What is an employee acknowledgement form?

An employee acknowledgement form is a short record in which an employee confirms they have received, read and understood a specific document — a policy, a procedure, a manual or an employee handbook. It is not the policy itself; it is the proof that the policy reached the person it applies to.

Most acknowledgement forms contain the same few elements:

• The employee's name and role
• The exact document and version being acknowledged
• A statement of what is being confirmed — for example "I have read and understand the policy"
• The date of acknowledgement
• A signature, handwritten on paper or captured electronically

That last line is where the administrative effort lives. Collecting, chasing, scanning and storing signatures is the part that scales badly, and it is the part this page is about.

The paper process, and why it breaks down

If you are an organization that needs to distribute and track policies, documents, procedures, manuals to your employees, then you will know that this can be an onerous and time consuming task.

For example, if as part of an on-boarding process you require a new starter to read and acknowledge your 'Code of Conduct Policy' or your 'Occupational Health and Safety' document then you will probably follow a process like this:

1. Navigate to the shared drive and find the latest copy of the policy and print it.
2. Find an 'Employee Acknowledgement Form' and print it.
3. Put both documents in an employee binder and hand to the employee on their first day.
4. Instruct the employee to read the documents, sign the acknowledgement form and send back to you, ideally within 4 weeks.
5. Add a reminder in Outlook to chase the employee in 4 weeks time.

So, what are the problems?

1. The employee won't do it on time, so you need to escalate to their Line manager. (This also requires you to add another reminder to chase the line manager in 1 week).
2. If you store your acknowledgements digitally, you need to scan the signed paper copy in and add it to the employee record.
3. The employee may lose the handbook – meaning you need to print and send it out again
4. The document can substantially change (meaning not only that new employee needs to acknowledge it, but all employees). You now need to send it out to all staff and track all of the responses.
5. It's a needless waste of paper
6. How do you know the employee actually understood what was in the document? Have they just signed it to stop you hassling?
7. This is a very time consuming and costly process as it needs to be done for ALL of your important documents and policies!

This sounds familiar – is there a better way?

If this is something your organization struggles with, and you have SharePoint then read on!

Employee handbook acknowledgement forms

The employee handbook is usually the first document a new starter is asked to acknowledge, and it is often the document with the most acknowledgement admin attached to it. A handbook acknowledgement form works exactly like any other acknowledgement form — the employee confirms they have received and read the handbook — but two things make it harder to manage on paper:

• It goes to everyone. Every new starter needs one, and every time the handbook is revised the whole organization needs to acknowledge the new version, not just new joiners.
• It is long. A handbook is the document employees are most likely to sign without reading, and the one where a paper signature tells you the least about whether it was actually read.

The DocRead process below treats a handbook exactly like any other document in a SharePoint library: publish the new version, target the audience it applies to, and let DocRead collect and track the acknowledgements. When the handbook is revised, you re-issue it to the same audience rather than reprinting and re-collecting forms.

Policy acknowledgement in SharePoint

If you already keep your policies in SharePoint, acknowledgement is the step SharePoint on its own does not close out. SharePoint holds the document, versions it, and controls who can see it — but it does not ask a named group of employees to confirm they have read a specific version, and it does not tell you who still hasn't.

That gap is what DocRead fills. Policy acknowledgement in SharePoint, in practice, means:

• The approved policy is published to a SharePoint document library, where it is the single current version.
• DocRead targets that document at the audience who must read it.
• Each employee confirms they have read and understood it, against that version.
• The organization keeps a permanent record of who read what and when.

The rest of this page stays with the acknowledgement form itself — the confirmation the employee gives and the record it produces.

SharePoint and DocRead

By using Microsoft SharePoint and DocRead there is a much easier way to automate this heavily paper-based and manual tracking approach. SharePoint is the world's leading document management system. When combined with DocRead's distribution and tracking capabilities this allows a very stream-lined process to be implemented taking away all of the administrative burden of authoring, distributing and tracking.

Author the document in SharePoint

SharePoint has many features that make it a very compelling solution to manage your policies and procedure documentation. If you wish to read more take a look at SharePoint's document management features or have a look at a list we curate on list.ly called 'The benefits of using SharePoint as a Policy management system'.

Once your policy is written, approved and published (within a SharePoint document library), it can easily be sent out with DocRead.

DocRead is an Enterprise add-on for SharePoint used all over the world by customers in industries such as education, governmental, financial, shipping and health. It runs on SharePoint Server on-premises and in Microsoft 365 — see DocRead for SharePoint Server for the on-premises edition.

Replace the Employee Acknowledgement Form with DocRead

DocRead replaces the paper-based acknowledgement form, as shown below, with an intuitive electronic signature process. Once the employee has agreed to the document, they are issued with a reading certificate and the organization also has a permanent record of who read what and when. No paper needed!

So, in simple terms, this Employee Acknowledgement Form example:

Is now replaced with this 'Electronic Acknowledgement Form' in DocRead. The terms and conditions can be set to suit your organization. You could use "I have read and understand the policy" for example. Additionally, per-document comments can easily be communicated to offer further instruction.

Once the employee has self-certified that they have 'Read' and 'Confirmed' the policy they can access their downloadable 'Reading Certificate'. As follows:

We hope you find this post informative. If you want to know more about how SharePoint or DocRead can help, please get in touch.

Do you still need a form template?

If you are searching for an acknowledgement form template, it is worth being clear about what the template is doing for you. A template standardises the wording — the document name, the confirmation statement, the date and the signature. In DocRead that wording is configured once, on the document itself, and then presented to every employee in the audience automatically. The electronic acknowledgement form shown above is the template: you set the terms and conditions text to suit your organization, add any per-document instructions, and DocRead applies it consistently to everyone who is asked to read that document.

The practical difference is that a paper or PDF template still leaves you collecting, chasing and filing the completed copies. The DocRead equivalent produces the completed record automatically, as a reading certificate and a permanent organizational record, at the moment the employee confirms.

We hope you find this post informative. If you want to know more about how SharePoint or DocRead can help, please get in touch.

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