Employee onboarding satisfaction survey in the onboarding process

Is an employee satisfaction survey unnecessary officiousness? Absolutely not! It must be said directly - employee job satisfaction has a real impact on the company business results. The United States loses approximately $550 billion a year due to dissatisfied workers. Today we will talk about how good practices help check whether our company has satisfied employees and how to measure their satisfaction during onboarding. We will also tell you what a good employee onboarding survey conducted during the employee onboarding process should look like.

Why is it worth examining the satisfaction level of a new employee?

Sometimes a few weeks or even days are enough for a new employee to lose enthusiasm for work and decide to leave.

Regardless of an employee's seniority, resigning from a job always involves costs that must be incurred to replace the lost talent with a new one. We have calculated that the cost of onboarding a new employee is up to 7 times his salary.

Looking simply and humanly, but also from a purely business perspective, an employee satisfaction survey should be a common practice already at the onboarding stage. Starting a new job is a very exciting moment when excitement goes hand in hand with stress. New responsibilities, a new team and learning about a new company culture - all this may arouse curiosity about new challenges, but also tension and uncertainty.

By conducting regular employee satisfaction surveys already at the implementation stage, you receive constructive onboarding feedback in real time. Instead of recovery plans after the trial period or (horror of horrors!) only after the annual evaluation, you can focus on the current expectations of the new hire and ensure positive onboarding experience. The more you reduce stress at the onboarding stage , the greater the chance that a new hire will start doing job effectively faster. In the longer term, the company has a chance for a higher employee retention rate, which actually results in the company success.

Onboarding is a process. Employee onboarding surveys must take this into account

Onboarding is a long-term and cross-functional process in which many people and departments are involved. Knowing the specifics of each employee's onboarding stage and the roles assigned to it, makes it easier to understand the emotions and expectations associated with a new employee in individual onboarding program phases. Without this knowledge, in turn, it is difficult to have good onboarding, that is, for the new employee to gain independence in new hire's role.

Keep your finger on the pulse

For the onboarding process to be truly successful, you need to keep your finger on the pulse and be in contact with new hires. If we do not detect warning signals of increasing stress, uncertainty and frustration in time, it will be difficult for us to react in time and provide new employees with the necessary support. And as we know, the more negative emotions, the more difficult it is to acquire knowledge effectively. The initial enthusiasm and employee engagement fades and is replaced by more and more stress and doubts about whether to continue this new professional chapter.

After the initial excitement, around the second or third week the new employee begins to have his first doubts. This is a critical moment of company's onboarding process- our reaction will determine whether new employees will get out of this dump or whether their frustration will grow.

Every new hire has critical moments during the first week or a few months in a new job. Catching them in time and reacting appropriately is crucial. An employee satisfaction survey is like a litmus test in such situations. Well-designed and properly timed pulse-check tests will allow you to determine what problems a new hire may be struggling with, what he/she is missing, and what emotions one is currently experiencing in the new role.

When to conduct an employee satisfaction onboarding survey?

We do not check sales results once a year. We do this regularly. The same should apply to the pulse-check test. The level of employee overall satisfaction also affects the company business goals, so it is worth having this area under control from the very beginning.

And the beginning of smooth onboarding process is nothing more than the successful conclusion of the recruitment process. In an ideal scenario, it starts when the decision to hire a new employee is made by the future employer. The first employee satisfaction survey should therefore be sent to new employees at the pre-boarding stage , often before formally joining the company. We ask about the recruitment process and what could be improved to enrich new hire's experience and make new hire feel welcomed. The next employee onboarding survey can be planned after each key part of the entire onboarding process, e.g. after:

• settling formal issues,
• transfer of equipment/work clothes,
• first day of work,
• welcome week ,
• stage of basic training / onboarding into the company policies,
• at each smaller stage of on-the-job onboarding process (a series of pulse checks) - we learn on an ongoing basis what is unclear and what issues are worth devoting more time to.

In a word, if you gather feedback from a new employee regularly the dynamic of the onboarding process should be taken into account.

How to create an employee satisfaction survey?

Define your goal and keep it concise

It is impossible to reliably examine all HR issues in one study in such a way as to achieve high responsiveness among employees and obtain reliable data. If you want to gather information and have clear understanding, employee satisfaction survey questionnaire should be short but concise, that is it should concern the specific area we want to take a closer look at. Define precisely what the purpose of the employee satisfaction survey is and what exactly you want to learn from it (e.g. how the recruitment process, equipment ordering, preboarding , familiarization with Buddy went).

Quality...

Once we know what the employee onboarding surveys are supposed to be about, it's time to shape them and add the best onboarding survey questions. To be qualitative, that is to reliably collect employee feedback / examine the level of employee satisfaction, they cannot be too general. To the prosaic question "How are you feeling?" we rarely answer comprehensively, describing all the factors responsible for our well-being. The same is true with the new hire satisfaction level during onboarding experience. Let's construct detailed questions about the core of the area we are measuring, e.g.:

• Is buddy's support during onboarding process sufficient for you?
• Was the data collected for the contract efficient?
• Did your manager provide you with ongoing feedback during on-the-job onboarding process?

It is important to collect qualitative data in addition to quantitative data. After each question or series of survey questions that can be answered, e.g. using a scale, leave space for a written statement. This way, you will allow the new hire to clarify the answer.

...not quantity

An employee satisfaction survey cannot be too long. A maximum of 10-12 survey questions are enough to receive valuable feedback on a specific stage of the entire onboarding process. Employee surveys that are too long are troublesome to complete. You risk that not every new hire will get to the last question. Sometimes even one well-asked question will do the trick!

Make sure you are responsive

• An employee satisfaction survey will not provide reliable data if it has low responsiveness. How to take care of it? Interactive, UX-attractive online surveys will make things easier, or at least they will not discourage employees after the first question. A page that takes a long time to load or is not adapted to be displayed on a smartphone, problems with saving answers - let's not go down this path! Let's treat employees as users who willingly fill out nicely designed surveys on a daily basis, for example when ordering food or shopping via an online application. Today, basically everyone knows whether they are dealing with the " user friendly " or not.

• It may be obvious, but employee satisfaction surveys should ensure their anonymity. It's not always easy to share honest feedback, especially if it is unflattering. In addition, a newly employed person often feels insecure in a new organization and may not feel comfortable sharing his or her opinion about, for example, his or her supervisor. Inform the employee about the anonymity of his/her response and - absolutely keep your word!

Why and how to automate pulse check tests?

HR perspective

From 4 to 15 - this is the number of pulse-check surveys that can be planned during the entire onboarding process, according to our calculations. What can be done to ensure that regular employee satisfaction surveys run smoothly at such a frequency?

The answer is simple - automation! By embedding the entire process in an appropriate tool, regular data collection and analysis will be much easier. From the perspective of HR teams, automating employee surveys is a great convenience, thanks to which they gain data in real time. This, in turn, is a valuable resource when it comes to analyzing the results and making global decisions based on them.

Employee (and consumer) perspective

As users of e-commerce services, we all encounter customer satisfaction surveys at every step. Often, such surveys are so refined and cleverly incorporated into the purchasing process that completing them comes naturally to us. Let's take advantage of these experiences and transfer them to the world of work, including: by automating employee surveys.

We will be happy to help you combine these two perspectives (HR and employee) into one coherent onboarding experience. In our application, the pulse-check test is started automatically according to a previously defined frequency. A few clicks and that's it - you have control over what the onboarding process looks like from the new employee's perspective. Let's talk about implementing such a solution in your company!

‍