20 Employee Survey Questions That Reveal How New Hires REALLY Feel
With a tight labor market going into 2023, HR is under pressure to be as efficient as possible with hiring. Talent is more scarce and expensive, and unsurprisingly, half of HR leaders anticipate the competition for that talent to get more intense in the next six months.
According to Gartner’s Top HR Trends and Priorities for 2023, one of the most important ways to succeed in this challenging hiring market is to “build onboarding for engagement,” with the following recommendations:
- Creating an emotional connection to the organization
- Prioritizing new hires’ individual needs
Onboarding surveys need to be part of your hiring toolset, so you can gauge how well your onboarding process helps new hires create meaningful connections and feel supported as individuals.
To help you create a more successful, engaging onboarding experience for your new employees, we’ll dig into the benefits of using employee surveys to improve your onboarding and the types of employee survey questions you should be asking.
Free Resource: Onboarding Survey Template
Starting your onboarding survey from scratch or updating the one you have? Download a template with 20 employee survey questions you can use right away.
Why Onboarding Surveys Matter
New hires are at a delicate stage of their employment at your organization. BambooHR research shows that 35% of workers quit a job within the first month, so it’s in your best interest to get feedback from employees about their onboarding experience as early in their employment as possible.
The feedback you get from employee survey questions can help you improve your onboarding program in important ways:
- Reduced Turnover: Getting early feedback from new employees can help you make changes that will keep them around and improve onboarding and the workplace for future new hires.
- Better Employee Integration: Effective onboarding is tied to increased employee connection, culture integration, performance, engagement, job satisfaction, and more. By improving one process, you can make huge improvements across the entire organization.
- Better Employer Brand: When looking for a new job, 71% of people rely on referrals from current employees. An onboarding survey can notify you of issues and give you time to make changes before negative reviews make it to other candidates.
The 5 Best Types of Employee Survey Questions for New Hires
As new hires complete their onboarding process, ask questions about the following topics.
Company Mission, Values, and Culture
An effective onboarding process should include an introduction to the company’s culture and values. In BambooHR research, employees who received effective culture training during onboarding were 12 times more likely to feel committed to their organizations (compared to poorly trained new hires).
Engagement with Onboarding Activities
Your onboarding program is only effective if it fulfills its aims to get employees up to speed and knowledgeable about their role, their team, and the organization as a whole. Make sure to include employee survey questions that help you evaluate the specific activities in your onboarding process. Did each activity meet its goal?
Benefits
Benefits are complicated, so the better you train employees about their benefits during onboarding, the better they’ll understand how to enroll in them and use them. By including benefits in your onboarding training and in your employee survey questions, you’ll not only get healthier employees but also head off a flood of benefits-related questions from confused new hires.
Create better first days with the BambooHR New Hire Checklist.
This template outlines 20+ essential tasks ranging from collecting tax forms to scheduling intro meetings to create a consistent experience for all new hires.
Team Integration
Managers drive engagement. According to Gallup, managers and team leaders are responsible for 70% of the discrepancy in team engagement (between teams at an organization). So while HR is responsible for the bulk of onboarding training, the new hire’s manager and team become their most important relationships at work. You’ll want to keep close tabs on this part of the onboarding experience.
Employee Satisfaction
Happy people are more likely to stick around, and they’re more productive. Keeping track of employee satisfaction is an important measure for how successful your onboarding process is and for how you’re doing overall as a company.
20 Must-Ask Employee Survey Questions [Free Download]
Your onboarding survey is your opportunity to improve one of the most impactful processes in your organization: onboarding. The example survey questions in this free template help you dig into that process by examining how well you’ve done the following:
- Incorporated your company’s values and culture in your onboarding program
- Accounted for new hires’ individual concerns and questions
With these employee survey questions, you’ll be well-equipped to measure the effectiveness of your onboarding activities. You’ll also be able to get specific employee feedback on each step in the process and better understand your new employees’ commitment to the organization, productivity, team integration, and satisfaction.