Onboarding Surveys
Supporting new employees and helping them to thrive in their working environment
For most employees, their first few weeks and months in a new role are the most crucial in determining how well they settle in, engage with their colleagues and become successful long-term members of staff. This is because for many inductees, their overall perception of an organisation and its staff are influenced by their earliest experiences, which can come to impact their engagement levels, motivation and even their intentions to stay.
Typically referred to as employee onboarding, this earliest stage in an employee’s lifecycle journey is focused on helping new staff adjust to the social and performance aspect of the organisation they have joined. By helping them to acquire the necessary, skills, knowledge and cultural attributes of the organisation they are working for, the aim of an employee onboarding programme is to swiftly turn them into productive and valuable members of staff.
However, just as much as this depends on the commitment and efforts of the new employee, it’s also dependent on the tools and environment provided by the employer to help them achieve this. Which is where the feedback from employee surveys is extremely valuable. By enabling you to better understand what new recruits think about the support you’re providing, see what’s working and what isn’t and any improvement you can make, an employee onboarding survey can help maximise your ability to develop more happy, productive and valuable long-term employees.

Onboarding surveys in the employment lifecyle
33% of new hires look for a new job within the first six months on the job
Harvard Business Review
From their experience of the recruitment process and how it influenced their decision to work for you, to their views about their induction, initial training and their first few weeks and months working for you, onboarding surveys offer an invaluable resource for getting the views about your employees’ very earliest experiences within your organisation. The survey is crucial as the views expressed by new staff typically set the tone about how they are likely to feel and perform in subsequent stages of their employment journey with you, giving you time to make any necessary improvements in order get the best out of an individual.
The onboarding stage is such a crucial period of a new recruit’s employment journey, so it’s essential to get it right, as new hires who experience poorly planned and executed onboarding and induction programmes can easily decide that an organisation is badly managed and leave, resulting in a costly waste of time for everyone involved.
To help provide you with more insight during this critical period, you may even consider slowly introducing some additional surveys for new employees after they’ve been working with you for a few weeks. These could range from recruitment and training surveys, to those that look to measure how contented, motivated and engaged they are with your wider organisation such as measuring job satisfaction, assessing levels of employee engagement and running occasional quick-fire pulse surveys.
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The benefits of onboarding surveys
Besides the beneficial impact it can have over the entire employee lifecycle, the business benefits that a successful employee onboarding survey programme can deliver include:
Nearly four out of five (78 percent) of business leaders rank employee retention as important or urgent
Talent Management & HR
Onboarding survey best practices
A good onboarding survey should not just be written once and then rolled out continuously for years to come. To be effective a good onboarding survey needs to be continually evolved, as the needs of your organisation, and its people, change over time.
However, whether you’re starting your survey from scratch or just revising it, there are a few best practices you should be thinking about. Some things to consider include:

33% of employees knew whether they would stay at their company long-term after being on the job for one week or less; 63% knew within the first month.
Accessperks.com
Employee onboarding survey questions
The questions you ask in your survey are vital to helping you to evaluate and improve the key stages you’ve highlighted as essential to the success of your employee onboarding programme. So, it’s vital to have some strong questions in place that will help give you the feedback you need.
To help get you started, we’ve outlined some questions you might like to consider below.
At the beginning of your employee onboarding survey, you may be interested find out a bit more about what your newest employees thought about your recruitment process and how it influenced their decision to work for you. Suitable questions could include:
What do you think about the overall recruitment process you experienced with us? Is there anything more we could have done to improve it for you?
During this process was there anything significant you heard or learnt about, that was factor in your decision to come to work for us?
After the first week or two, you could then explore how new recruits were feeling about their onboarding experience to date, including any initial induction programme or training they had received.
How are you finding your onboarding experience so far? What have you enjoyed the most and is there anything you feel we could improve?
What did you think of your induction and/or training programme? Was the information and support you received sufficient to enable you to perform your job well going forward?
Then to get a feel for how they feel about their role, how they feel they fit in and their perception of the wider company, you might want to ask some further questions after they’ve been working for you for after a couple of months such as (these questions prompt respondents to rank their answers from strongly agree to strongly disagree):
I feel that this role is a good fit for me, and so far, matches the job description that was provided for me.
I’ve been made to feel welcome here and the experience of the organisation so far, is matching my expectations.
Employee survey templates
From what you need to be asking your employees, to what structure of questions you should be using, it can be daunting to know where to start with your first survey. So, to help you we’ve developed a great selection of fully customisable templates for you to look at.

Employee onboarding survey software
From their first week, induction and orientation with your organisation and its policies, to any training programmes you may have provided and ongoing performance reviews, with so many key stages to an employee onboarding survey programme, it can be challenging managing your surveys, so that they are distributed, and their feedback gathered and analysed at exactly the right time.
With the right employee survey software in place this shouldn’t present a major issue, as it’s automation and integration capabilities will ensure a survey is triggered whenever a new employee reaches one of these key stages, to ensure your insight is maximised throughout the onboarding process.
Free Coronavirus resources
COVID-19 has brought a new working dynamic and presents a rapidly evolving situation. Use these free survey templates to connect with your workforce.