Onboarding Buddy Feedback Survey

Use it with new hires who were assigned an onboarding buddy during their first weeks or months. It is especially useful for HR, People Ops, and managers who want to evaluate whether the buddy program is actually helping people integrate. If you do not have a formal buddy program, this template can still work as a lightweight check on informal peer support.

Send it after the new hire has had enough time to interact with the buddy meaningfully, often near the end of the first 30, 60, or 90 days. The right cadence depends on how active the buddy relationship is and how long onboarding lasts. If the survey is sent too early, you will measure first impressions instead of real support.

This template focuses specifically on the buddy relationship: reachability, practical help, confidence, belonging, and whether expectations were clear. That makes it better for diagnosing problems in the buddy program itself rather than onboarding overall. It also includes follow-up prompts that help you understand why a rating was low.

Yes, anonymity should be the default for employee feedback unless there is a clear reason to identify respondents. New hires are more likely to give honest feedback about a buddy relationship when they trust their answers will not be tied back to them. If you need identifiable responses for follow-up, make that choice explicit and separate it from the survey content.

A common mistake is asking only whether the buddy was 'good' without separating practical support, belonging, and clarity of expectations. Another is skipping open-ended follow-ups on low ratings, which leaves you with scores but no explanation. It is also a mistake to collect demographic questions before the survey content, because that can reduce trust and response quality.

You can tailor the wording to match the new hire's context, such as engineering, sales, operations, or remote onboarding. Keep the core questions about reachability, guidance, and integration, but adjust the examples of 'people, tools, and processes' to fit the role. If your buddy program has a formal checklist, you can add one question about whether that checklist was followed.

Yes, it works well as a focused module within a broader onboarding survey program. It can be paired with onboarding check-ins, manager feedback, or HRIS workflows that trigger surveys at set milestones. Keep the buddy survey short so it does not compete with other onboarding feedback requests.

Look for patterns in the ratings and the open-ended comments, especially where new hires say the buddy was hard to reach, expectations were unclear, or contact was too little or too much. Those findings usually point to fixes in buddy selection, training, cadence, or manager oversight. The goal is to change the program design, not just collect sentiment.