How to Measure Onboarding with Survey Questions

Onboarding is a key part of the employee experience, which is why it’s essential to properly set up the entire training and adaptation process for a new employee. Onboarding survey questions are an essential part of the evaluation process. This guide provides a structured plan to help you implement them effectively. Employee onboarding surveys are a key tool used by HR professionals to measure and improve employee satisfaction throughout the employee lifecycle.

Why is a Well-Designed Onboarding Process Important?

The first three months are crucial—from several perspectives:

• The Human Perspective: Building relationships and a sense of psychological safety through interactions and experiences.
• The Managerial Perspective: Effectively transferring know-how to the new employee.
• The Data Perspective: Reducing costs and time spent on finding a replacement if the employee leaves during their probationary period. Tracking this data helps reduce employee turnover and supports long-term retention.

A quality onboarding experience leads to higher employee engagement, productivity, and loyalty. It is also the new hire’s first real immersion into the company culture.

A Modern Approach to Onboarding with Sloneek

Onboarding shouldn’t be just a formality of the first few days, but a well-thought-out process that guides a new hire through their first weeks and months at the company.
Key elements of this approach include:

• Preparation Before Day One: The new colleague has access to information, documents, and tasks even before their first day.
• Structured Adaptation Plan: Clearly defined steps outlining what they will learn, when, and who will assist them.
• Digital Support: Using tools that allow for tracking task completion, signing documents online, and having an overview of the onboarding progress.
• Involvement of the Entire Team: Not just HR, but also managers and colleagues, so the new employee feels part of the company from day one.

Why Involve New Hire Feedback in Onboarding

An important part of the onboarding experience is feedback from new employees. Scheduling personal meetings with both HR and the direct manager to discuss first impressions and feelings works great.
If you want to keep all data in one place, you can collect feedback through an onboarding survey. This is an excellent choice because:

• You gain valuable data you can build on.
• The survey helps improve the entire onboarding process.
• It supports employee retention and increases their satisfaction, motivation, and productivity.
• It gives the company a chance to hear new hires’ voices firsthand.
• It reveals problems early and allows for quick corrections.
• It gives a platform to the Employee Voice and can reveal issues with manager support or a lack of perceived growth opportunities early on.
• It reinforces a culture of continuous feedback from the very first days at the company.

How to Create Good Onboarding Survey Questions

You can use a mix of different question types. For consistency, HR teams can use a pre-made survey template or simple online survey tools like Google Forms to gather feedback. The onboarding questions should be designed to evaluate training effectiveness and ensure role clarity.

• Open-ended questions: Allow the new hire to express themselves in their own words.
• Numerical scales (1–10): For quick ratings.
• Likert scale (Agree / Disagree): To measure feelings or the degree of agreement.
• Yes/No: For quick and clear answers.

Tip: We recommend dividing the questions into distinct sections to help new hires reflect on each phase. You can focus on the technical aspects of onboarding (the process, etc.) or also on team dynamics and relationships. You can conduct multiple surveys—after a week, a month, 3 months—or combine them into one survey that the employee receives after 2 months, still within their probationary period.

Examples of Onboarding Survey Questions by User Onboarding Phase

The onboarding survey questions below will help you create your own survey. They have been organized by the recommended time frame for asking them.

1. Preboarding (Before Starting)

• What was your experience like before you started?
• What helped you most to prepare for your first day?
• Were the instructions for the first day clear?
• Did you receive all the necessary information (e.g., access, contacts)?
• Was all the information available to you in a timely manner?
• How was the communication from the company?
• Is there anything you would add or remove?

2. After the First Week/Month:

• How do you rate the pace of the onboarding?
• What would have improved your first day/week/month?
• Do you feel welcome at the company?
• Did you receive enough support from HR?
• Did you receive enough support from your manager?
• Did you receive enough support from your team?
• Is it clear to you what is expected of you?
• Does your job match the position description?
• Do you have all the necessary tools (software, hardware, etc.)?
• Is there anything you are missing in your work?
• Have goals been set for the near future?
• What do you like the most, and what should we continue doing?

3. After 2-3 Months:

• How well have you managed to build relationships with key colleagues?
• Do you understand your role in the context of the company’s goals?
• Did the onboarding prepare you sufficiently for your role?

4. For Remote Employees:

• What would improve your connection with the team?
• Do you have access to the necessary information?
• Are regular check-ins with your manager taking place?
• How do you rate the communication with the team, your manager, and overall?
• What would you welcome or change in your workflow?

5. Company Culture and Values

• How would you describe the company culture based on your experience so far?
• Do you feel that your personal values align with our organizational values?
• What has helped you the most with your cultural integration into the team?

It’s up to you whether you choose scales, yes/no, or open-ended questions. The important thing is to get the information you need and be able to analyze it quickly and effectively. We do not recommend too many open-ended questions. A good alternative might be questions in the style of the “start – stop – continue” method:

• What should remain in the onboarding process?
• What should we stop doing in the onboarding process?
• What should we continue doing?
• Open-ended question: Anything else you would like to add? 🙂

AI Surveys: The Power of Feedback Without Wasting Time

Sloneek offers an intelligent AI Surveys module that has the potential to significantly streamline feedback collection within the company, including in the context of onboarding. Here’s what sets it apart:

How It Works and Its Main Benefits

• Saves up to 90% of your time with a tool that automatically generates questionnaires, evaluates data, and can offer smart recommendations. AI tools simplify feedback analysis and can even suggest ways to improve survey response rates, providing significant value for busy HR leaders and their HR teams.
• Offers flexibility: surveys can be anonymous or public, and include closed-ended (checkbox), scale-based (e.g., 0–5), or open-ended questions.
• AI-powered survey generation: Need to quickly create a questionnaire during the onboarding process? Just enter what you want to find out, and the AI will create it in moments, with hundreds of pre-set prompts and optimized parameters. It also features multilingual processing and intelligent scheduling to increase respondent engagement.
• Data analysis & clear visualization: The results are automatically displayed in easy-to-read graphs. You can filter data by teams or locations and export it to CSV, PNG, or SVG formats.
• Smart, actionable recommendations from data: Sloneek AI chatbot offers not just a summary of the data, but also interpretation and concrete solution proposals. It can predict long-term trends and make it easier for you to decide on the next steps.

Tip: Don’t forget about remote workers. Remote onboarding has its specifics as it requires a well-structured virtual onboarding experience. Support new hires with easily accessible learning resources and clear video tutorials, and use surveys to effectively gauge their integration and identify any support gaps in the remote environment.

Conclusion

A quality onboarding process is a key factor for the success of a new employee and the entire company. A well-designed process promotes engagement, productivity, and loyalty from human, managerial, and data perspectives. An essential part of this is collecting feedback from new hires—personal meetings, surveys, or AI tools allow for the timely identification of problems and continuous improvement of the onboarding process. Effective employee onboarding surveys build on the positive candidate experience established during the recruitment process and are a crucial part of the overall employee journey. Structured questions, regular check-ins, and modern digital tools like Sloneek not only facilitate employee adaptation but also provide valuable data for strategic decision-making and support a culture of open feedback from the very first days at the company.