As a whole, the onboarding process exists to evaluate whether a new hire and the organization they’ve just joined is a good fit, as well as helping them acclimate to their new workplace and responsibilities.
The question is:
How does one evaluate the onboarding process itself?
How can a company identify the parts of its onboarding program that are doing more harm than good?
While conducting an employee onboarding survey is the best way to measure the effectiveness of an onboarding program it is also crucial to make sure the surveys being sent out are:
- Easy to complete
- In the flow of work
- Can be analyzed efficiently
To make sure your onboarding surveys tick these boxes, this blog post will show you how you can conduct surveys with your new hires inside the best communication and collaboration platform for work: Microsoft Teams!
Table of Contents
The Purpose of Employee Onboarding Surveys
The primary purpose of onboarding surveys is to understand how well new employees are acclimating to their roles and to identify any areas that may require improvement. By gauging the new hire onboarding experience, organizations can reap the following benefits:
- Enhancing the New Hire Experience: By collecting feedback on the onboarding process, organizations can make necessary adjustments to ensure new hires feel welcomed, supported, and well-prepared for their roles.
- Identifying Areas for Improvement: Onboarding surveys can highlight specific aspects of the process that may be lacking or need refinement, allowing HR teams to make targeted improvements.
- Ensuring Alignment with Company Values and Goals: Surveys help ensure that the onboarding process aligns with the company’s culture and strategic objectives, fostering a sense of belonging and purpose among new hires.
- Facilitating Continuous Improvement: Regularly collecting and analyzing feedback from onboarding surveys enables organizations to continuously enhance their onboarding practices, making them more effective over time.
Optimal Frequency for Onboarding Surveys
While the question of “What is the right frequency for onboarding surveys?” is a valid one, it is also a question that clearly depends on the organizational culture, their approach to the onboarding process, and specifically, the length of the employee onboarding period in question. Afterall, each organization has a slightly different employee onboarding checklist.
That being said, a relatively common practice is to conduct onboarding surveys at the following intervals:
1. Initial Survey: First Week
It helps capture immediate impressions and address any early challenges.
2. Follow-Up Survey: First Month
Its main purpose is to evaluate how well new hires are settling into their roles and identify any ongoing issues.
3. Mid-Point Survey: 60 Days
Used in tracking ongoing progress and addressing new challenges that may have emerged.
4. Comprehensive Survey: 90 Days
Serves as a proxy to onboarding reviews and helps obtain a holistic view of the new hire’s experience and identify areas for long-term improvement.
Why Conduct Onboarding Surveys Over Microsoft Teams?
So what makes Microsoft Teams the right platform for your surveys? Regardless of its purpose and nature, surveys need to be conducted in an environment where your team communicates with each other during their day-to-day operations.
The most important metric for a successful survey is its response rate.
When you conduct surveys inside a centralized communication and collaboration hub that your team uses on a regular basis, you are guaranteeing a much higher survey completion rate.
Another reason is the fact that Microsoft Teams can be fully customized and enhanced with third-party apps. While Microsoft Teams has relatively lackluster survey capabilities on its own, it can seamlessly integrate with the right survey tool to offer the best possible experience.
In this post, we will show you how you can use the highest-rated employee onboarding application in the Microsoft Teams App Store, Teamflect, to conduct your employee onboarding surveys without ever having to leave Teams.
Step 1: A Survey App for Microsoft Teams – Teamflect
In order to start conducting surveys inside Microsoft Teams right away, all you have to do is look for the Teamflect app inside the Microsoft Teams App Store.
Since you can log in to the app using your Microsoft Account, you won’t need to sign up, create an account, or put any payment information in.
You’ll also be glad to know that Teamflect automatically accesses your organizational chart through Entra ID, the same way Microsoft Teams does, having all your employees’ information readily available inside the app.
Step 2: Select and Automate Survey Template
Teamflect has an extensive library of survey templates available for every possible scenario in mind. These templates can be used as they are, or they can be fully customized. Users can also simply create survey templates of their own.
Onboarding surveys inside Microsoft Teams can be conducted in two separate ways: Manually or Automated.
In order to conduct an onboarding survey manually, all you have to do is:
- Access the Surveys Module.
- Select the Onboarding Survey Template
- Select Respondents
- Send the Survey Out
The objective best practice however is to automate these surveys to be conducted automatically, at intervals of your choice, or simply after a certain number of days into a new hire’s employment.
Depending on your organization’s approach to the onboarding process, you can submit select the right onboarding survey automation scenario for you.
Whether you choose to automate your surveys periodically or go with the “New hire automation” scenario, you will be providing your team with a more structured onboarding experience that saves time and mitigates the risk of making mistakes.
As opposed to manually sending a survey out every single time, you will have an automated onboarding survey system you will only set up once.
Step 3: New Hires Complete Surveys
Once a survey has been sent out, new hires receive notifications to complete them. Pulse surveys are sent out in the form of adaptive cards inside Microsoft Teams chat and they can be filled out right then and there.
This level of simplicity is what ensures high survey completion rates. Regardless of the platform you are using or the type of survey you are conducting, the entire process should be in the flow of work and easily accessible.
Step 4: Analyze Survey Results
Once surveys have been completed, people leaders can analyze survey results with ease. They also have the option to “Generate a Report with AI”.
This AI report helps individuals analyze surveys that have been sent out to large numbers, providing them with actionable insights in a matter of seconds.
If there is more than one iteration of the same survey, the AI-generated reports feature can also compare the latter surveys with previous ones.
Ready to Conduct Onboarding Surveys in Microsoft Teams?
Utilizing platforms like Microsoft Teams to conduct these surveys ensures a seamless, integrated, and efficient approach, ultimately leading to higher employee satisfaction and retention. If you are curious about trying Teamflect for your onboarding process or performance management in general, you can start exploring the platform for free, today!
