Onboarding survey questions
Effective onboarding comes with benefits that lead to the organization’s success. A company makes its onboarding process unique by gathering feedback from employees. For this purpose, they use onboarding survey questions to evaluate their process.
An onboarding survey can be defined as a measure to determine the experience of new employees during their onboarding process. According to a Principal Consultant of Employee Experience at Qualtrics, Liz Pavese-Kaplan, “Onboarding new employees is a make-or-break opportunity for organizations”.
Onboarding survey ensures that all the set expectations of onboarding are successfully met. It is a critical stage of the employee life cycle as it sets the foundation for new hires’ success in the organization. The sole purpose of good onboarding survey questions is to find out what is working, what’s not, and how one can improve it.
Types of questions
Organizations can gain insights from employees by asking different types of questions. Each type will help analyze the results in many ways.
Below mentioned are the three types of questions.
1. Open-ended survey questions
These are the questions that cannot be answered without a simple yes or no. The respondent is required to elaborate on his point of view. These questions are started by asking what if, why, and how.
It allows unlimited response, provides more detail, and gives the organization opinions and sentiments.
2. Close-ended questions
These questions are the opposite of open-ended questions, where the respondent is required to answer with a yes or no opinion.
They are quicker, easier to answer, help obtain qualitative data and results are comparable. These usually seem less intimidating as well.
3. Likert scale survey questions
In the Likert scale, the respondent is provided with five possible answers which indicate their positive to negative strength. These answers include very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, and very satisfied.
The data gathered through the Likert scale is easy to understand and benefits in measuring the respondent’s attitude.
What makes an onboarding survey good?
A good employee survey is not written and rolled out each year, but it should be continuously updated as per the needs and requirements of an organization. Using employee onboarding software will help automate the survey and collect information from new hires more quickly.
More on that learn in our other article called What onboarding software does.
The survey should be sent when a particular milestone of the onboarding process is completed i.e., after the training session, or after every 30 days. Conducting 360 development reviews will be beneficial for evaluating both the onboarding process and engagement level as well. All these efforts will result in making improvements in the onboarding process.
Onboarding survey questions:
- Following are the general questions that can be asked in an onboarding survey:
- How well are you now familiar with your role, task and responsibilities?
- Were the roles described to you during interviews accurate?
- What are the challenging aspects of your job?
- What are the exciting aspects of your job?
- What aspects make you worry about your job?
- Have you encountered any obstacles so far?
- Describe your favorite part about your onboarding process?
- Is there any area regarding your job that you are confused about?
- Do you feel that the orientation materials provided to you were helpful?
- Were you able to catch up with the pace of the onboarding process?
- Can you describe your experience with the onboarding process in a word?
- Was the training content relevant to your job task and responsibilities?
- Do you think that the orientation was engaging and helpful?
- Did you feel welcome here?
- What in particular you did not like about the onboarding process?
- Did your manager have any career-oriented conversations with you?
- Are you satisfied with the training provided to you for your new role?
- Recommend any changes that the onboarding process may need?
- Was the organization able to meet your onboarding expectations?
- In your opinion, was the onboarding program successful?
In conclusion, the importance of employee onboarding survey questions cannot be denied as it helps in identifying whether the new hire is engaged, well integrated, fulfilling their responsibilities, and is likely to stay or not.
Researchers highly recommend that organizations should conduct onboarding surveys. The improvements made through these surveys will make organizations achieve employee retention, satisfaction, engagement, and productivity, and maximize success in the long run.
