Employee Onboarding Surveys: What to ask and why?

What is an employee onboarding survey? ‍

Onboarding surveys, also known as new hire surveys, assess the experience of fresh employees and help managers in enhancing the onboarding and new-hire procedures.

Onboarding surveys are basically sets of questions that are totally anonymous. You ask these questions to new hires to see how they're feeling about the whole getting-hired process and starting work.

These questions cover everything from when they first heard about your company to what they thought during the interviews and how they're finding their first few months on the job.

These insights are helpful for HR folks and managers. It helps them figure out if they're doing a good job at hiring and training new hires.It gives them insights on questions like:

• - How satisfied they feel
• - Their manager’s feedback
• - The effectiveness of orientation processes
• - Likelihood to stay

Why are onboarding surveys important? ‍

According to Liz Pavese-Kaplan Ph.D., an expert in Employee Experience at Qualtrics, “onboarding new employees is a make or break opportunity for organizations.

These initial experiences significantly shape new hires' overall perceptions of the company and impact their future engagement, motivation, and decision to remain with the organization. If onboarding isn't smooth, it's a bad look. It can make new hires feel like they've made a mistake. As per the findings of the Harvard Business Review: 33% of new hires start job hunting within their first six months, mostly due to a bad onboarding process. 

Onboarding question suggestions

1. Overall, how well do you understand your role, including the responsibilities of your job?
2. How accurately was your role described to you during your interviews (i.e., Are you doing what you expected you’d be doing)?
3. How challenging would you say your current role is?
4. How interested are you in your current role?
5. How well do you know how to complete your work assignments?
6. How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the training that you have received for your new role?
7. Considering all of the people that you’ll be working with in your role, how many would you say that you’ve met?
8. How happy or unhappy are you with this company as a place to work?
9. How relevant have your role-based conversations been with your manager?
10. How relevant have your career-oriented conversations been with your manager?

Asking good questions like these ensure that we can get good insights on KPIs such as:

• Tenure: employees tend to stay longer at a company when they’ve had a positive onboarding experience
• Ramp time: the better the onboarding process, the faster new employees get up to speed and deliver valuable work to the company
• Advocacy: a better onboarding process has been shown to increase the likelihood that new hires will recommend you as a place to work, potentially referring more top talent to the organization

Assessing survey results‍

After you've surveyed your employees, it's time to check out the feedback. You can use Text IQ to spot trends in the open text responses and address the most important issues and opportunities.

It's vital to let your employees know you've heard their feedback and are making improvements. Did you know that while 60% of U.S. employees have a way to give feedback, only 30% see their feedback acted upon?

Connecting your onboarding feedback with other employee feedback helps you see how the onboarding experience impacts other parts of the employee journey, like development and engagement, and even attrition.

Employee engagement drives productivity, revenue, and customer experience. So, it's essential to ensure new hires have a top-notch experience from day one.