42 Employee Onboarding Survey Questions to Ask (+Tools)
- Published: May 13, 2022
- Updated: February 23, 2024
When a new employee joins your company, you want to ensure that they are properly trained and feel welcomed. One way to measure your employee onboarding success is to administer a post-onboarding training survey. This survey will help you identify areas where your onboarding process need refinement and identify new areas that you aren’t providing enough training and support for new team members.
According to a survey by Brandon Hall, organizations that have a strong onboarding process improve their employee retention by 82%. What’s more, research suggests that 20% of employee turnover happens in the first 45 days. A post-onboarding survey will help you spot disgruntled new hires who are at the risk of leaving your organization.
In this blog post, we will discuss employee post-onboarding surveys, different examples of onboarding survey questions, the benefits of post-onboarding surveys for new hires, as well as the four best survey tools for soliciting post-onboarding feedback.
What Is an Employee Post-Onboarding Survey?
An employee onboarding survey is a feedback strategy for organizations to solicit feedback from their new hires, post-onboarding. These surveys help organizations measure the effectiveness of their onboarding from those who have recently experienced the process first-hand.
Example of a post-onboarding survey from Qualtrics.
By surveying employees after they’ve completed their onboarding, organizations are able to compile insights into what worked well and what could be improved. This feedback is essential for ensuring that onboarding is an engaging, effective experience for all types of employees.
L&D teams should look to utilize a few types of questions, including:
- Open-ended survey questions
- 1-10 scale survey questions
- Likert scale survey questions
Below you can see an example of a Likert scale onboarding survey question:
What’s more, these surveys help you determine how well your employees have adjusted to their new roles. By gauging their level of satisfaction with their onboarding experience, you can decipher whether or not your employees are properly prepared for their new positions.
Onboarding new employees is a process that takes time and effort to get right. With the right questions, you ensure that you’re getting the most accurate information from your new employees.
An engaging onboarding experience is an integral part of workplace culture. For this reason, you need to ensure that all your new hires feel comfortable and happy with their onboarding process.
42 Examples of Post-Onboarding Survey Questions to Ask New Employees
Every organization will have a specific onboarding experience tailored for different departments and roles – from training delivery methods, employee onboarding tools, topics, mediums, and more. That means your post-onboarding surveys will need to be tailored to your specific new hire experiences.
The survey questions you ask post-onboarding should be straight-forward and should be tailored to each business unit to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback and insights for your HR team to improve your overall onboarding experience.
We’ve curated a list of common post-onboarding survey questions to ask new hires and categorized them into three categories:
Post-onboarding survey questions after your employee’s first week orientation
- How can we improve our first-week employee orientation for new hires?
- Was there anything uncomfortable about employee orientation?
- When arriving on your first day, was it clear when and where you needed to be?
- Was orientation helpful and engaging?
- Did you feel welcomed during employee orientation?
- How would you describe your first day?
- Was there anyone who made your first day or week feel better or more inclusive?
- Do you feel confident that you made the right choice is coming to work here?
- Did this orientation process prepare you for your role?
- How welcome do you feel welcomed at this company? [rating scale]
- How do you feel about your orientation materials (e.g., handbook, policies)?
- Do you have any questions about the company policies?
Post-onboarding questions after employees first 30 days
- What was your favorite part of the onboarding process?
- Were there any parts that were confusing or unclear?
- Do you understand how your role contributes to the overall business goal?
- Do you have any questions about your job duties?
- Did the onboarding process have a comfortable pace?
- How confident are you in using the tools required for your role?
- Do you have a good idea about what you still need to learn to do your job well?
- How do you feel about our organizational values?
- Do our organizational values align with your own value system?
- How well does your role match the job description?
- Did the first 30-day onboarding process meet your expectations?
- Is there something in particular that you didn’t like in the onboarding?
- Were you able to get all your questions answered during the onboarding process?
- Is our company documentation and policies easy to find?
- What is the one thing you would like to change from your experience so far?
Post-onboarding questions after employees first 90 days
- Would you recommend any changes to the onboarding process?
- How proud are you to work for our organization? [rating scale]
- Have your team members been integral in smooth onboarding?
- Do you need any additional training or support to do your job effectively?
- Is there any additional longer-term development or training you would like to receive?
- Have you received the support from your manager that you need to be successful in your role?
- Do you and your manager have routine 1-1 conversations and meetings to discuss your responsibilities, tasks, and performance?
- Do you and your manager have routine 1-1 conversations and meetings to discuss your career aspirations and goals?
- Do you feel comfortable talking with your manager?
- Do you feel you could provide your manager with constructive feedback? Do you think it would be taken well?
- What’s your biggest challenge in your first 90 days of onboarding?
- How do you see yourself progressing at our company?
- Would you recommend the company to others in your network?
- Do you see yourself working here in 2 years?
- How can we improve the overall employee onboarding experience?
5 Benefits of Post-Onboarding Employee Surveys
Surveys allow HR teams to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of their onboarding programs. Post-onboarding evaluations provide an in-depth understanding of your employees’ value out of your well-thought onboarding process. Answers obtained from these surveys can be used as feedback or inspiration to create a killer onboarding experience.
Listed below are five benefits of post-onboarding employee surveys.
1. Improves your employee onboarding
Your onboarding process can be greatly improved by conducting an employee post-onboarding training survey. By surveying your new hires after they have completed their training, you can solicit valuable feedback on what they enjoyed, what was engaging, what was helpful, and what was missing. This will help you to make your onboarding process even more effective in the future.
2. Helps measure onboarding effectiveness
By understanding how employees feel about different aspects of the onboarding process, you are able to gauge its overall effectiveness. For instance, an employee’s answer to the question “was this training program tailored to your role?” will help you decide whether the accompanying training material was relevant and useful.
If an employee is on the workforce management team, they should know to use their work schedule maker effectively to schedule and manage the workforce. You need to find out whether their tools training program was informative. Their answer will help you understand whether your idea of conducting tools training as a part of the onboarding was effective or not.
With a digital adoption platform like Whatfix, organizations are able to solicit onboarding feedback at the moment a new hire completes a training flow or program to gather feedback that is still fresh in your new hires’ memory. You can see this in action below.
3. Gauges employee engagement with your onboarding
Giving your new hires a chance to express their opinion about the onboarding program they went through is essential for employee engagement. An employee onboarding survey can open the lines of communication between an employer and the employee.
What’s more, it creates an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas or thoughts openly. When you know the unsolicited opinions of your employees, you will be better equipped to create an onboarding process that meets their expectations.
4. Creates a better overall employee experience
When a new employee joins the company, their first experience should be everything they hope for and more. A good onboarding survey will help you get all of your newly hired talent hooked up with what’s needed to make them feel at home in no time, so that way nothing is standing between productivity or happiness!
When your employees feel that their opinions matter, they will not only feel welcome but also valued. A simple post-onboarding survey will foster an ongoing employee experience that resonates throughout their tenure with your organization from day one.
5. Increases employee retention
The benefits of a post-onboarding survey are immense. By taking the time to fill out a survey, employees can let employers know what they did and didn’t like about the onboarding process. This feedback is invaluable in making sure that every employee has a positive experience when they start their new job.
A positive employee onboarding experience can not only reduce an employee’s time to productivity and overall employee satisfaction but also ultimately improve employee retention rates. This means that employees will be happier in their rool, remain at your company longer, and you’ll establish better communication with your workforce.
This onboarding planning toolkit includes four free templates for creating and improving a robust employee onboarding program.
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4 Best Survey Tools for Employee Onboarding Feedback in 2024
There are many employee survey tools available to organizations to gather feedback from their new hires, with G2 listing 402 survey software tools currently on the market.
Most of these are basic survey tools. However, there are more robust learning and development tools that integrate feedback surveys into your onboarding experience.
Here are four of the best software tools for HR teams to explore for running post-onboarding feedback surveys in 2024:
1. Whatfix
Whatfix is not a simple survey tool, it’s a robust digital adoption platform that empowers organizations to create in-app onboarding content to create an interactive, engaging onboarding experience for new hires that allow them to learn in the flow of work.
With Whatfix, L&D teams are able to create:
- Interactive walkthroughs and step-by-step guides that showcase how to complete digital processes and use complex application features
- Onboarding task lists to provide a guardrail for new hires to complete all mandatory onboarding tasks
- Smart tips to nudge your employees in the right direction or provide helpful tips
- Embedded knowledge bases that allow new hires to search in a self-help widget for answers to questions and that integrates with your Google Drive, intranet, knowledge base, and other document storage tools. This allows new hires to find any onboarding document, company handbook, training materials, or any resource they may need during their onboarding (or post-onboarding) process.
All of this is embedded directly into the digital applications and processes your company uses. Whatfix also offers an easy way for employees to give feedback during the onboarding process. It makes it straightforward for employees to provide their feedback right in the flow of onboarding, allowing organizations to make the necessary improvements to their onboarding process and deliver a positive employee experience to their new hires
What’s more, Whatfix nudges your new hires promptly with in-app survey questions so that they can share their feedback about the onboarding process as and when it happens. It also helps you get the most out of your post-onboarding surveys by turning employee replies into visual-rich, actionable insights which can be later used to revamp the onboarding process.
2. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is an excellent, simple survey tool for collecting feedback from employees, especially when it comes to onboarding. HR teams can now conduct employee surveys more efficiently with SurveyMonkey’s easy-to-use templates and collect data from custom-designed questionnaires.
One of the best aspects of this tool is that it provides branding options for companies, allowing them to create their own branded survey in minutes. While it is an excellent mechanism for gathering quantitative feedback, it lacks some features like options to embed with a webpage that would streamline the onboarding feedback collection process – as well as the in-depth behavior analytic and event data features that come with a tool like Whatfix.
3. Google Forms
Google Forms is designed to make surveyed data more accessible and user-friendly. Its interactive interface and smart design features allow HR managers to create surveys effortlessly, even participants can answer surveys in a hassle-free manner. The lack of a learning curve and its seamless integration with Google Sheets makes Google Forms one the best platforms available today for large scale surveys.
Google Forms allow you to ask questions, collect data from responses, and easily share them with other stakeholders like functional managers, rest of the HR team, the C-Suite, and more. It also has robust analytics that gives users insight into how their survey is going.
4. Kodo Survey
Kodo Survey is a tool that makes it easy for HR teams to conduct post-onboarding surveys. The crown jewel of Kodo Survey is its data-backed dashboard which gives a bird’s eye view of employee pulse. Its comprehensive reports give insights into every new hire’s opinion about the onboarding process so that the HR team can optimize the onboarding experience effectively.
With Kodo Survey, strategic decisions can be made based on accurate information rather than relying solely upon first impressions like many HR managers used before now. Rather than wasting time and resources on inefficient data collection and analysis procedures, HR managers can use Kodo Survey to automate post-onboarding surveys and focus on more strategic initiatives.
A post-onboarding survey is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your onboarding program. It can help you identify areas where you need to make improvements, and give you insights into what new employees are thinking about your company and their role within it.
If you’re looking for an easy way to create surveys for your employees, Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that allows organizations to create effective, engaging, and interactive onboarding programs that provide contextual self-help to your new hires that drive adoption of your digital applications and processes, cuts down on training time and content creation costs, and is proven to help your new employees retain critical knowledge.
If you’re ready to step up your enterprise onboarding, find a time that works for you to set up a demo to see Whatfix for yourself.
Request a demo to see how Whatfix empowers organizations to improve end-user adoption and provide on-demand customer support
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