Everboarding: it’s not a new concept, but plenty tout it as one.
Most everboarding content online today describes it as a ‘new generation approach’ to employee onboarding, and a silver bullet for common problems like worker engagement and retention.
Here’s the thing. It’s not - because it’s not new.
That said, we’re not saying everboarding should be disregarded. Far from it. The only new thing about the concept is its name, or how it's being packaged. It’s still an incredibly effective framework for approaching training organizationally - and applying this framework to your own training initiative can transform its impact (for the best).
In this article, we’ll be covering what everboarding is and why it’s important, particularly if part or all of your workforce is made up of frontline workers. We’ll then move on to what an everboarding approach could look like at your business.
Jump straight in:
- What is everboarding?
- Why is everboarding important for frontline workers?
- The 3 stages of an everboarding framework: preboarding
- The 3 stages of an everboarding framework: onboarding
- The 3 stages of an everboarding framework: continuous learning
Ready? Let’s get into it.
What is everboarding?
First things first: what’s the definition of everboarding?
Everboarding is an attitude to employee training. Adopt an everboarding mindset, and your perception of training and learning will transform from something that happens reactively or sporadically to something that happens all the time.
In other words, you’ll be taking an approach that recognizes training in a business context - learning about the company, its products and processes, its clients, how to do a job well - as something constant, rather than a finite process with a set start and finish date.
An everboarding framework can be built around this training philosophy, and split into three main areas: preboarding, onboarding, and continuous learning. More on that in a moment. For now, keep in mind that everboarding is an approach all organizations should take. It’s not, as some say, the training practice of the future. It’s the training practice of now.
Everboarding and its place on the frontline
Adopting an everboarding approach to worker learning is particularly helpful when your workforce is partially or completely made up of frontline workers.
A typical office-based employee often has more opportunities for learning baked into their tenure. Think compulsory company-wide training or a personal L&D budget, as well as the learning by osmosis that occurs when you’re in an office or in a team Slack channel. The same can’t be said for frontline employees, who often work alone in varied locations.
The risk here is that frontline employees have fewer opportunities for learning that are relevant to their role - which is where everboarding comes in. Everboarding is a consistent, continual approach to employee training at an organizational level, starting from before their first day and lasting for their entire tenure at the business. The immediate impact of consistent, quality training is that employees remember more of what they’ve learned - which means they can execute better and perform at a safer, more efficient level.
At the same time, provision of high-quality, frequent training that employees enjoy shapes their perception of your organization as one that positively invests in them. In other words, it’s a differentiator for your employer value proposition, too.
When you aim for your employees to be continuously learning, you’re also paving the way for true knowledge retention. Retaining knowledge is the commitment of information to our long-term memory store, as opposed to the short term. This ability is important for all employees - otherwise, nobody would be doing their jobs well - but particularly so for frontline workers, who are often paid based on the speed at which they can precisely perform a repetitive task. If they regularly make mistakes or forget how to do something it’s going to cost them. The same can’t be said of an office-based employee.
Everboarding also helps with creating a personalized learning experience for every employee. Frontline workers consider training that is ‘relevant to me’ to be a key component of quality education. Personalize your employee training, and you’re able to deliver learning experiences appropriate to where each person is at. For example, someone who hasn’t started should be learning differently from someone who has been with a business for a year.
Take an everboarding approach, and you’ll positively reinforce not only knowledge retention but learning enjoyment too. The results? Workers that are more engaged and stick around for longer.
Now we know what everboarding is and why the approach works for frontline workers, let’s take a look at the three stages of an everboarding framework.
The three stages of an everboarding framework
We can split an everboarding framework into three stages: what happens before your worker joins, when your worker joins, and after they’ve passed the stage of ‘new employee’.
Preboarding
20% of new hires leave their role within the first 45 days of employment. That’s not a lot of time to make a good impression and get them engaged - and what a lot of employers don’t do is make use of the time before they start working.
As a result, employees either start off on the back foot, which makes them more likely to churn, or don’t show up at all. And with each new employee in the US costing an average of $4000, no-shows are an expensive problem to have. In fact, 39% of companies with frontline workers list turnover as their biggest problem today.
With hiring named as the second biggest area of focus for frontline leaders over the next five years, disregarding first impressions simply doesn’t make sense. Doing so is a missed opportunity for those in charge of the hiring process.
This is where preboarding comes in. Preboarding is a learning experience that happens in the period of time between an employee accepting a job offer, and their first day. You can think of preboarding as a subsection of the onboarding process.
The key here for employers is establishing an emotional connection with your business, and starting to build trust and loyalty. Signing contracts and exchanging emails may be a part of preboarding, sure, but it’s not what’s going to get a new employee excited and engaged - particularly for those hiring frontline workers, who can’t always use meeting the team and manager 1:1s to fulfil this role.
It may not be possible to give each new employee a personalized preboarding experience, but you can stay in touch before they start. Communicate your culture via extra touchpoints with information about teammates, first day expectations, a site map, or how their role is essential to your brand's mission.
The best way to share this information is within the flow of hiring - which could be executed by integrating visual microlearning into your ATS, whether that’s Fountain or Workday Recruiting.
Ridesharing company Alto switched from face-to-face training to a process undertaken entirely from its new employees’ smartphones. Using a third-party integration with Fountain, workers were able to move from one part of the hiring process to the next within the same workflow. In doing so, Alto minimized new hire drop-off and the time it took to get them to productivity.
On-demand service GoPuff also used Fountain to improve the hiring from onboarding to the first delivery journey. Delivering relevant, accessible information before driver partners activated in the platform allowed more new employees to feel confident enough to take the next step and start making deliveries. The knowledge shared empowered them to reach this state faster. By integrating relevant learning touchpoints within the hiring flow, GoPuff were able to improve conversions through the hiring funnel, reduce drop off rates, and reduce time to productivity by 26%.
Onboarding
If a new hire has a negative onboarding experience, they’re twice as likely to look for other job opportunities.
Onboarding’s a time-sensitive opportunity for employers to build the foundations of a healthy employee lifecycle; brand loyalty and trust, as well as productivity. While onboarding a traditional office-based employee might take weeks or months, frontline workers need to perform well from day one - otherwise, they simply won’t get paid enough to make the job viable.
Consider these four strategies for onboarding frontline workers:
- Personalization: meaningful onboarding content should be tailored to each role and responsibility.
- Interactive learning: content like videos, quizzes and simulations make learning more enjoyable, and more effective. HR coach Suzanne Lucas explains video in particular reaches employees where they are, is trackable, cost-effective, and fits into the day-to-day of a frontline worker.
- Bite-sized learning: microlearning lessons let new employees learn in quick bursts - perfect when a lot of information has to be delivered without interrupting the flow of work. When workers can put what they’ve learned immediately into action, they’re more likely to remember it.
- Feedback mechanisms: employees are 4.6 times more likely to perform at their best when they feel listened to. Regular pulse surveys are an effective way to introduce feedback loops at scale.
It’s also worth noting in-person training is still the most popular mode of delivery for businesses with frontline workers. While there’s nothing wrong with in-person learning itself, it can prove to be too logistically challenging, expensive and time-consuming for employers to carry out at very frequent intervals.
Remember, for knowledge to be remembered it needs to be repeated, which is why companies who execute an everboarding approach successfully opt for blended learning. A combination of training modes, like, for example, bite-sized refreshers in between in-person sessions, allows one method to support and reinforce the other.
Mobile wellness app Urban used to rely on in-person onboarding sessions. These were inefficient, and follow-up questions caused a lot of pressure on the support team. Introducing remote onboarding through the eduMe and Fountain integration supported the company’s hiring practices at scale, and reduced tickets by 35% in one year. The onboarding process also received a 99% satisfaction rating: a positive sign for worker engagement.
Continuous learning
You’ve successfully onboarded your frontline workers. What comes next in the everboarding approach?
For a lot of frontline employees, this is where learning ends. When asked about training frequency, the third-most selected answer was ‘just for my first day/week/month’. And the results speak for themselves: stop upskilling your workers after onboarding, and they’ll be 75% more likely to churn.
Instead, you need to find ways for your workers to continually gain new knowledge and skills on a regular basis. Do so, and as well as boosting your retention rates, you’ll be 46% more likely to be first to market, and 92% more likely to innovate.
Of course, consistently delivering high-quality training can be difficult - particularly for smaller teams who will be balancing creating, disseminating, and updating content with other responsibilities. AI can be a huge help here - 22% of L&D teams already use it for help with text creation, research, or translation.
Successful everboarding frameworks include the following tactics:
- Repetition: this could look like workers consuming the material for a second time, or having it explained to them once they’ve read it.
- Presenting information in a different way: for example, you might follow up an in-person training session with a microlearning lesson on the same topic .
- Applying lessons to real life: deliver a lesson at the moment of need, and your workers can put what they’ve learnt into practice straight away.
- Assessment: regular testing offsets forgetting. This could look like a short quiz straight after a digital lesson.
Combine these tactics, and you’ll give your workers the best possible chance of retaining and building on their new skills throughout their time with you.
Everboarding: final thoughts
Everboarding may be nothing new, but that doesn’t mean its new-found popularity is unfounded. When frontline employees are able to learn continuously - before, during, and after the onboarding process - they’re more likely to adopt new skills, retain new knowledge, and engage with your business. In other words, it’s probably as close to a silver bullet as frontline L&D teams can get.
Looking for an everboarding software? We’re eduMe, a frontline training provider obsessed with giving employees the best learning experience possible - for as long as they stick around. Learn how we helped client Uber nail its onboarding process, and beyond.
