This blog will explore the concept of everboarding, its benefits, and how your organization can make the shift from traditional training to an ongoing learning model.
You’ll also discover how Spekit, a leading just-in-time learning platform, can simplify your journey to higher employee performance and productivity.
How we learn at work is evolving
The world of work is changing in ways few of us anticipated. And these transformations are changing the way we learn at work.
Organizations are shifting how they hire, build, and grow high-performing teams. Given the effects of the shift to remote work and The Great Resignation, employee development and continuous learning are now at the forefront of HR priorities. But most employees can no longer turn to their co-workers for tribal knowledge. Or sit in classroom-type environments as they onboard. Without this kind of 1:1 support, new employees are struggling to ramp quickly and become highly productive.
And when an employee doesn’t feel successful, they are more likely to leave.
Recent Gallup research found that replacing an employee costs one to two times more than the employee’s annual salary. With smaller budgets, it’s more important than ever for organizations to onboard new hires quickly and to help employees be efficient and productive throughout the course of their employment. By ensuring employees can be successful, employers are also increasing employee satisfaction and loyalty. Enter everboarding.
But first, let’s take a closer look at what everboarding means.
What is everboarding, and why has it grown in popularity?
Definition of everboarding
Everboarding is an ongoing learning approach that keeps employees engaged and informed as they navigate their roles within an organization.
Unlike traditional onboarding, which focuses on getting new employees up to speed in a limited timeframe, everboarding recognizes that learning doesn’t stop there.
Instead, everboarding emphasizes that employees continually develop their skills and knowledge to stay current with industry trends, organizational changes, and evolving job requirements.
The growing popularity of everboarding is due to:
- The rapid pace of change: Now, more than ever, companies must be agile and adaptable. Everboarding supports this by ensuring employees have the latest knowledge and skills to do their jobs and grow into (and beyond) their roles.
- Employee expectations: Modern employees expect continuous learning opportunities as part of their employment experience. Everboarding helps organizations meet these expectations while promoting employee satisfaction and retention.
- Workforce agility: By fostering a culture of continuous learning, everboarding empowers employees to adapt quickly to changes in their roles and teams. In other words, it makes them more receptive to change and equips them with the tools to manage it better.
Continuous learning and the science behind everboarding
Everboarding recognizes that learning doesn’t stop
A single exposure to new information may not be enough for long-term knowledge retention. Newly acquired knowledge must be maintained to produce enduring changes in competence.
To understand why continuous learning matters, let’s look at how we learn and why we forget.
Here are three concepts to keep in mind when considering everboarding:
- Cognitive load: Learning new information can drain an individual’s cognitive resources. By breaking content into smaller, more manageable chunks and providing ongoing learning opportunities, everboarding reduces cognitive load and makes it easier for employees to absorb and retain new knowledge.
- Hybrid learning: Everboarding often incorporates various learning methods, such as online resources, workshops, mentorship, and peer-to-peer learning. This hybrid approach caters to different learning styles, ensuring all employees have the tools and resources they need to succeed.
- The forgetting curve: Research shows that people forget information over time if it is not reinforced. The forgetting curve illustrates this phenomenon, revealing that knowledge retention declines rapidly without repetition. Everboarding provides ongoing learning opportunities that reinforce key concepts, helping employees retain information more effectively.
By understanding and leveraging these concepts, everboarding offers a comprehensive approach to employee development — one that recognizes the importance of continuous learning and the need for agility in today’s fast-moving organizations and markets.
How to shift from traditional onboarding and training to everboarding
Onboarding has long been the cornerstone for successfully integrating new employees into a company, but what happens after the initial process is complete?
Today, ongoing training is vital to maintaining a knowledgeable, skilled, and adaptable workforce. This is where everboarding — the seamless combination of onboarding and continuous learning — comes in.
When you adopt an everboarding approach, you can ensure your employees are constantly growing and evolving.
5 steps to embracing everboarding at your organization
Here, we spell out our best practices to shift to everboarding by sharing actionable tips on delivering contextual, simple, and measurable microlearning experiences at every stage of an employee’s work journey.
1. Start with onboarding: building a strong foundation
The shift to everboarding begins with a solid onboarding program.
Onboarding lays the groundwork for successful employee integration and establishes the framework for future learning.
To ensure your onboarding process is comprehensive and interactive, address everything from company culture and values to role-specific training. A strong foundation will pave the way for the continuous learning culture that follows.
2. Integrate learning into the flow of work
To shift to everboarding, you should incorporate learning opportunities into your employees’ natural workflows. This makes learning an integral part of their daily routine rather than an isolated event that occurs sporadically.
Embed training content and resources within frequently used applications, tools, and platforms to make information and support easily accessible.
See Spekit integrations and extensions>
3. Create contextual learning experiences
Everboarding is most effective when learning happens in a context relevant to the employee’s role and responsibilities.
Offer training materials and resources that are tailored to the specific needs of each team or department. Consider the unique challenges of those roles and design content that helps employees bridge those knowledge gaps.
By delivering contextual learning experiences, employees can immediately apply what they’ve learned to their work, reinforcing that knowledge and saving time, thereby boosting their productivity.
4. Simplify content with bite-sized learning
One of the keys to successful everboarding is making learning easy and manageable.
Instead of overwhelming employees with lengthy training modules, Spekit breaks content into smaller, digestible pieces. This approach, often referred to as microlearning, allows employees to absorb information more effectively and apply it quickly.
Focus on creating concise, engaging content that doesn’t interfere with employees’ work and reduces friction by having them move between tools.
See 7+ Best Microlearning Platforms>
5. Measure progress and identify knowledge gaps
Monitor employee progress and measure the impact of your training efforts to see if your everboarding program is working.
Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress and identify areas that may require improvement. Some examples of everboarding KPIs include:
- Employee engagement and satisfaction levels
- Time to competency or proficiency
- Retention and attrition rates
- Productivity metrics such as task completion time or error rates
You can implement regular assessments, quizzes, and feedback sessions to gauge understanding and identify knowledge gaps.
11 Must-Measure Sales Enablement Metrics >
By pinpointing areas where employees are struggling or falling behind, you can adjust your training materials and resources, ultimately maximizing the impact of your everboarding program.
How to empower employees with Spekit everboarding
With the growing complexity of modern tools and software, it’s crucial to ensure that every employee understands how to use these platforms efficiently. One such tool is Salesforce, which plays a critical role in company strategy and employee success.
Spekit, a simple yet powerful just-in-time learning platform, helps you create an everboarding program that maximizes the potential of Salesforce for each team member.
Let’s explore how.
Harnessing the power of Spotlights and Speks
An essential aspect of any everboarding plan is guiding new employees through their initial experience with a tool like Salesforce.
Spekit uses Spotlights — in-app notifications — to introduce users to the platform and direct them to relevant resources.
As they explore Salesforce, employees will encounter Speks — bite-sized resources that provide assistance and guidance for specific tasks.
Speks are available during onboarding and for refresher learning, as employees can search for them whenever they need reminders about common Salesforce actions.
Customizable out-of-the-box templates
Spekit offers customizable out-of-the-box templates to streamline the learning process for first-time Salesforce users. These templates can be marked as “Read” by the employee, allowing them to track their onboarding progress and easily refer back to these resources when needed.
Teaching employees the full potential of Salesforce
An effective everboarding plan will also teach employees how to use Salesforce’s features to their advantage.
For example, Spekit can guide users through creating their own List Views for marketing campaigns or trade show follow-ups. Speks are available throughout this process to ensure employees fully understand each step.
Everboarding with Flows
To enhance the everboarding experience further, Spekit offers Flows — step-by-step click paths built on top of Salesforce.
Flows, along with Speks, can guide users through processes such as opportunity creation, ensuring that employees understand naming conventions and essential data capture points.
The best part? All these features require no coding or JQuery knowledge to create and maintain, making it easy for organizations to design and launch effective everboarding programs.
By harnessing the power of Spekit’s features, such as Spotlights, Speks, customizable out-of-the-box templates, and Flows, you can create an everboarding program that maximizes the potential of Salesforce for each team member.
With the right strategy and tools in place, you can transform your onboarding process and ensure that every employee becomes your best employee.
Everboarding helps with retention too
Giving people the tools they need to succeed and encourage learning results in up to 50% higher engagement and retention rates. And with US companies spending $160 billion on employee learning and training each year, learning that doesn’t stick is essentially throwing your budget away.
That’s why investing in everboarding and microlearning is critical to making sure the dollars spent on training deliver ROI and help your people be happier and better at their jobs.
For a deep dive, read the eBook
Success stories and case studies: Everboarding in action
Hobson’s: Ed-tech & everboarding
Hobsons, an education technology company with over 400 employees, faced the challenge of rolling out Salesforce to a fast-growing, remote team while driving adoption and maintaining productivity.
As the company prepared to migrate from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning, it recognized a need to improve knowledge retention, reduce support tickets, and drive Salesforce adoption.
To tackle these challenges, Hobsons turned to Spekit to enhance everboarding experiences and streamline training processes. The result was a substantial improvement in knowledge retention, a reduction in support tickets of 35%, and increased overall Salesforce usage among employees.
Todd Tribble, Vice President of Sales Operations and Enablement at Hobsons, credits Spekit’s accessibility, adoption, and scalability for addressing the company’s top three training challenges, specifically:
- Disseminating information
- Maintaining high retention rates from initial training to adoption
- Finding a training solution that scales with their business
Get Hobson’s full everboarding story >
Copado: DevOps & everboarding
Copado, a company specializing in end-to-end native DevOps solutions, needed to overcome challenges related to system training and onboarding new hires, especially as the workforce transitioned to remote work during the pandemic.
They aimed to shorten the onboarding process to less than 90 days, and with Spekit, they achieved their goal. Using Spekit, Copado was able to centralize their enablement documentation and support self-driven onboarding, resulting in quicker and more efficient training for new remote hires globally.
As a result, Copado has significantly reduced the time employees spend searching for content, and the onboarding process for new hires now takes 90 days or less.
Read the full Copado everboarding story >
Arterys: Health tech & everboarding
Arterys, a company transforming medical imaging through its automated and intelligent diagnostic platform, faced a significant challenge in effectively communicating real-time knowledge to its remote workforce.
Sales Operations Manager Michael Lonsinger adopted Spekit to transition from static documents to a cross-platform, contextual knowledge base. The implementation enabled sales reps to access the latest information effortlessly, leading to a 50% decrease in time spent onboarding new sales reps.
Learn how Arterys decreased onboarding time by 50% >
Start your everboarding journey with Spekit today
Spekit is an incredibly powerful tool that helps organizations create an everboarding program designed to make every employee their best employee.
It does this through a combination of in-app notifications like Spotlights and Flows and bite-sized resources called Speks, which guide users through their learning journeys and workflows.
Spekit’s features enable employees to learn and understand the full potential of Salesforce and other applications, ensuring they can efficiently leverage the platforms to drive results.
Plus, the platform’s analytics, out-of-the-box templates, and customizable learning resources make onboarding and refresher learning seamless.
By adopting an everboarding strategy with Spekit, organizations can effectively onboard new hires, improve Salesforce adoption, and empower employees with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their roles.
Ready to improve onboarding and learning at your business?
Chat with us today to learn how we can help you seamlessly integrate everboarding into your organization.
👉 Schedule a demo of Spekit today
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