This post was originally posted on Collaboris.com here 

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 following a process like this:

So, what are the problems ?

This sounds familiar – is there a better way ?

If this is something your organization struggles with and you have SharePoint then read on we can help.

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 documenation. 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 now be 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. Once you have finished reading this post we recommend that you take the DocRead Tour to learn more.

Replace the Employee Acknowledge 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‘:
 

Employee Acknowledgement Form
 

Is now replaced with this ‘Electronic Acknowledgement Form‘ in DocRead. The terms and conditions can be set to suit your organization and also per-document comments can easily be communicated to offer further instruction. 

Electronic Employee Acknowledgement Form

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

Employee Acknowledgement Certificate

We hope you find this post informative, if you want to know more about how SharePoint or DocRead can help, please get in touch via one of the methods on our ‘contact form‘.