Onboarding Survey: Direct Questions for Direct Impact

Employee engagement is undeniably critical to organizational longevity and success. Workplace productivity is important any day, and long-term employee retention supports a company’s stability and bottom line. Both require employee engagement on many levels. Yet, according to Gallup, that trend’s workforce prevalence has dropped from 36% to 32% from 2020 to early ’22.

One way to maintain high employee engagement is by ensuring that your onboarding process is working as you intend. Having a good onboarding program is important for many reasons. For one, it can mean the difference between an employee staying engaged for years and leaving after only months.

By using an onboarding survey, you can better understand how well-received your onboarding and training processes are by new hires. With timely onboarding feedback, you’ll also gain insight into what you can change, add, drop, or strengthen to improve it.

Here we’ll explore types of onboarding surveys you can conduct and what employee onboarding survey questions to ask.

3 types of onboarding surveys HR managers can be creating, using, and updating

It’s easy to create surveys to collect feedback for an array of organizational goals and insights. There are 3 basic types of employee onboarding surveys to consider developing and distributing according to your onboarding timeline. Each can be customized to gather feedback and insights that you deem most beneficial to the company and employees:

• New hire survey to be completed on or by the employee’s first day.
• Post-training survey to be completed upon finishing a given training program.
• Post-onboarding survey to be completed at the end of the employee’s probationary period.

New hire survey

Develop and use the new hire survey to help you examine and refine your hiring process. In general, you want to discover how the new employee perceived the application, interviewing, and recruiting processes. This survey can be most effective if administered via the employee welcome kit and submitted with the new hire paperwork. Your new employee’s experience will be fresh enough to recall and distant enough to reflect upon.

Hiring survey questions

• How did you hear about the job opening?
• What made you want to apply to our company?
• Do you feel like you received accurate and sufficient information about the company during the recruitment process?
• Were all the questions you asked during the interview process answered honestly, accurately, and sufficiently?
• How long did you spend in the recruitment process, from submitting your application to attending your first interview?
• How would you describe the quality and frequency of the communication you received during the recruitment process?
• What did you think of our welcome packet, and did we forget anything? Do you have any recommendations for helpful items to add?

Post-training survey

The post-training survey should be administered after new hires have completed all their initial training and development requirements. Your goal is to learn how effective the employee found the training and what they think could make it better.

Post-training survey questions

On workplace and company culture:

• How would you rate the welcome you received from our company?
• How would you rate our current workplace culture? What could be improved upon?
• How do you feel you are getting along with your coworkers, and what could be improved, if anything?
• Do you feel as though you understand company policies and procedures?

On training processes:

• Do you feel that the training has adequately prepared you to perform your new job? Please elaborate.
• What would you change about the training process, if anything?
• What was most useful about the training you received?
• What did you find least useful about your training?

On workload and balance:

• How would you rate your current work-life balance with this job? Do you foresee being able to maintain or improve on that as you become more comfortable with your job responsibilities?
• How would you rate the stress level for your job, and what could we improve to make it less stressful?
• How would you currently rate your productivity, and how do you think it’s going to change over time?
• Do you have any questions, comments, or concerns that were not addressed during training or in this survey? If so, please elaborate.

Post-onboarding survey

Administer a post-onboarding survey after the employee has completed training and any remaining probationary period or onboarding programs that apply. By then, they should have the basic concepts and functions of their job memorized. Hence, they will be able to provide open and honest feedback about the onboarding process.

Post-onboarding survey questions

On the process:

• Do you feel confident and prepared to do your job? Please elaborate.
• Was anything missing from our company’s onboarding process?
• Did the onboarding process include irrelevant information that wasn’t pertinent to your job or our company policies??
• What would you change or improve about our onboarding process if you could?

On relationships and resources:

• How would you describe your relationship with your immediate supervisor?
• How would you describe your relationships with other team members?
• Are there any resources we could provide that would help you perform your job better?
• Have our onboarding, training, and orientation processes met your expectations?
• What do you wish you would have known sooner about our company or your new position?
• What types of training do you feel you’ll need in the future in order to grow and advance your career path at our company?
• How would you rate your overall onboarding experience?

Collecting feedback about your onboarding and training programs can help you keep your programs relevant and up-to-date. It also allows new employees to tell you about their experiences, ask relevant questions, and make suggestions. Feeling more included in the onboarding process can help pave the way for increased engagement and initiative over time. And don’t stop there. Employee surveys can be a valuable resource for various purposes and stages throughout the employee lifecycle.

For help developing or updating your company’s ideal onboarding program, read our definitive guide to employee onboarding.

For ongoing tips, tools, and other resources for business management and HR professionals, visit Workest by Zenefits daily.

Sources

1. U.S. Employee Engagement Slump Continues, Gallup