You wrote the onboarding doc six months ago. It was good. Thorough. Maybe even comprehensive.

But since then, your refund policy changed. The escalation workflow has a new step. Three tools got swapped. And your onboarding doc? It still says “log in to Intercom” — which you replaced with Zendesk in November.

This isn’t a documentation problem. It’s a change management problem.

The real cost of stale onboarding

When new hires follow outdated SOPs, three things happen:

First, they make avoidable mistakes. They follow a process that no longer exists, create a ticket in the wrong queue, or quote a policy that changed last quarter. The correction costs time — theirs and their manager’s.

Second, they lose trust in the documentation. Once a new hire hits two or three inaccuracies, they stop reading the docs entirely. They start asking colleagues instead, which creates dependency on tribal knowledge — the exact problem you were trying to solve.

Third, you can’t measure competency. If the docs are wrong, any quiz or assessment based on them is meaningless. You’re certifying people on processes that don’t exist.

Why “just update the docs” doesn’t work

The advice everyone gives is simple: keep your docs updated. But in practice, this breaks down because:

No one owns it. The person who wrote the SOP left, changed roles, or simply forgot.
There’s no trigger. When a process changes, there’s no system that says “hey, the doc about this is now wrong.”
Updates don’t propagate. Even if someone updates the doc, there’s no mechanism to tell the team “v2 is out, please re-read section 3.”

The missing piece isn’t discipline — it’s infrastructure.

A better model: version-controlled training

What if your onboarding materials worked more like software releases?

v1 gets published and distributed to the team.
When the source process changes, the training is flagged as outdated.
v2 is generated with a clear diff: “here’s what changed.”
v2 gets reviewed and published through an approval workflow.
The system tracks who has completed v2 and who hasn’t.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s exactly how modern operations teams should manage knowledge transfer — with the same rigor they apply to code deploys or product releases.

What to do today

If you’re running a team where onboarding matters (support, sales, ops), start with these three steps:

Audit your existing docs. Pick your top 5 most-referenced SOPs and check when they were last updated. If it’s been more than 90 days, assume they’re wrong somewhere.

Assign ownership. Every SOP needs a named owner who’s responsible for accuracy — not just authoring.

Create a change trigger. When a process changes (new tool, new policy, new workflow), there should be a step that says “update training.” Better yet, automate it.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s a system where changes flow into training reliably — not one where documentation slowly rots while the team figures things out on their own.