The EHS method
What is the Employee Happiness Score?
EHS makes employee experience easier to express, measure and understand.
EHS combines a carefully worded question, five labelled faces and an open “Why” field. Explore the reasoning and research behind each choice.
Explore the method ↓working at [your company]?
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01 / A deliberate question
Leave the feeling
to the person answering.
The question starts with the employee’s experience. It gives them room to say that work feels good, difficult or somewhere in between.
How do you feel about working at [your company]?
Why “feel”, rather than “happy”?
“How happy do you feel?” introduces happiness before the employee describes their experience. EHS deliberately leaves that direction open. “How do you feel?” lets the employee choose from the full range, from actively unhappy to actively happy.
Why name the organisation?
“Working at [your company]” gives the question a clear subject. Employees consider their own working experience, rather than whether they would recommend it to someone else.
Question wording and context can change what people report. Schwarz’s research explains why the way we ask is part of the measurement. EHS keeps its wording fixed so each cycle begins with the same question. [22]
Does “How happy…” always bias an answer?
The response scale and context matter. The ONS uses a happiness question with a scale that includes “not at all”. EHS chooses a different framing: it leaves the emotional direction open in the question and makes both positive and negative answers explicit in the response choices. [18]
02 / Five faces, with clear meaning
Give feelings a face.
Give each face a meaning.
A number tells you where an answer sits. A face and its label tell you what that answer means. EHS combines the visual direction of an expression with a clear description of the feeling.
More than a bare number
A “4” needs an explanation. EHS names the category: Happy. Employees choose a described feeling rather than inventing a meaning for a number.
A shared visual direction
The expressions show the progression from negative to positive. Labels clarify each step and support people who rely on words rather than the icons.
Consistency beyond the screen
The same five categories feed the same calculation. The employee chooses the feeling; EHS handles the numerical conversion consistently.
Numbers are part of the message.
Schwarz and colleagues found that changing the numerical range changed how people interpreted the same endpoint labels. A scale’s meaning needs to be made clear. [23]
Faces have a practical role.
In two eye-tracking experiments, faces alongside labels reduced reading time without a detected change in response distributions. [2]
How does this work across languages?
Faces offer a visual cue alongside language. The labels preserve the intended meaning of each category. For use in another language, the question and labels should be translated together and checked with the people who will answer them. That is how a shared method keeps its meaning across different audiences. [26]
03 / The reason behind the response
Ask “Why”.
Let their priorities surface.
A targeted question chooses the subject before the employee speaks. An open explanation lets them tell you what shaped their answer, including something you might never have put on a questionnaire.
The score provides a consistent measure. Their words tell you where to look more closely.
What comes to mind
belongs here.
Pew Research Center describes how earlier questions and suggested answers can shape what respondents mention. Starting with an open explanation gives employees space to introduce their own priorities. [24]
Where do targeted questions fit?
They help once you know what needs closer attention. Use the overall response and comments to find a focus, then explore it through an Open Check-in or a conversation. Starting open and following up with purpose gives the two approaches different jobs.
A spontaneous comment shows what that person chose to share. Looking for repetition across comments and cycles helps leaders see which themes deserve further attention.
04 / Confidence and choice
Make honesty easier.
Leave the door open.
Employees should be able to describe their experience without attaching their name. They should also be able to choose a direct conversation when they want one.
The default
Anonymous to your organisation
Leave the email field empty. Your feedback is shown to authorised reviewers without your name or email.
The employee’s choice
Reveal my identity
Enter your email if you want someone to follow up directly. The details you type are the details you choose to share.
Anonymous feedback can still lead to action through recurring themes and focused follow-up. Adding your email opens the door to a personal conversation; the employee decides whether to share it.
Research on sensitive questions identifies concerns about disclosure and social judgement as influences on reporting. Giving employees control over identification addresses an important reason they may hold back. [25]
What makes that promise credible?
Clear access rules, careful reporting for small groups and an accurate explanation of who can see what. A comment can also identify someone through its details. Confidence comes from how the process is run as well as the email field.
05 / The wider evidence
Less effort to answer.
More reason to listen.
Every extra question asks for more time and attention. EHS concentrates the recurring measure on one meaningful judgement, then makes room for the detail behind it.
The cost of asking too much
Longer questionnaires can lose people and weaken answers.
Galesic and Bosnjak varied the stated duration between 10, 20 and 30 minutes. Longer questionnaires attracted fewer starts and completions; later answers were faster, shorter and more uniform. [3]
EHS keeps the core response brief and uses focused follow-up where there is something worth exploring.
Questionnaire length carries a participation cost.
Rolstad and colleagues found lower response rates for longer questionnaires overall. Content also mattered. The lesson for EHS is practical: each question should earn the effort it asks of employees. [20]
One overall question can carry meaningful information.
Wanous and colleagues found an average correlation of 0.63 between single-item job satisfaction measures and longer scales. Concise overall measurement has a serious research foundation. [1]
How can extra effort affect response quality?
Research on satisficing explains how demanding questions can encourage shortcuts in answering. Reducing unnecessary effort gives employees a simpler task to engage with. EHS asks for one overall judgement and leaves the explanation to the employee. [21]
Participation remains visible alongside the score. Missing voices matter when the people who do not answer have different experiences from those who do. [8]
Why use one question and five options?
A clearly defined overall question gives repeated listening a consistent focus. Research by Fisher and colleagues supports selecting single items to suit the construct being measured; the ONS also uses separate single questions for aspects of wellbeing. [12] [18]
Five labelled faces distinguish moderate and strong feelings and include Neutral. More categories can offer finer discrimination; EHS chooses a compact interaction and retains a distinct contribution from every category. [4]
A close workplace precedent
Five faces used in research across 11 BT call centres.
A weekly happiness question with five faces was linked to recorded sales performance in research by Bellet and colleagues. The study found evidence that positive affect improved performance in that setting. [11]
It offers a relevant precedent for brief visual workplace measurement, using a different question and administration from EHS.
The business relevance
How people feel belongs in the management conversation.
Research covering more than 1.8 million employees links satisfaction with productivity, customer loyalty, turnover and profitability. Experimental research also connects happiness with higher task output. [5] [6]
EHS gives leaders a practical way to keep employee experience in view and explore what is shaping it.
How do major employers approach brief listening?
Microsoft described daily pulse sampling alongside its annual poll in 2021. Amazon describes a short daily Connections question whose results support team discussions. These accounts show recurring listening in organisational practice. [16] [17]
Where does the UK Workplace Happiness Report fit?
The 2026 report draws on 24,129 responses and adds contemporary context to the importance of workplace experience. Its findings belong to its own instrument and sample; EHS benchmarks use the EHS method. [7]
06 / Understanding your EHS
A clear score.
A fuller picture.
EHS brings employee responses together into one clear, consistent measure of how work feels. Its design is informed by scientific research into employee experience and measurement. Read the score alongside participation, response patterns and comments to build an accurate picture of your people’s experience.
One consistent question gives people a straightforward way to express how working here feels.
A consistent scoring approach brings employee responses together into a meaningful overall measure.
One score from 0 to 100 helps you follow change over time and identify where to look more closely.
What makes EHS a useful measure?
EHS uses the same question, response options and scoring method across cycles. That consistency helps you compare results over time, while the feedback behind the number helps you understand what has changed and why.
A consistent scale
Your EHS is a score from 0 to 100. A score of 84 means 84 points on the EHS scale; it is not the percentage of employees who are happy.
A fuller picture
Participation shows whose voices are represented. Response patterns and comments add the detail that makes the headline score useful for decisions.
What helps make the picture representative?
Encourage participation across your workforce and review the response rate alongside the score. Look at the spread of responses and the comments, and consider whether changes in who answered could affect the comparison. Together, these give you a more accurate understanding of employee experience.
Your first completed cycle
Days 1–21Check-ins
Days 22–30Follow-ups
Day 30Your first EHS
Three weeks, rather than one day.
A company announcement or an event the day before can colour a single day’s answers. EHS spreads check-in invitations over 21 days, bringing together feedback across three weeks. This reduces the risk of one moment dominating the score and gives a broader view of how work feels.
Nine days to give everyone a chance.
Days 22–30 are for follow-ups. Reminders help people who missed the invitation or needed more time, so they know the check-in is there and have another opportunity to speak openly before the cycle closes.
HR or management oversees the cycle. Open Check-ins provide a separate way to explore a topic between EHS cycles; they do not change the fixed question used for the headline score.
07 / Choosing the measure
Understand experience directly, rather than through advocacy.
EHS
How does working here feel?
A direct question about the employee’s own experience, with five clear response options that give employees room to describe how they feel.
Employee NPS
Would you recommend working here?
A question about employer advocacy, usually reported as promoters minus detractors.
EHS asks about the experience you want to understand. Recommendation can involve reputation or whether a workplace would suit someone else. A direct question keeps the focus on the employee’s own working life.
What does the evidence say about eNPS?
Research on more than 6,500 employees found strong relationships between recommendation and work satisfaction while questioning the standard net grouping. A useful question can lose information through the way its answers are summarised. [13]
Customer NPS research has challenged its claimed universal superiority, with later findings supporting particular uses. EHS focuses on a direct question and a consistent approach to understanding employee experience. [14] [15]
What does eNPS grouping hide?
In standard eNPS, 0–6 are detractors, 7–8 are passives and 9–10 are promoters. Moving from 1 to 6 leaves the net score unchanged; moving from 8 to 9 crosses a threshold. Passives remain in the denominator.
EHS keeps the focus on how employees experience working here. The score provides a consistent headline, while the response distribution and comments help explain the experience behind it.
08 / Making comparisons meaningful
Make repeated listening more informative.
Your own completed cycles are the starting point. Keep the question and scoring method consistent, then read a change alongside participation, response distribution and changes in your workforce.
Look beyond the headline.
Similar scores can reflect different experiences. Read your EHS alongside participation, the response distribution and employee comments to understand the picture behind the number.
Your business over time
Compare completed cycles. Check who had the opportunity to respond, who answered and whether the business changed between measurements.
Your business alongside others
A useful sector comparison needs the same measurement method and a clearly defined comparison group. Similar-looking numbers from different instruments are not interchangeable.
What should sit beside a benchmark?
A useful benchmark identifies the organisations, period and measurement rules behind it. Your own completed cycles provide the immediate reference point; sector comparisons should be shown where an appropriate EHS dataset is available.
How should leaders interpret a change?
Read movement alongside participation, the spread of responses and the comments. This helps distinguish a sustained pattern from a change in who answered or an event around the cycle. [8]
Returning to employees after a change gives leaders another opportunity to hear how work feels and whether the relevant themes persist.
What makes comparisons meaningful?
Consistent wording and scoring provide the foundation. Comparable interpretation across groups, a defined reference period and transparent cohort information give the comparison substance. [19]
09 / Understanding the reasons
The score follows a method.
People decide what changes.
Employee responses inform a clear, consistent EHS score.
AI helps organise and summarise feedback. Leaders can return to the original comments for context.
People decide what to explore and what to change, then use later check-ins to hear how it is going.
A consistent scoring method helps you follow change over time. Themes help leaders find the feedback worth exploring, and a focused follow-up question can bring the detail they need to decide what to change.
The case for EHS
A clear method.
A meaningful place in your business.
A direct question, an accessible response and a clear, consistent score give leaders a practical way to keep listening. Employees’ explanations turn that measure into a starting point for a better conversation about work.
The research behind the design
This EHS-prepared review draws on published studies supporting concise measurement, visual responses and attention to employee experience. Those studies support the rationale; they did not test this exact EHS instrument. Direct studies of participation, repeatability and outcomes will strengthen its own evidence base.
How the earlier customer study informed EHS
The founder’s 2024 undergraduate dissertation received 258 completed responses from a cohort of 382 hotel guests and included management interviews. It informed the combination of a simple question, visual scale and open explanation. Its contribution is to EHS’s development history, in a customer setting. [9]
10 / Follow the evidence
The research is here to explore.
Explore the studies, measurement guidance and development history behind the approach.
Explore all 26 references
- Peer-reviewed meta-analysis
Wanous, J. P., Reichers, A. E. & Hudy, M. J. (1997). Overall job satisfaction: How good are single-item measures? Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 247–252.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed experiments
Stange, M., Barry, A., Smyth, J. & Olson, K. (2018). Effects of smiley face scales on visual processing of satisfaction questions in web surveys. Social Science Computer Review, 36(6), 756–766.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed experiment
Galesic, M. & Bosnjak, M. (2009). Effects of questionnaire length on participation and indicators of response quality in a web survey. Public Opinion Quarterly, 73(2), 349–360.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed scale research
Preston, C. C. & Colman, A. M. (2000). Optimal number of response categories in rating scales: reliability, validity, discriminating power, and respondent preferences. Acta Psychologica, 104(1), 1–15.
Read the source ↗ - Research working paper · meta-analysis
Krekel, C., Ward, G. & De Neve, J.-E. (2019). Employee wellbeing, productivity and firm performance. Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper 1605. Analysis of Gallup data.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed experimental research
Oswald, A. J., Proto, E. & Sgroi, D. (2015). Happiness and productivity. Journal of Labor Economics, 33(4), 789–822.
Read the source ↗ - Industry report · a different instrument
The Happiness Index (2026). UK Workplace Happiness Report 2026. 24,129 responses, collected February 2025 to January 2026. Industry context using a separate instrument and sample.
- Peer-reviewed methodological review
Groves, R. M. (2006). Nonresponse rates and nonresponse bias in household surveys. Public Opinion Quarterly, 70(5), 646–675.
Read the source ↗ - Development history · undergraduate dissertation
Feedback is broken! The missed opportunity with feedback in the context of the hospitality sector. (2024). Founder dissertation, BUSI3232, Durham University Business School, pp. 40–43. Unpublished customer study supplied by the author.
- EHS design specification · internal document
EHS / EmployeeHappinessScore (EHS) Limited (27 September 2026). The Employee Happiness Score: The evidence for clearer employee listening. Company-prepared evidence paper and scoring specification.
- Peer-reviewed workplace field study
Bellet, C. S., De Neve, J.-E. & Ward, G. (2024). Does employee happiness have an impact on productivity? Management Science, 70(3), 1656–1679.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed validation research
Fisher, G. G., Matthews, R. A. & Gibbons, A. M. (2016). Developing and investigating the use of single-item measures in organizational research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 21(1), 3–23.
Read the source ↗ - Employee study · university press chapter
Sedlak, P. (2020). Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as a single-item measure of employee work satisfaction. In Contemporary organisation and management: Challenges and trends, pp. 347–357.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed customer NPS research
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.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed customer NPS research
Baehre, S., O’Dwyer, M., O’Malley, L. & Lee, N. (2022). The use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to predict sales growth. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50, 67–84.
Read the source ↗ - Company account of practice · 2021
Microsoft (2021). To thrive in hybrid work, support flexibility in work styles. Work Trend Index.
Read the source ↗ - Company account of practice
Amazon Web Services (n.d.). People: The human side of innovation at Amazon. AWS Executive Insights.
Read the source ↗ - Official measurement guidance
Office for National Statistics (n.d.). Personal well-being user guidance.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed methodological review
Vandenberg, R. J. & Lance, C. E. (2000). A review and synthesis of the measurement invariance literature. Organizational Research Methods, 3(1), 4–70.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed meta-analysis
Rolstad, S., Adler, J. & Rydén, A. (2011). Response burden and questionnaire length: Is shorter better? A review and meta-analysis. Value in Health, 14(8), 1101–1108.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed methodological paper
Krosnick, J. A. (1991). Response strategies for coping with the cognitive demands of attitude measures in surveys. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5(3), 213–236.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed methodological review
Schwarz, N. (1999). Self-reports: How the questions shape the answers. American Psychologist, 54(2), 93–105.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed experiments
Schwarz, N., Knäuper, B., Hippler, H.-J., Noelle-Neumann, E. & Clark, L. (1991). Rating scales: Numeric values may change the meaning of scale labels. Public Opinion Quarterly, 55(4), 570–582.
Read the source ↗ - Research methods guidance
Pew Research Center (n.d.). Writing survey questions. Guidance on wording, open responses and question order.
Read the source ↗ - Peer-reviewed research review
Tourangeau, R. & Yan, T. (2007). Sensitive questions in surveys. Psychological Bulletin, 133(5), 859–883.
Read the source ↗ - Cross-national research methods
Pew Research Center (n.d.). Questionnaire design and translation.
Read the source ↗
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