Moving the ‘Employee Onboarding Process’ to ‘Everboarding’
- Kartikay Kashyap
- September 26, 2023
Everboarding, a holistic employee onboarding process, focuses on continuous learning, feedback, career progression, and cultural integration.
The employee onboarding process has been in place for years. Over time, as businesses evolved, the need for robust employee onboarding increased. With the advancement in processes and technology, many organizations improved their onboarding techniques for better results. But today’s onboarding techniques still have flaws. The most common is that most onboarding processes are static and do not have a continuous motion. To meet this adversity, the future of onboarding is here, Everboarding!
What is Everboarding, and why do you need it?
Everboarding is a more evolved method of preparing new employees for their roles. A traditional employee onboarding process is static. It generally lasts for three to six months at best. This gave rise to the need for Everboarding.
It’s a process that follows a continuous learning approach and is more personalized where the learning content is spread over time, which helps the employee to retain knowledge better.
Hermann Ebbinghaus, the German Psychologist who gave the forgetting curve, explained that humans tend to forget 70% of knowledge within 24 hours and 90% in a week if the individual does not try to retain the knowledge.
Everboarding will help the employees to learn and practice their newly learned skills in real-time continuously. Moreover, it helps deliver personalized content, which will train the new employee much better than the traditional onboarding process.
How to implement the Everboarding strategy?
To implement Everboarding effectively, certain elements and procedures need to be followed to overhaul your current organization’s onboarding system. Before getting into the implementation, understanding the elements that aid in transforming employee onboarding process is crucial.
Elements of Everboarding
One of the critical elements of Everboarding is continuous learning. Companies will need tools and resources which foster a constant learning and development environment. These resources will include online courses, workshops, mentorship programs, and internal resources.Employers will have to invest in various technologies, such as e-learning and microlearning solutions which will help employees to stay relevant in their roles and contribute more to the company’s growth.
Another significant element of everboarding is regular feedback on performance and having a coaching mindset. In addition to having a robust learning environment, it will be essential to cultivate a coaching mindset. Discussions over performance help employees stay aligned with their goals and further grow and expand their expertise in the given role. It also helps in building a career path for the employee.
Suggested Read: Retaining what is learned during employee onboarding
All employees want to grow in their careers. Especially the employees below 30 are going through the development stage. They aspire for more learning which will help in career advancement. Employees want to discuss career aspirations, identify opportunities for growth within the organization, and support employees in their professional development. It will help employees take ownership of their work and contribute to further growth.
Transforming the current onboarding system into an everboarding approach requires a mindset and cultural shift to ongoing learning and career advancement. The company will have to live the values and behaviors which support continuous learning and a feedback system.
Implementation of Everboarding
Most companies will already have an employee onboarding process in place. All we need to do is assess the existing processes and techniques and evaluate where do need to plug in the elements of the ‘Everboarding’ approach. Update materials, resources, and training programs to align with the everboarding approach. Since everboarding is a continuous process, companies will need to update their learning resources and activities to align with a continuous process approach. For instance, we must transform when and how we deliver the learning content. It is also advisable to have learning and development platforms such as a Learning Management System (LMS), which supports a continuous form of learning where HRs and employees can track learning progress and drive a continuous feedback system.
Fostering a culture of learning in the organization is essential. Making all the tools and resources accessible for learning is one part of creating a culture of learning. Still, it is necessary to encourage employees and their managers to have learning and development conversations. Discussions regarding continuous growth and talent development are essential to creating a culture supporting the organization’s learning. Moreover, we need to encourage collaboration, open communication, and employee well-being, which lead to more learning in the organization. Cross-functional collaboration and team-building activities will help create a positive culture promoting learning.
Since Everboarding emphasizes continuous learning and a continuous feedback system, we need to build a feedback framework where managers can witness the learning progress of the new employee and share knowledge and feedback with the individual. This will allow the employee to grow faster in the organization and become a useful asset for the company.
Defining a career path for the employee is important to transform from traditional employee onboarding process to everboarding. There has to be a constant dialogue between the employee and the manager. The HRs will need to create more opportunities for newly hired employees to access direct coaching and mentorship opportunities where ways and paths to success in the organization are being discussed.
As per many surveys and research, talent will become a defining factor in the organization’s success. Skills and talent give an edge to the organization. What was the defining factor in the success of innovative companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft? Their people. These companies have continuously invested in people practices that foster turning them into a resource that ensures success and innovation.
Everboarding ensures continuous learning, feedback, career progression, and cultural integration, which further increases people’s retention and productivity as they enter the organization’s system.
