Onboarding surveys

Onboarding aims to help new employees acquire the knowledge, skills, and behaviours needed to become fully functioning members of their team as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Our onboarding surveys evaluate their experience with your organisation during this time.

They're designed to be ongoing or "always on". You can add new participants as soon as they start, and they'll automatically be sent an invitation at the time you select (e.g. 1 month in).

You can choose between two different onboarding surveys:

• Onboarding Week One: Includes questions about the recruitment experience, organisational culture and values, responsibilities of their role and how they contribute to achieving the organisation's goals.
• Onboarding Over Time: Includes questions that focus more on the ongoing wellbeing of the new employee. Do they feel comfortable, happy and have a growing sense of belonging?

Make sure to choose the survey template that best suits your needs.

To create an onboarding survey, you will still need to go through the create survey flow, but there are a few key differences. Let's take a look at what these are.

What changes during the create survey flow?

You can create onboarding surveys the same way as other surveys. But there are a few things to look out for.

We've outlined which steps in the process contain changes.

Step 1: Survey information

Invitation sending period

You'll need to choose when to send survey invitations to participants. You can choose 1 week or 1, 3, 6, or 12 months after their start date.

Example: New employee Joe Smith's start date is 5/04/2024 and the invitation send period is set for 1 week after their first day. Joe would receive the invitation on 12/04/2024.

Start and end dates

You won't see this field for onboarding surveys. This is because it is an ongoing survey and there are no start and end dates. Once you publish the survey, it will be 'active', and you can add participants to it as they join your organisation.

To close or end an onboarding survey:

1. Go to Surveys.
2. Find your onboarding survey.
3. Select the three dots on the survey card.
4. Select Close and then Continue.

Step 2: Settings

Enable AI for reporting

This feature gives you access to time-saving AI features in your survey reports like:

• a summary of the overall survey results
• automatic topic and sentiment assignment for free-text responses
• question and topic summaries for free-text responses
• suggested actions based on areas identified as needing some work.

When you Enable AI for reporting for an ongoing survey, you will also be asked to specify a reporting period. Suggested actions, AI summaries for the Insights Dashboard and the Text Analysis Report need to be generated periodically. They won't be updated as soon as a new response comes in. So you'll need to choose how frequently you'd like to generate them.

When new summaries are generated, the Survey Creator and Survey Administrators will be notified by email.

Enable ongoing survey mode

Toggle on this feature to get access to an extra report, the Over Time Report.

Privacy settings

Onboarding surveys are anonymous by default and your organisation's minimum report threshold will apply. However, this can be changed.

If you'd like to see individual responses, toggle off Apply default survey threshold. This action will notify participants before they begin that their names will be linked to their responses.

You may choose to use this feature if you want the participant to complete the survey and have their feedback discussed in a face-to-face meeting.

Step 3: Questions

No change.

Step 4: Demographics

No change.

Step 5: Participants

You can choose to toggle on Automatically add participants.

If you've added the employee's start date in the participant library before their first day, this will automatically add them to the survey and send them an invitation.

If you leave it toggled off, you can manually add employees to the survey from your participant library. When the time criteria is met (like 1 week from their start date), the invitation will be sent out.

Take a look at our onboarding survey timeline for more details on the sequence of activity.

Step 6: Communications

Survey reminders

You'll be asked if you'd like to send reminders to participants to complete the survey.

For onboarding surveys, these reminder emails are sent based on the Invitation send period selected during the Survey Information step.

The reminder options are:

• 3 days after the survey invitation is sent
• 5 days after the survey invitation is sent
• 1 week after the survey invitation is sent
• 2 weeks after the survey invitation is sent
• 1 month after the survey invitation is sent

Step 7: Overview & Publish

There is no pending state for Onboarding and Offboarding surveys. When you publish your survey, it will go live immediately.

How to compare results over time

Repeating onboarding surveys at 1, 3, 6 or 12 months gives you the ability to compare new employees' experience over time. For example, you can explore how their experiences, expectations and intention to stay changes.

To compare feedback over time:

1. Decide which intervals you would like to ask new employees for feedback. For example, 3, 6 and 12 months.
2. Create a survey for each of the intervals.
3. When you have enough feedback to meet the report threshold in at least two surveys, select Compare from the left menu.
4. Select the two surveys you'd like to compare.