EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK DISTRIBUTION PROCESS

Steven Cesare, Ph.D.

A business owner from Maine contacted me the other day because we had just revised her Company’s Employee Handbook and now had to develop a practical process for distributing that document to all of her employees and receiving the signed Employee Handbook Acknowledgment Forms for record-keeping purposes.

Here is the process I recommended:

Print out a payroll roster of all Company employees organized by each Manager
Have each Manager give an Employee Handbook to each employee on his/her roster
Inform each employee they must read and understand the Employee Handbook, and return the signed Employee Handbook Acknowledgement Form to the Manager by the following Monday (i.e., one week after they were distributed)
The Manager was instructed to check off the name of every one of his/her employees who submitted the signed Employee Handbook Acknowledgment Form, from the payroll roster
All employees who did not return their signed Employee Handbook Acknowledgement Form were informed by their Manager that if the document was not signed and returned by the next day, the employees would essentially be resigning their position from the Company
Once each of the Managers had received all of his/her employees’ signed Employee Handbook Acknowledgement Forms, each Manager must deliver all of the signed forms to the Office Manager for proper file storage in each employee’s personnel file as well as a scanned copy to the Company IT network, cloud account, or hard drive.

Following this decentralized approach ensures field involvement, drives personal accountability and establishes a downward cascading process that will be used frequently for other types of Company-wide rollout procedures.