Everything You Need To Know About Our Employee Onboarding Surveys

What Is An Onboarding Survey?

An onboarding survey is designed to find out how new starters are settling into your workplace. They typically measure the success of your onboarding processes including recruiting, hiring and starting the new role. You may also find questions about workplace culture, values and vision and policies. 

As many as 20% of employees quit within their first 45 days, it’s easy to see why this can be costly. This is why it’s so important to get the first 6 weeks of employment right. Typically onboarding surveys are used as a retroactive activity to learn for the next cohort or hires to improve processes and policies for people who are going to be hired next. 

What Makes Our Onboarding Surveys Different?

Our onboarding surveys are led by neuroscience and backed by millions of data sets, this gives you the guarantee that you’re asking the right questions at the right time. Rather than a single survey, we provide a series of surveys that cover the first 6 months of an employee’s lifecycle. We provide you with a survey for 6 weeks, 3 months and 6 months.

By default the onboarding surveys within our platform are set to anonymous. This is particularly helpful for large organisations where you are onboarding large volumes of people regularly and it’s important to get a standardised process that works hard for everyone. Getting anonymous feedback will give you an excellent picture of how processes are working across different locations or teams. 

For smaller organisations there is also the option to turn off anonymity. This allows you to gather feedback to tailor your approach for individuals. However, the beauty of our platform is that these scores also feed into your larger data sets, allowing you to get a bigger picture of drivers of engagement and happiness across the employee lifecycle. 

What Questions Are Included In Our Onboarding Surveys?

Each survey contains 14 questions which cover all 8 key drivers of employee engagement and happiness, meaning you get a holistic picture of how new starters think and feel. These questions are all rated on a 10 point scale. This gives you quantitative data on how your team are settling in. 

Each of the three surveys also give space for leaving long form comments and suggestions to give you further context and information pertinent to the onboarding process within your organisation. Having both qualitative and quantitative feedback is vital for helping you to make data-led decisions. 

What Are The Benefits Of Our Onboarding Surveys?

There are so many studies and stats that have proved time and  time again why investing in onboarding is so important. Here are a few powerful ones: 

• 82% increase in retention rates for organisations with great employee onboarding - Brandon Hall Group

• 91% improvement in relationship by soliciting feedback from new hires - Candidate Experience

• Only 19% of employees strongly agree their organisation does a great job of onboarding - Gallup

• 60% of remote workers feel disorientated after their onboarding experience - Paychex

• 70% of new hires make a decision on job fit within the first month

The research shows how often organisations are getting onboarding wrong. Spending time and money in refining and improving your onboarding process will give you a competitive edge. Our onboarding surveys will give you the data you need to get this process right. 

What Are The Limitations Of Our Onboarding Surveys?

Just as most organisations don’t have one homogenous culture, so onboarding will vary between teams, locations and job functions. No one would expect a cashier to have the exact same onboarding experience as a financial director in head office. Standardising onboarding completely is not only impossible but also counterproductive. This means that everyone will have slightly different experiences. However, by using neuroscience, we focus on the experience rather than the detail, which will give you a better view of how well your processes are working generally. 

If you are gathering responses anonymously it might take a while for you to get enough to be able to see the data, and even longer to catch trends. For this reason it might also be helpful to run other surveys like our always-on offering Employee Voice, to help you catch issues arising in the moment and allow you to react in a more agile way to the needs of your people. 

Why Should You Use Our Onboarding Surveys?

Our onboarding survey gives you a greater depth of insight than your standard onboarding surveys. Here are our top 5 benefits from using our survey for your organisation: 

1. Reduce Employee Churn - getting onboarding right allows you to retain your key hires and best talent. Understanding what your onboarding processes are doing right and where they’re falling down will help with this. By measuring at different stages of the process you’ll get a holistic view of the whole onboarding time, plus the 6 month survey often uncovers insights gained with a more reflective mindset. 

2. Get Employee Engagement & Happiness Data From Day One - you will be able to properly understand the key drivers of engagement and happiness within your team from the get go. This will mean that you’re able to tailor the rest of your listening programme and support your team in a more bespoke way. 

3. Break Down Data Silos - by having feedback from different stages of your employee lifecycle within your data universe, you’ll be able to accurately assess employee engagement and happiness across the employee lifecycle. This information can be used to feed into processes and decisions throughout your organisation and HR practices. 

4. Uncover Actionable Insights - our surveys are designed by neuroscience experts, HR professionals and experienced business leaders to help you to get data that is actionable. This means that you’ll be able to drive meaningful and sustainable change from every survey send, even with less traditional employee surveys like our onboarding survey offering. 

5. Build Trust In Your Wider Listening Programme - by taking an interest in your people’s feedback from day one and introducing them to a feedback platform designed to be easy, intuitive and trustworthy, you can support your whole listening programme. 

What Actionable Insights Might You Gain From Our Onboarding Surveys? 

Our onboarding survey is designed to support you in creating an onboarding programme that supports the employee happiness and engagement of your whole team. This means that some of the insights you might get are: 

1. Concrete Suggestions From Your Team - by including an open text field at the end of the survey, having prompted the individual to think about various different areas of the onboarding process, you’re creating a space for specific feedback and idea generation. Many of our customers find that they uncover concrete and actionable suggestions from this. 

2. Key Drivers Of Engagement & Happiness - by understanding which drivers of engagement and happiness are particularly important to your unique team, you’ll be able to focus on making improvements in the areas that are going to have the biggest impact. This is one of the key benefits of our neuroscience-backed platform as you can then replicate this across the employee lifecycle. 

3. Blockers To Success - isolate what is causing your onboarding programme to falter and what is inhibiting onboarding success. This will help you to build a more robust onboarding process that gives greater clarity and support to your whole team. 

4. Key Strengths - especially for larger organisations whose onboarding processes vary slightly between teams and locations, you may find that some of the elements of their onboarding that people particularly love are not being replicated across the board. This way great ideas can be distributed and duplicated so everyone can benefit. 

5. Areas To Explore Further - you may isolate key themes that you want to explore in more depth at every stage of the employee lifecycle. This could include specific issues such as mental health or EDI, industry or organisation specific queries that could be included in a bespoke survey, or key drivers from our neuroscience model.  

What Impacts Have Our Customers Seen From Using Our Onboarding Surveys?

Here are some of the insights customers have gained using our onboarding survey and programme ideas they have implemented: 

• One of our customers found our onboarding surveys as a way of helping release the pressure of recruitment. They explained that the more they understand their colleagues, the more they can improve things, which enhances the employee experience and therefore retention. This in itself aids attraction via having more brand advocates

• Another linked their THI onboarding surveys to Glassdoor feedback to encourage a greater level of feedback on their Glassdoor, which is incredibly useful to any brand for recruitment and attraction purposes. 

• We find that customers often use onboarding surveys as they progress in their listening programme and have more mature data sets. This is because it helps them to understand the entire employee lifecycle and how newer staff sit in their wider findings. 

How Can You Make Sure You’re Successful With Our Onboarding Surveys?

Just running onboarding surveys isn’t enough to guarantee return on investment. Here are some steps you should consider taking to get the results you and your organisation need. 

1. Communicate From Day One - we recommend introducing THI as a partner from before you start onboarding, ideally within the recruitment phase. From here introducing the onboarding survey process, explaining anonymity and managing expectations will help your new hire to understand what is coming up and how the data will be processed and used. This will give you better response rates and more accurate, candid data. 

2. Set Aside Resources To Follow Up - as with any survey it’s important to set aside time to communicate the feedback you’ve been given and the actions you intend to take from there. With onboarding surveys it’s particularly important to do this promptly and fully as you need to maintain momentum at this key stage. 

3. Create A Wider Culture Of Listening - it’s important that your onboarding surveys aren’t the only way that people can provide feedback, particularly in the early stages of your relationship with an individual. Having an always-on listening option, such as our Employee Voice survey is invaluable. But this shouldn’t replace regular two-way conversations with managers, plus leadership and the HR team, who should all make time to speak to new hires at regular intervals. 

4. Empower Managers Across Your Organisation - every team will have slightly different needs when it comes to onboarding, so empowering managers at every level by giving them access to relevant data and insights will be important to get their support in implementing change that works for everyone. 

5. Don’t Run Onboarding Surveys In Isolation - onboarding surveys tend to come a bit later in an organisation’s listening maturity curve. We always recommend understanding a bit more about the context of your workplace culture and people’s needs before starting with onboarding. Furthermore, running exit surveys alongside your onboarding surveys will give you a fuller picture of the entire employee lifecycle. 

For more information about building an onboarding process that works for your unique team, why not check out our eBook: Making The Most Of Employee Onboarding.

What Other Surveys Should You Run With Our Onboarding Surveys?

Our onboarding surveys are designed to get you the results that your organisation needs. But to maximise impact, we recommend using the series alongside some of our other employee surveys. The most popular include:

• Employee Voice - Stay reactive to the changes to what your team needs and wants with our always-on listening offering.

• Exit - Gain greater insight into how your people are thinking and feeling as they leave your organisation to give you a fuller picture of your entire employee lifecycle.

• Cultural Assessment - Understand the wider context of how people think and feel about your workplace culture with our in-depth survey that will give you all the context you need to make decisions in everyone’s best interests. 

If you want to learn more about how our onboarding survey could supercharge your organisation’s culture, why not chat to one of our experts? Book in a call today.