15 Areas to Address In The Employee Onboarding Survey

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An employee onboarding survey is essential for any organization for many reasons. As an accountable business owner, you in all probability suppose your company does a very good job of onboarding employees. However, your onboarding practices and procedures will not be as welcoming and efficient as you suppose.

Employee onboarding survey

According to Gallup analysis, a mere 12% of employees imagine their organization does a very good job throughout onboarding. An examination by Glassdoor exhibits the significance of getting a top-quality onboarding process: The analysis confirmed that organizations with robust onboarding processes enhance new-hire retention by 82% and productiveness by over 70%.

With this in thoughts, conducting an employee onboarding survey is among the many most positive steps you may take for the long-term health of your business.

What is an employee onboarding survey, and why ought to companies conduct one?

An employee onboarding survey, additionally known as an employee onboarding survey, is a questionnaire that companies use to acquire perception into employees’ experience throughout their preliminary few months on the job. Conducting a new-hire survey permits you to do the next:

Learn which points of your onboarding procedures are – and are not – working. The insights you glean make it simpler to refine the onboarding process and guarantee it’s as efficient as possible. An efficient system will impress future new hires and improve your retention charges.

Identify points interfering with employee productiveness. These points embody disconnects between employees’ expectations and their precise experience, in addition to the caliber of coaching and relationships with managers and colleagues. Unmet expectations can foster dissatisfaction and attrition.

Bolster team morale. A nasty onboarding process could make employees really feel unsettled, thus dampening morale and impeding your company’s growth. An employee onboarding survey reverses the tide by sparking enhancements in onboarding procedures, mentioned David Cusick, chief strategy officer of House Method.

Pinpoint and accommodate particular person employees’ wants. Assess particular person employees’ general experience throughout their first few weeks and months on the job, and deal with any negatives.

“A survey allows you to identify each new hire’s needs and address them,” mentioned Reuben Yonatan, founder, and CEO of GetVoIP. “The personalized attention will help you hold on to top talent.”

Key takeaway: An employee onboarding survey helps to extend retention charges and employee productiveness by permitting you to determine points of the onboarding experience that require a change in the employee onboarding survey.

How do I create and distribute an employee onboarding survey?

Here are the 2 most important strategies for creating and distributing employee onboarding surveys:

Paper. This is the less expensive route. However, you will need somebody to manually compile the suggestions shared by employees and put them right into a kind you may simply review and use to make selections primarily based on the findings.

Software. Companies equivalent to DecisionWise, Qualtrics, and TINYpulse provide software that may assist you design and customize employee onboarding surveys. The software additionally emails the surveys to employees and gives complete studies in regards to the findings.

The technology requires financial funding, nevertheless, it has an upside: It could also be simpler and sooner for employees to finish an employee onboarding survey online than on paper.

That means it will be more possible to supply detailed and more useful responses. Respondents can also be much less apt to skip questions to avoid wasting time.

Key takeaway: You can develop and distribute employee onboarding surveys on paper, which saves more cash quite than time, or by way of software, which saves time quite than cash.

How to conduct an employee onboarding survey, and what questions ought to it include?

The business homeowners and human sources (HR) consultants we spoke with mentioned the perfect instances to conduct an employee onboarding survey are on the end of the brand new rent’s first week and first month on the job, in addition to on the conclusion of the formal onboarding interval.

You can format inquiries to require yes-or-no solutions or ranked responses (for instance, score a component of the onboarding experience on a scale of 1 to 10). You also can use open-ended questions that call for detailed suggestions. Many companies mix these kinds of questions.

Regardless of which format you select, base the questions on your goal for the survey. “Ask yourself what you’re trying to do with the information,” mentioned Cate Galeza, HR supervisor of productiveness software agency Formstack.

“Do you want ideas from employees on improving the onboarding process, or are you trying to measure an employee’s experience at a certain time period?”

Here are some pattern employee onboarding survey questions. For simplicity’s sake, we put them in an open-ended format. You can tweak a few of them to accommodate an easy unfavorable or affirmative response or score scale. Remember that particular questions will differ primarily based on your business’s wants.

Questions to ask after the first week:

How efficient do you’re feeling your coaching has been to this point? What would you modify? Are you having to ask a whole lot of questions on subjects not lined in your coaching? If, so what are these subjects?
What, if something, appears unclear about your function?
Do you’re feeling you have got the right instruments to do your job? If not, what else do you need?
What points of your function do you want and dislike to this point?
What, if something, appears complicated to you? Do you’re feeling you are beginning to grasp your duties?
What have been your preliminary expectations of the onboarding experience? How do they match the experience you are having?
What’s the most important impediment you’ve got encountered up to now?
What’s nonetheless unclear to you about your duties and our company’s policies?
Did you’re feeling welcomed to the company? Why or why not?
How properly do you’re feeling you match into the company culture?

Questions to ask after the first month:

Has the coaching you’ve got acquired been related to your particular duties? How so, or not so?
How usually have you ever felt you’ve got been without route and uncertain of what to do or the place to seek out the solutions?
What have you ever realized since your first survey that you simply want you had realized earlier?
Do you’re feeling a way of work-life steadiness? If not, what may need to vary?
What did you would like you’d been advised before you began your job?
What’s delighted you that you simply did not anticipate?
Do you perceive the expectations for this job intimately? If not, what’s missing?
Did we meet your expectations throughout this first month? If so, how? If not, what was lacking?
How would you rate your satisfaction in working together with your co-workers?
How would you rate your level of productiveness at each shift?

Questions to ask after the onboarding has wrapped up:

Have you cast a very good working relationship together with your supervisor? If so, how? If not, why do you suppose that’s?
Have you cast a very good working relationship together with your co-workers? If so, how? If not, why do you suppose that’s?
Was the length of the onboarding process too long, too quick, or simply right?
Did your onboarding make you’re feeling more or much less assured that you are able to do your job? Why or why not?
Did your onboarding meet your expectations? If it fell quick, how?
What information/coaching/practices ought to we add to our onboarding program, and what ought to we remove?
In basic, was your onboarding profitable? Why or why not?
If there has been a job opening right here, would you advocate {that a} pal or family member apply for the place?

Additional inquiries to ask distant employees at the end of the onboarding interval:

What would assist you really feel more linked to everybody else on the team?
What varieties of sources do you need to do your work higher?
What further information do you need entry to?
What communications points have you ever had that need fixing?

Key takeaway: Conduct an employee onboarding survey after an employee has been on board for one week, once more after the first month after which once more after the onboarding process is full.

Questions will differ in line with your company’s particular person wants, however, on the whole, embody questions in regards to the high quality and size of the process, challenges employees face, relationships with colleagues and managers, and what could also be lacking out of your onboarding program.

How do I be sure I get the most effective survey responses?

Asking the right questions at the right intervals will assist your business profit from conducting an employee onboarding survey, nevertheless, it will not assure high-quality, actionable responses.

Business homeowners and HR consultants provided a number of methods for guaranteeing you get essentially the most out of your employee onboarding survey:

1. Keep it transient.

Being requested to finish an employee onboarding survey with more than 10 questions could be overwhelming for a lot of employees, particularly in the event that they’ve simply accomplished their first week on the job. The more overwhelmed new hires really feel by the survey, the much less considerate and actionable their responses can be.

2. Mix it up.

Some consultants we spoke with mentioned an employee onboarding survey ought to include solely questions that require a yes-or-no reply or a ranked response. Others mentioned they like open-ended questions.

But most of our sources mentioned they favor a hybrid strategy. Business coach Dave Labowitz mentioned he likes to make use of numeric score scale (NRS) and open-ended, text-based questions.

“NRS questions allow you to track averages over time, which is important to measure whether you’re getting better or worse at your onboarding process,” Labowitz mentioned.

“An NRS question can also help you identify an outlier who had an extremely positive or negative experience. This person may be worth following up with individually.”

Open-ended questions are equally important as a result of “they’ll tell you what you need to work on, not just that you have work to do,” and will elicit concrete concepts for enhancements to onboarding procedures, Labowitz mentioned.

“Sometimes you’ll see patterns across many team members, and other times a single team member will throw a brilliant idea your way,” he mentioned. “Either way, these answers are absolute gold.”

3. Watch your wording.

Avoid wording that makes it simple for brand spanking new hires to skip open-ended questions. “For example, don’t ask them if they feel anything was left out of the onboarding process,” mentioned Phil Strazzulla, CEO and founding father of Select Software Reviews. “Instead, ask what was left out of the onboarding process.”

4. Encourage honesty.

Most new hires worry about doing or saying one thing improper after they first are part of a company. They have not developed the long-term trust of their employer and could also be afraid you will use unfavorable suggestions in opposition to them.

That’s why it is important to reassure employees that they will not undergo any penalties from answering survey questions actually, mentioned Jeff Skipper, of Jeff Skipper Consulting.

“Depersonalizing” some questions additionally makes it simpler for employees to be candid of their responses to an employee onboarding survey, Skipper mentioned.

For instance, as a substitute for asking respondents to checklist what they did not like in regards to the first week on the job, phrase the query this fashion: “If you were going to prepare someone else for their first week on the job here, what would you caution them about?”

Key takeaway: Brevity, fastidiously worded questions, a mixture of questions that require quick and long solutions, and reassurance that providing trustworthy responses will not trigger respondents any bother are important parts of any employee onboarding survey.

How to maximize my funding in a new hire survey?

It takes time to develop and use the outcomes of a new-hire survey. It additionally requires cash, for the labor to manage the survey and analyze the outcomes and, when you select to make use of it, the software used to create the survey. Maximizing these investments over a long time period makes good business sense and could be achieved by following these finest practices:

Publicize and act on employee suggestions.

Periodically publish the suggestions and findings – anonymized, after all – on an inner platform. “That way, new employees know that the information is read and that their thoughts are meaningful and valid,” mentioned Cory Colton, principal government coach at Inflection Point Coaching.

Some companies schedule regular evaluations of new-hire surveys to determine applicable modifications that ought to be made to the onboarding process – as an illustration, extending coaching instances or bettering coaching packages. Ian Kelly, VP of operations at NuLeaf Naturals, mentioned companies ought to take this step every three months.

Revisit and revise the survey periodically.

The most beneficial employee onboarding survey is not put collectively simply as soon as and offered to new hires for years and years without additional consideration. Instead, it is reviewed and altered periodically to reflect the altering wants of the business and its employees, Labowitz mentioned.

Combine feedback from the survey with different employee suggestions.

This may also help you monitor and assess the impact of your business’s onboarding program at different phases of employees’ tenure with the company.

For instance, evaluating information shared in new-hire surveys with information offered throughout an annual engagement survey helps to find out whether or not new hires’ experience through the onboarding process has an influence on their level of engagement after a year of employment.

Similarly, viewing the contents of employees’ annual efficiency evaluations alongside suggestions shared in new-hire surveys lets you recognize if employees’ preliminary impression of your organization and their onboarding experiences have an effect on their job efficiency. You can then provoke any necessary modifications – as an illustration, enhance coaching through the employee onboarding process.

Key takeaway: Employee onboarding surveys are essentially the most worthwhile when the suggestions are shared with employees and later analyzed together with suggestions from different surveys, equivalent to annual engagement surveys.