Onboarding surveys are your shortcut to not only creating a better first impression, but improving the employee experience overall.
In this guide we’ll cover:
It’s time to revamp the way you do onboarding for the better. Read on to discover how to make the most of this crucial moment in your new hire’s journey.
An onboarding survey is like a typical feedback survey, except it’s designed to get thoughts, comments, and suggestions from your new hires as part of their onboarding experience. You might ask how the process was, what worked and what didn’t, and how you could improve it for the future.
Companies usually survey new employees after they’ve completed their formal onboarding process steps or shortly after they’ve settled in to find out how the experience was. It’s one of your first opportunities to survey your new hires and not only gather their thoughts, but to introduce them to your culture and approach to feedback.
Investing in your onboarding process by running surveys can help you:
Without an onboarding survey, it’s almost impossible to truly know what the experience is like as a new team member. With one, you have valuable insights that help you shape your onboarding workflow and create a better first impression for your new hires.
Simply adding onboarding surveys into your process isn’t enough. To really get the most from your data, you need to know how to use these surveys to their full advantage.
Here’s how to improve your onboarding survey process to get the best possible results.
Look back through old employee feedback questionnaires for any insights into your onboarding workflow, new hire journey, and hiring process. You’ll often find ideas, comments, and criticisms that can help you kickstart your process towards a better onboarding experience.
Many companies decide to run an onboarding survey after the first month, as a way to gather first impressions and thoughts. While this allows you to collect data, it can feel quite hands-off and like a checkbox exercise. Instead, look to check in with new employees more regularly in small ways.
Use Polly to help you stay in touch throughout the orientation process with an automated check-in on the first day, and scheduled prompts like our new employee follow up and remote insights pulse survey. These short yet effective employee engagement surveys allow you to get an idea of how their first day, first week, and first month have gone.
Popular employee onboarding survey questions include:
We’ve shared more of our go-to onboarding questions in our guide to new employee survey questions, so head there if you’re looking for more question inspiration.
Filling in surveys isn’t the most exciting task, even if you’re happy to take part. Give your team members the best chance of making it all the way through your survey by making it more engaging.
Use a mix of question types including rating and ranking questions, closed questions, and open-ended questions. Use smiley faces or emojis in place of number scales, and sprinkle in some of your culture throughout the survey. Keep the survey short too — it’s better to check in regularly with smaller surveys or polls than to overwhelm your new hires.
It can be harder to encourage new hires to fill in an anonymous survey if they’re the only one joining your company. They might be concerned that their responses aren’t all that anonymous. In moments like this, let them know you’ll review their feedback together with their coworkers’ when you’ve reached a certain number. Remind them also that they can share anonymous feedback in other ways in the meantime — like your Open Forum, if you already use (or are about to sign up for) Polly.
When someone new joins your team, they’re not sure what your company culture is like. They don’t know whether you review feedback and act on it, or simply collect responses and never look at them. Now is the perfect opportunity to introduce them to your culture of feedback and say welcome to the team.
Your new team members and their coworkers are more likely to fill in employee engagement or employee satisfaction surveys if they know they’re meaningful. Show that you care about continuous improvement and share updates on new initiatives, changes you’re going to make, and ideas you’ve acted on as a result of your feedback initiatives.
With Polly, you can revamp your onboarding program and make it more engaging and supportive. Create automated workflows that welcome your new hire on their first day, prompt them to complete orientation tasks. Use our onboarding workflows to automatically check in with new hires after the first week, first 30 days, and first 90 days — all through Slack.
Polly isn’t just a survey tool — it’s an employee engagement app with everything you need to create a welcoming experience and a system of continuous feedback.
So many companies set up an onboarding program and never check to see whether it’s actually working. With an onboarding survey, you can get useful insights into what your new hires experience and how to improve it for the future.
Use this guide to help you put together an onboarding process that not only introduces new employees to your company and their role, but welcomes them to your team and your feedback culture. Put employee feedback front and center, so they know you’re serious about constant improvement and creating better employee experiences. Make all this happen with Polly’s employee onboarding workflow and transform your onboarding experience for the better.