Offboarding surveys

Offboarding is the process of transitioning employees out of an organisation, regardless of whether they are leaving for voluntary, involuntary or retirement reasons. 

An offboarding survey is often a key part of this process:

• giving employees a chance to share their thoughts
• providing organisations with more context around the reason(s) for leaving
• helping to identify any issues that impact retention and might need urgent attention.

Our offboarding survey is designed to be ongoing or "always on". So you can add new participants as soon as their end date is confirmed, and they'll automatically be sent an invitation at the time you select (e.g. 7 days before their end date).

To create an offboarding 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 offboarding 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 14, 7, 5, 3 or 1 day before their end date.

Example: New employee Joe Smith's start date is 20/04/2024 and the invitation send period is set for 14 days before their last day day. Joe would receive the invitation on 06/04/2024.

Start and end dates

You won't see this field for offboarding 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 offboarding survey:

1. Go to Surveys.
2. Find your offboarding 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

Offboarding 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

The offboarding survey has a unique structure, with questions arranged into 3 groups:

1. Reasons for leaving: This contains a multi-choice and free-text question. These will always appear first and in a set order.
2. Agree-Disagree scale questions: Up to 30 questions that will show in a randomised order.
3. Free-text questions: Up to 6 questions that will always appear at the end of the survey in a set order.

Step 4: Demographics

No change.

Step 5: Participants

You can choose to toggle on Automatically add participants.

If you've added the employee's end date to your participant library before the invitation send out period, this will automatically add them to the survey. When the time criteria is met (e.g. 7 days from their end date), an invitation will be sent out.

If you leave it toggled off, you can manually add employees to the survey from your participant library. When the time criteria is met, the invitation will be sent out.

Take a look at our offboarding 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 offboarding surveys, these reminder emails are sent based on the Invitation send period selected during the Survey Information step.

The reminder options are:

• 5 days before their end date
• 3 days before their end date
• 1 day before their end date
• on their last day.

Step 7: Overview & Publish

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