Employee Handbook Written Acknowledgment (United States)

*Permission was received from ACC members quoted below prior to publishing their forum comments in this Wisdom of the Crowd Resource.

Response #1: We have required signature both when revisions are made and on an annual basis. We have employees acknowledge by clicking in response to an email.

We have also tested this method in federal court- we had a matter where a manager insisted he had never been informed of a policy or received the handbook containing the policy. We produced the log showing he clicked and accepted, and the judge was satisfied.¹

Response #2: I highly recommend having an acknowledgment, as you will want to be able to show that the individual acknowledged receipt of the policy/handbook. You may want to consider an electronic acknowledgment if it is too burdensome to collect hard-copy signatures. The additional advantage of electronic acknowledgments is that (assuming your system has this capability) you can track which employees have not submitted their acknowledgments and follow up with them to collect them, and the signatures are stored in the system and, thus, not subject to being lost or mis-filed.²

Response #3: An acknowledgment can be extremely helpful if an employee is terminated for violation of one of the policies included in the handbook. The acknowledgement will show that the employee knew (or should have known) the conduct was prohibited.

In addition, in the event of a claim of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, failure to accommodate, or other EEOC matters, the handbook serves as important notice to the employee of how and with whom to register an internal complaint. This can serve not only to give the company a chance to deal with the complaint before the EEOC or other agency, but also can set up the Farragher/Ellerth defense in certain claims of hostile work environment harassment. The employee's acknowledgement is invaluable in these cases by proving the employee had notice of the employer's complaint procedures but failed to follow them.³

Response #4: I agree it is essential that the employee not only acknowledge receipt, but that she/he agrees to comply with all of its terms. This is for all the reasons previously stated plus the fact that the obligation to sign may prompt more employees to read the handbook.⁴

Response # 5: With regard to the delivery method at my company, we task Department Managers with collecting the signatures, which are then verified and kept by Human Resources.

 

Response # 6: We recently updated our handbook. For the acknowledgement, we used SurveyMonkey this time around as the acknowledgment method. Distributing, collecting, and retaining actual written copies was becoming too burdensome and was resulting in too many gaps. So, we went with this digital method. There are, of course, drawbacks, but on the whole, at least for us, this seems to have worked - at least so far. No court actions yet to test it, and hopefully, we won't have to anytime in the near future. Nevertheless, the collection and tracking have been much easier. We'll probably stick with this method until a better one comes along.⁶

¹Ronald Peppe, Vice President Legal & Human Resources, Secretary, Director, Canam Steel Corporation, Maryland (Employment & Labor Law, July 8, 2017). ²Rebecca Goldstein, Principal Legal Counsel, Medtronic, Missouri (Employment & Labor Law, July 10, 2016). ³Marti Cardi, Vice President, Product Compliance, Matrix, Colorado (Employment & Labor Law, July 11, 2016). ⁴Gregory Peterson, General Counsel, International Council of Shopping Centers (former), Inc., New York (Employment & Labor Law, July 11, 2016) ⁵Natalya Vasilchenko, Contracts Attorney, Kulite Semiconductor Products, New Jersey (July 12, 2016). ⁶Anonymous Poster (July, 2016)