Get a Winning Start with Employee Onboarding Surveys
Believe it or not, your company’s onboarding process plays a larger role in turnover than you may have ever thought possible. One study found that 77% of employees who went through a formal onboarding process were able to meet their first performance goals.
Hiring right matters. Moreover, an effective plan helps set new hires up for success, and employee onboarding surveys offer a simple, effective way to collect valuable feedback and further refine your employee onboarding experience. By taking a proactive approach and implementing best practices, organizations can beat early turnover, boost productivity, and lower costs.
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The Role of Employee Onboarding
Research from the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) shows that turnover during the first 18 months on the job can be as high as 50 percent. Organizations are realizing they must move beyond the standard new hire orientation to create an effective onboarding process. This is critical to improve employee retention.
An effective onboarding process will help your new hires feel more valued, better understand their role, and increase their productivity and performance, resulting in increased engagement. The onboarding process begins as soon as an offer is accepted and typically lasts through the first year of employment, at a minimum.
Identifying Opportunities for Improvement
Your onboarding experience should instill confidence, reduce turnover rates, and enhance employee retention. Each collectively contributes to a harmonious and efficient workplace environment. Here are six signs that signify your onboarding process has room for improvement.
- Low Employee Engagement. When new hires feel disconnected or disengaged shortly after joining, it should raise an immediate red flag. A successful onboarding process not only provides important information but also immerses employees in the company’s culture, operations, values, and goals.
- Early Turnover. An early turnover rate often serves as a clear indicator that an organization’s onboarding process is not effectively meeting the needs of its new employees. That’s because employees who do not feel a strong connection to the organization are more likely to seek opportunities elsewhere.
- Poor Employee Survey Feedback. When an organization consistently receives poor feedback from employee feedback surveys, it’s a telling sign that its onboarding process is falling short of expectations.
- Frequent Questions and Concerns. A consistent influx of questions and concerns from newly onboarded employees is a clear signal that an organization’s onboarding process is falling short of its intended goals.
- Long Learning Curves. When employees experience prolonged and challenging learning curves upon joining an organization, it often indicates that the onboarding process is not effectively designed.
- Limited Team Integration or Interaction. If new employees find themselves isolated or struggling to establish meaningful connections with colleagues, it suggests that your onboarding process might be neglecting the crucial component of social integration.
A Critical 90-day Period Warrants New Hire Onboarding Surveys
Everyone chooses to leave a job for different reasons, but there are a few that come up frequently. Data from the 2022 Job Seeker Nation Report, found that the number one reason employees left in the first 90 days was because the day-to-day role was not what they had expected, with 41% of respondents marking this as a reason for leaving. Other top reasons include:
- 35% – Bad experience or incident
- 34% – Company culture was not what was expected
- 32% – Unsatisfactory company leadership
You can make a positive impact on new employees by following the best practices listed below for increased employee retention and engagement.
- Set clear expectations upfront
- Have a strong onboarding process
- Encourage employee voice
- Schedule regular check-ins with new hire onboarding surveys
- Recognize their contributions and value
Make it Fun
Traditional onboarding can often be perceived as dull and paperwork-heavy. To ensure that your new employees start their journey with enthusiasm and a sense of belonging, it’s essential to infuse fun and excitement into the process. After all, fun employee onboarding and efficient employee onboarding do not have to be mutually exclusive! You can set the tone for employee satisfaction and engagement by creating an enjoyable, personalized onboarding process that doesn’t forego your standard procedures.
With that in mind, here are five fun onboarding ideas to engage and excite new team members:
- Employee Onboarding Trivia. The premise is simple: put your new hire’s knowledge to the test by curating key information and fun facts into a trivia roundup. Be sure to incorporate a balanced mix of trivia questions. Otherwise, you run the risk of delivering something that feels more like a test or quiz.
- New Hire Activities. Icebreakers help your existing team members get to know new team members and vice versa. A simple Google search will yield plenty of icebreaker ideas for you to start with and many organizations choose onboarding icebreakers that change each time.
- Onboarding Scavenger Hunt. This is a unique way to give your incoming employees a fun introduction to their new role. Use your office space as a base and set up clues and challenges in break rooms, common areas, offices, and even in the surrounding areas of your building.
- Send Them a Welcome Package. These are a thoughtful way to express gratitude and appreciation for new hires. Ideally, your welcome package will arrive before or within three days of their start date. This starts them off on a good note, can leave a lasting impression, and reinforces your emphasis on company culture.
- Host a Themed Lunch. Arrange an in-person or themed lunch break with your new hire and the rest of your team. Share a gift card for DoorDash, UberEats, or any food vendor of your choice. Vote on a theme and encourage people to join with theme related accessories or virtual backgrounds.
See how our Onboarding surveys work
Embrace New Hire Checklists
Far beyond a simple to-do list, a new hire checklist is an important and reliable tool that empowers organizations to create and operate a smooth onboarding process. It essentially functions as a comprehensive roadmap that can be used over and over again, outlining all the essential tasks and steps for successfully welcoming and integrating new team members in an organized and consistent manner.
From pre-boarding paperwork and IT setup to team introductions, a new hire checklist ensures nothing falls through the cracks. This one simple integration alone can foster a sense of organization while setting clear expectations of all new employees. Here are five reasons to implement a new hire checklist into your onboarding process:
- Improve the New Employee Onboarding Experience
- Create a Smooth Transition
- Streamline the Onboarding Process
- Time & Resource Efficiency
- Follow a Consistent Process for New Hires
Leverage New Hire Check-Ins
Now, let’s take a look at new hire check-ins which help to increase comfort level and productivity for new employees during this critical 90-day period. Ideally handled by a third party, a new hire check-in, otherwise known as an employee onboarding survey, allows an organization to:
- Collect information and data about challenges that new hires experience
- Demonstrate that the organization values employee input
- Establish the expectation that employees speak up about issues in their work environment
With new hire check-ins, companies see higher participation rates, better quality of data, and deeper levels of feedback. In particular, employees are more likely to provide honest feedback when they aren’t worried about who will see their – potentially unfavorable – responses to onboarding feedback survey questions.
Conversely, when companies don’t make the time to conduct new hire check-ins, they run the risk of losing those employees due to unclear expectations, miscommunication, lower morale, and bad decisions.
As we’ve said, the first 90 days with a new hire is critical. Asking onboarding questions and getting feedback at the right time is important for the success of the process. If you wait too long to collect feedback, you can lose out on valuable insights and delay time to value for the employee and your organization. Automate the process to ensure surveys are sent at the right time in the onboarding process. Best practice is to deploy at least two check-in surveys during the first 45 days.
Onboarding Week 2 – A survey for new employees after their first week on the job. This helps you get a sense of first impressions and assesses the recruiting experience, orientation, and fundamental onboarding elements.
Onboarding Week 5 – A survey for employees after their first 30 days on the job. New employees are starting to settle in and adapt to their new role. This survey helps assess training, role expectations, and productivity.
New Hire Point in Time – A survey for employees after two months on the job. This provides a detailed assessment of the entire new hire experience beyond early onboarding, measuring perceptions of culture, leadership, alignment and more. This survey is used between 60 and 180 days on the job.
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Communication Tips for New Hire Surveys
When running new hire surveys, you want to be able to hear as many voices as possible and communication is key to getting as many people to complete the survey as possible. We have seen organizations with participation rates over 80% when executing a great communication plan. To ensure the best possible participation possible, we recommend the following actions be taken:
- Leverage Your Current Onboarding Process. Make the new hire survey known to the new employee. Inform them that someone from an outside third party will be reaching out to them via phone or email to complete a new hire survey.
- Ensure Managers and Participants are Aware. Arguably, the most vital part of the communication process is to make sure your managers know about the survey and that they are communicating it to their new hires as well. During those first few weeks of orientation, employees are given a lot of information and they may forget about the conversation they had with HR at the beginning.
- Actively Pull Lists from your HRIS. This should include emails of all employees that will be sent the survey. Use this list and its email addresses to send out reminders to your new employees about the upcoming survey.
Employee Onboarding Questions to Ask
All new hires are brimming with questions and, perhaps more importantly, observations during their onboarding journey. However, their experience is often a one-way street with them bombarded with information but given limited opportunities for feedback. Employee onboarding questionnaires provide employees with an ongoing voice to give honest feedback.
When prompting them, ensure that you incorporate an array of questions to capture both qualitative and quantitative data, providing for instant insight and actionable steps. Consider the following:
- Open-ended questions: Encourage honest and detailed feedback by asking questions like, “What aspects of onboarding were most helpful?” or “What could we have done differently to improve your experience?”
- Likert scale questions: Gauge overall satisfaction with specific onboarding elements (e.g., pre-boarding communication, training materials, team introductions) using a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).
- Multiple-choice questions: Capture specific data on areas for improvement with questions like, “Which resources were most valuable during your onboarding?” or “Would you prefer virtual or in-person training sessions?”
- Ranking questions: Learn what matters most to them through ranking questions like, “Please rate the following factors in terms of how much impact they had on your decision to work for the organization.”
- Type of work
- Job security
- Hours of work/scheduling
- Training/Professional development
- Compensation
- Benefits
- Location
- Company reputation
Set New Hires up for Success with Employee Onboarding Surveys
First impressions matter, especially when it comes to welcoming new hires. A well-structured onboarding program is the cornerstone of a positive employee experience, setting the stage for long-term success and engagement. People Element’s industry-leading employee onboarding surveys can help you collect new hire feedback to boost retention and engagement. Request a demo to see the surveys in-action and the impact they can make for your organization.