Employee Lifecycle Survey Types, Solutions, & Best Practices

Are you curious about the stages your employees go through in your company?

An effective way to learn more about this is through conducting employee lifecycle surveys. This market research method gathers employee feedback about the different stages of their employment.

Using the feedback, you'll gain a better understanding of your employee's experience at work.

Keep reading to learn more about the employee lifecycle and why it's so important!


How We Approach Employee Lifecycle Surveys

Our third-party employee survey company will work with you to create a suitable lifecycle survey for your team based on specific details.

We also suggest that you run more than just one employee lifecycle survey. While a single survey will certainly provide you with good data, it's far more helpful to run them on a regular basis to track changes over time.

For instance, your employees will likely have different feedback a year from when you run the first lifecycle survey. If your company never runs another one, you will miss out on important employee trends and changes.

By running these surveys at least semi-regularly, you can keep up with these important shifts within your company.


Why Is the Employee Lifecycle Important?

 Measuring the employee lifecycle at your company can ultimately have a positive impact on staff engagement levels. In fact, only 33% of employees are engaged in their job.

By measuring lifecycle, you will get an inside look at how staff view working at your company throughout each stage of their employment.

For instance, it's unlikely a new employee's opinions and views of their role will be the same in one year, two years, and so on.

After gathering this type of feedback, you can improve different aspects of the employee experience, like job satisfaction levels, overall well-being, and much more. Over time, these improvements can lead to higher engagement rates.


Types Of Employee Lifecycle Surveys

Measuring employee lifecycle can be done with a wide variety of online surveys. Below, we'll go over each of these survey types. 

Recruiting Surveys

Recruiting surveys will help you understand how effective your hiring process is.

Often this type of lifecycle survey will gather feedback from all candidates (whether successful or not) to get a well-rounded view of the process. In doing so, you will receive actionable feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of recruitment strategies.

Additionally, recruiting surveys will gather information on...

  • Candidate experience
  • Application process
  • Interviews
  • Final selection process

By measuring these processes, your company can refine the hiring process to draw in top-notch candidates.


Onboarding/New Employee Survey

Typically, onboarding/new employee surveys will ask employees about their first experiences at your company. 

This type of survey will review job role overviews, what the orientation programs are like, and how much support your new hires receive. Additionally, this feedback can help you pinpoint the gaps in your onboarding process (if there are any) and make it smoother for new hires. 

The key benefit here? A better onboarding experience can significantly raise employee experience levels and boost their satisfaction as they work at your company.


Training Surveys

Conducting training surveys is key to understanding the performance of employee programs within a workplace. 

Through these surveys, you will be able to learn more about how employees interact with the training material, the best delivery methods, and their overall satisfaction with the programs. 

Using this employee feedback, you can make the necessary adjustments to create a better training system for employees. This will not only be good for satisfaction levels, but it will also help employees engage with the training content in a deeper way.


Review Surveys

Review surveys cover the effectiveness of performance evaluations. They cover topics like fairness and clarity of different performance criteria, along with other key aspects such as the feedback provided during the evaluation.

Using the feedback, you can enhance these evaluations, ensuring they are a positive experience for everyone involved. This can have a direct impact on workplace culture and also boost staff satisfaction levels.


Self-Assessment Surveys

Used to help employees evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses, self-assessment surveys play a key role in the monitoring lifecycle. 

Aside from gathering staff feedback about their performance, these surveys also help employees gain perspective about their future at your company. 

Additionally, these surveys should be woven into your performance review process. This move will also help management teams partner with staff to create personalized plans to get ahead within your company, and can even help with future training programs.


Anniversary Surveys

Anniversary surveys are just as they sound: they're given to your employees who have hit specific milestones (one-year marks, five-year marks, etc.).

These are useful in better understanding the impact of your workplace on employees. The feedback will also aid in improving employee satisfaction and engagement initiatives within your company.

What's more, these surveys will reveal changes in how employees feel about their jobs over a longer period of time. This is incredibly useful for any kind of employee retention strategy, as it's a direct way to measure their commitment.


Engagement Surveys

Great for measuring overall satisfaction, engagement surveys are another useful method that goes into employee lifecycle research.

Usually, these surveys will review:

  • Job satisfaction levels
  • Stance on company values
  • Effectiveness of current communication methods

The feedback from engagement surveys can be used in many ways, from creating strategies to boost staff morale to helping enhance productivity levels. Ultimately, engagement surveys are essential to creating a high-performing, healthy work environment.


Exit Surveys

Conducting exit surveys provides you with feedback on why employees left your company.

Questions in these surveys revolve around reasons for leaving, management quality, benefits, overall experience, and other related topics.

By conducting these surveys, you can understand the reasons why employees leave your company. Using this feedback, you will be able to correct issues leading to employee attrition by making decisions based on actual data.


Avoid Survey Burnout

Survey burnout is real! 

This term refers to when too many surveys are sent out to employees in a short amount of time. The more this happens, the less likely employees will be to take the surveys. 

To avoid this, create a plan for how often you want to gather feedback. This can be quarterly or even monthly - it all depends on the needs of your company and most importantly, the needs of your employees. 

By implementing a plan, you will be able to gather the proper amount of feedback without overwhelming your staff.


Use Different Scoring

Scoring systems like net promoter score (NPS) provide insight on if employees are likely to recommend working at your company.

This is an incredibly useful metric, as the feedback can be used to address existing issues in the workplace (ultimately making it a more attractive place to work for job seekers).

Respondents will be grouped into promoters, passives, and detractors. Promoters will highly recommend their workplace, passives are somewhat less enthusiastic, and detractors will not recommend their workplace.

Aside from NPS, other scoring methods include measuring employee satisfaction and engagement levels. Piecing all of this data together, you will get a better idea of how employees view working at your company.


What To Look For In An Employee Lifecycle Survey Partner

When working with an employee lifecycle survey partner like Drive Research, there are a few attributes to factor in.

Customizable survey options: Every business has its own unique set of needs. It's important that your survey partner is able to provide customizable survey options, ensuring you get feedback specific to your employees. This is done by creating thoughtful, relevant questions that encourage good responses.

Confidentiality: Employees are more likely to provide accurate feedback when they know it will not be traced back to them. Often, this stems from a fear of retaliation from the company should they provide negative feedback. It's important to ensure employees that the survey is anonymous to promote transparent responses.

Quality feedback: A dedicated survey team will be able to properly clean the survey feedback, providing only the best responses. They will keep an eye out for errors in the feedback that may indicate quick completion times and other common issues.


Contact Our Employee Satisfaction Company

Creating an effective employee lifecycle survey will provide incredibly useful insights into every stage of their employment. Our team will work with you to create a survey specific to your needs so you can create an optimal work environment for staff.

To learn more about our market research services, get in touch with us today.

  1. Message us on our website
  2. Email us at [email protected]
  3. Call us at 888-725-DATA
  4. Text us at 315-303-2040

lark-allen-drive-research-aboutheauthor

Lark Allen

As a Content Marketing Specialist, Lark has a strong background and passion for creative, professional, and journalistic writing. She is also a self-proclaimed music freak and 90s enthusiast.

Learn more about Lark, here.


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