SHRM26 Debrief · Strategic HR, Organizational Design & Change Management · #2349

From Onboarding to Everboarding: Redefining Employee Development to Improve Performance and Retention

with Amber Watts

▶ Watch on the SHRM portal ~45 min, distilled

everboardingonboarding designemployee development

"Most of the time, your onboarding is not failing, it's just simply ending too soon."

What it was about

Traditional onboarding ends too soon and gets treated as a one-time event instead of an ongoing system. Organizations should replace it with 'everboarding': a milestone-based, cross-functional relay that hands employees off from the people team to managers to self-directed growth, across their first year and beyond.

By the numbers

12%

Gallup statistic: percentage of employees who feel ready and prepared to do their job after completing onboarding at their organization.

nine to 11 hours per week

Average time managers spend answering questions, cited as a cost that rises further when a new hire is added to a team.

70-20-10

The 70-20-10 learning model cited to note that formal training is only 10% of how people develop, used to argue against defaulting to more formal training as the fix for onboarding gaps.

Key notes

Stop treating onboarding as a fixed 30/60/90-day event and instead design it as a milestone-based system with no hard time constraints.
Build formal playbooks for managers on how to develop and assess new hires, since managers are the multiplier or the bottleneck for onboarding success.
Redesign measurement to predict performance and readiness rather than just tracking activity and completion of training modules.

The contrarian takeOnboarding shouldn't be fixed by building more formal training programs. The speaker argues most requests to 'fix' onboarding problems default to more training, when the real fix is systems design, cross-functional alignment, and manager enablement, not more content.

Take this back Monday

Do this for your team

Give every manager a written playbook for developing new hires, since managers are the multiplier or the bottleneck for onboarding success.

Say this in your next leadership meeting

Only 12% of employees feel ready to do their job after onboarding, per Gallup, because we treat onboarding as an event instead of an ongoing system.

Watch out for

Assuming that completing onboarding means an employee has the confidence, competence, and ability to actually do the job.
Treating onboarding as a single event or a checklist to complete rather than an ongoing system.
Front-loading all resources (time, money, people, technology) into the first week or 30 days and then abandoning support once habits have already formed.

Fun fact · Amber Watts

Amber Watts is a former Chief Revenue Officer who pivoted careers to become a talent strategist and published author.

If this landed, see these

↳ Go deeperOnboard to Engage: Four Critical Questions to Ask Your New HireGives managers the actual four questions to ask in that handoff moment everboarding requires.⇄ The counterpointEverything I Know about Solving Today's HR Problems – I Learned from My DogComplicates the systems argument: without trust, no playbook or handoff cadence will stick.✦ The unexpected oneOpportunities and Pitfalls of AI in Financial Wellness: What HR Professionals Need to KnowAI's personalized triage layer mirrors the same shift from one-size-fits-all to individualized, ongoing support.