. When you recommend a restaurant, you risk a friend having a mediocre dinner. When you recommend your workplace, you put your own name behind it, and you might be pulling someone you care about into a place you have real doubts about. You could also be handing a friend the desk next to yours, which is not always something people want. So plenty of perfectly content people give a cautious score for reasons that have nothing to do with how they feel about their job.

Then there is the scoring, which almost nobody outside HR understands. Say you are basically fine at work. Not thrilled, not miserable, so you give an honest 6. In your head, 6 out of 10 is a passing grade. In the model, you have just been logged as a detractor, in the same bucket as someone who dreads Monday morning. And the 7s and 8s, often a third to half of everyone who answers, get dropped from the calculation completely. Their feedback does not count at all.

And, there is an even deeper problem. The score measures whether you would advocate (or cheerlead!) for the company, which is a separate thing from how you are actually doing. Someone burning out can still give a high score out of loyalty. Someone doing really well but remain unwilling to get work and personal life mixed up, can give a low score. The number and the lived experience can point in opposite directions.

The worst possible time to ask

Now put that survey where it often lands in 2026, a few weeks after a round of layoffs.

Your team is smaller and some good people are gone. You can't help but wonder if you're going to be next. And into that inbox drops a cheerful question asking how likely you are to recommend the place as somewhere to work.

Consequently, trust in the survey's anonymity drops, because people who just watched colleagues get walked out are not feeling especially safe. Some decide not to bother at all. Others answer, and the score falls, and it falls for a reason that has little to do with engagement in any fixable sense.

Psychologists have a name for it - the psychological contract - a concept developed and popularised by Denise Rousseau in the late 1980s and 1990s. It describes the informal promises we believe our employer made us, about security and being valued, none of it formally written down anywhere. Organizational changes, when they happen frequently, tend to shake that unspoken agreement and it has detrimental effects, even leading to #burnout.

Nevertheless, the company often reads the low score as an engagement problem and reaches for easy fixes for engagement like more perks (pizza anyone?). But, none of these touches the thing that actually changed, which was trust - not engagement.

To answer or not to answer the survey?

So what do you do with the survey, beyond the satisfying fantasy of giving it a big, round zero?

Treat it as information for you, rather than only for them. Your employer is trying to read the room with one blunt instrument. You can do something more honest in private, roughly what I used to do with those focus groups and 1:1s, only pointed at your own working life.

First, are you treated fairly? Not just paid fairly, but informed and dealt with straight when decisions get made. Researchers call this organisational justice, and it shapes how people feel about work far more than any fruit bowl in the kitchen ever will.

Second, do you feel appreciated? Real recognition, the kind that actually lands, is one of the protective factors against burnout. If your last six months of effort disappeared into even more work, your gut already knows the answer.

Third, are you still learning? A role that stretches you is one of the strongest job resources we have for staying engaged, which is well established in the burnout literature. When growth stops, people tend to check out long before they hand in their notice.

Answer those three honestly and you will read your own score better than any dashboard your employer is staring at.

Before you type your answer

The next time that box appears, you can still give them the zero. Sometimes a zero is the most honest number you have, and there is nothing wrong with saying so.

But before you do, ask yourself the deeper question the survey is clumsily circling: When did you last finish a week and think, I want more of this? If you cannot remember, that deserves your attention far more than any figure you send back.

So here is my question for you. If you answered your company's survey honestly today, what would your number be, and what would you actually do about the reasons behind it?

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🌟Sparking Leadership # 54: a weekly series on human-centered sustainable #leadership. Reach out if you're stuck in your career and need a change or follow for more sparkling content. In the meantime, lead with spark! ✨️

Sources

• Reichheld, F. F. (2003). The One Number You Need to Grow. Harvard Business Review, 81(12), 46–54.

• Keiningham, T. L., Cooil, B., Andreassen, T. W., & Aksoy, L. (2007). A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth. Journal of Marketing, 71(3), 39–51. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.71.3.039

• Rousseau, D. M. (1989). Psychological and Implied Contracts in Organizations. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 2(2), 121–139. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01384942 (see also Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological Contracts in Organizations. Sage.)

• Colquitt, J. A. (2001). On the Dimensionality of Organizational Justice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 386–400. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.386

• Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands-Resources Model: State of the Art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940710733115