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Onboarding new employees is a critical part of any fast-growing business. Unfortunately, many companies do not effectively track the results of their onboarding program to identify opportunities for optimizations over time, and ways to better support employees. One way to make the onboarding process easier, repeatable and more efficient is by creating a new hire survey.
With an engaging and well-crafted survey, you can get lots of valuable insight into how your new hires feel about their onboarding experience, the resources they have access to, the mentors they work with, and the team culture. In this blog post, we'll discuss what questions to ask in your survey, tips for increasing completion rates from new hires, and considerations for crafting effective questions that result in meaningful responses from your new employees.
What Questions Should You Ask?
The type of questions you ask in your survey really depends on what kind of insight you're looking for. Generally speaking, there are three categories of questions that can help provide useful data about your onboarding process: demographic information (e.g., age, gender), open-ended feedback (e.g., "What did you like most about your onboarding experience?") and multiple-choice questions (e.g., "On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate the quality of the resources provided during your onboarding?").
Examples of question topics your survey can cover include:
- What were the highlights of onboarding/orientation?
- What resources or lessons were most helpful for learning about the organization?
- What employees were most supportive and/or helpful in learning the ropes of work?
- What resources were missing from onboarding?
- What sort of support can the organization provide 30,60,90 days into the role?
- What mentorship do you expect going forward?
It's important to remember that while demographic information can provide some useful insights into how diverse or homogeneous your organization is, it's not always relevant or necessary to include in a new hire survey. You can also ask about resources provided during onboarding (like training materials), their opinion on mentors or managers they worked with during onboarding, and whether they have any suggestions for improving team culture going forward.
Tips for Increasing Completion Rates
When creating a survey for new hires, it's important to think carefully about how you craft each question so that it results in meaningful responses without being too long or overwhelming for respondents. The best way to do this is by keeping questions short and sweet – no one wants to spend 30 minutes answering 10 pages worth of questions. Additionally, try using visuals or engaging content whenever possible; audio, video and images are much easier on the eyes than blocks of text and can help keep respondents engaged throughout the survey. Finally, make sure you give respondents enough time to complete the survey; if they feel rushed or overwhelmed then they won't take the time needed to answer thoughtfully.
When looking to capture high quality information, our top recommendation is to try and make your survey feel like a conversation. One that builds a relationship between the survey creator and the respondents! For example, share a video introduction at the start of your survey to help respondents get to know you, your survey goals and why the survey is so important.
Follow Up with Employees Who Don't Fill Out The Survey Right Away
It's important to follow up with any employee who does not fill out the survey right away – otherwise you may miss out on valuable feedback. One way to do this is by sending out automated reminders via email; this will ensure that everyone remembers to complete the survey in a timely manner without having to manually track down every respondent individually. Additionally, offer incentives such as gift cards or other rewards for completing surveys – this can help increase completion rates significantly. For reminder emails, we typically recommend you share one within the first 48 hrs and a secondary reminder 4-5 days after that.
Check out the power of voice and video in surveys with Voiceform.
Crafting an engaging new hire survey doesn’t have to be difficult – all it takes is some careful planning and consideration for crafting effective questions that give you meaningful responses from new employees without overwhelming them with too many choices or redundant information requests. The goal is to create a survey that helps you improve your onboarding for future employee cohorts, and to capture sound bites that validate your program’s effectiveness.
Consider popular question ideas such as rating onboarding quality, resources available during the onboarding process, perspectives on team culture etc. Also, use engaging voice and video content where appropriate and be sure to incentivize employees who complete surveys quickly or on time so they don’t forget! To create a super friendly and conversational survey, consider Voiceform’s multimedia based questions, intuitive integrations with HR systems and rich analytics to easily understand your survey results.
With these tips in mind creating an engaging new hire survey should be a breeze - and help you create a program that’s scalable, repeatable and easily measured so that all stakeholders within your organization can understand what works, and what needs optimizing.
