Notify employees of changes to important documentation in any of your manuals by using our online read and sign solution. Ensure important information is acknowledged, understood and distributed to relevant people.
Distribute read and sign requirements to groups of users
Set read and signs for individual users on an ad-hoc basis
Set read and signs by individual or a collection of documents. Ideal for induction
A traditional read & sign register is a paper checklist that people can sign to say they have received, understood and acknowledged an important piece of information, typically a notice or some other kind of document. They are used in many company quality management systems to demonstrate compliance, and typically used in industries where it’s critical to get information out to staff and be sure they have received and understood the information. Read and sign is a mechanism that has been used for years in many industries such as Aviation, Construction and Healthcare. As a specific example from the aviation industry, read and sign can be a mechanism by which service bulletins or airworthiness directives are notified to key staff members across the business.
Historically, it was commonplace to have a register of names on a clipboard, along with a folder holding important documents for people to read. When times were quiet people could check if they had notices or documents to read and if so could ‘read and sign’ for them – effectively confirm they had read them by signing against a list and recording the date they had read them. As a means of both ensuring and demonstrating key information reaches relevant people, it works, but surely there’s a better way than shuffling bits of paper around?
There’s also the challenge of actually getting people to read the notices in a reasonable period of time, the problems can be varied and complex. Managers spend time chasing people for signatures, staff are too busy to read the documents, or unable to read them because there’s a limited number of copies available, congestion at the source of the information. Auditors, both internal and external are looking for paper registers to check compliance, which could be sat on someone’s lap as they read. There are of course other problems, but these are just a few of the issues that generate friction in implementing a successful read and sign system within a business.
These problems are exactly the kind that can be solved by using appropriate technology as part of your read and sign system. We offer a tool for this, an online read and sign function is just one of the many features of our company manual documentation management and control software. It solves the problems with traditional paper based read and sign systems and it also solves some of the problems with other read and sign solutions implemented via software. As with any software, the software is just one part of the system, the other key part is the users, the recipients of the read and sign notice, the people setting those read and sign requirements, and the people who need oversight that the system is doing its job, getting key information to the right people at the right time. Making those tasks simple is key to making your read and sign system a success.
This is one of the first problems to solve, you have some information, you have a large number of employees, third parties and so on to deliver that information to. It’s also vital you know they have received and acknowledged that they have understood that information. Our solution allows you to organise users into groups, and you can select one or more of those as a target for read and sign actions on an individual document. So far so good, but at times you want people to read and sign for a set of documents, maybe as part of your induction or new starter process, or maybe as part of a department move. We allow you to define named sets of documents and use these in a read and sign action.
These read and sign requirements can be set at any time for any document in the system, or as part of a document change control and publication process, i.e. when adding a document to, or updating an existing document on the system. You can even mandate that read and sign is set for documents based on where they live within the system, useful if you have specific areas of your manuals that hold critical safety information.
Recipients of the read and sign action receive notifications about documents they need to acknowledge periodically (as often as you want them to), or whenever they log into the system. They will see a notification bubble showing the number of read and signs they have to complete. When receiving notifications, they will also see the time the items have been outstanding and an estimate of how long it will take them to read the item.
Some businesses have recurrent requirements for read and sign, for example they might have a set of documents they need all new starters to read and understand. They may also, depending on role, have a set of documents a new starter in a particular role or department needs to understand. Without the ability to manage these recurring requirements, it can quickly become an administrative burden, setting multiple read and signs for multiple users when they commence work.
Our company manual solution supports the creation of named document collections (for example create a named collection ‘Induction’ and allocate documents in that collection as read and sign to a user or groups of users). This is often used for induction or onboarding when a new employee starts, to bring them up to speed with vital processes or procedures.
There is of course no limit to the number of collections you can create, for example, you could have an ‘Induction – All staff’ collection and an ‘Induction – Goods In’ and ‘Induction – Flying Staff’ and set read and sign in combination as required, ensuring correct targeting of information for new starters. That way when a new starter joins the business in one area you simply set a read and sign for that user with the given collections and all documents are then on the user’s read and sign list and be sure they have received and understood the information vital to their induction.
A document important enough to be distributed with a notification requirement is generally communicating something important, critical to health and safety or security for example, and it’s therefore just as important to know that the information is understood by recipients, not just acknowledged as received.
Our software supports read and sign requirements with feedback, when a read and sign is specified, it can be optionally set to also gather feedback. This can be used by the recipient to acknowledge understanding or to raise questions about the information within the document. And of course, as our software fully supports online change control and approval, a user can always propose a new draft to correct any issue they have identified.
Read and sign is an extremely useful tool, but if the information flow with most solutions is only ever one way with little opportunity for feedback, this can be considered a negative experience by a user. If a notice is issued about a particular issue, it might be that one user in the organisation is aware of that issue and already has a novel solution, but without feedback you’ll never know. Similarly, if the information is technical or complex, the instructions may be ambiguous or misleading, and without feedback you’ll lose the opportunity to identify and correct this in a timely manner.
In other words, there’s an implicit assumption that firing the information off to employees is enough, a one-way information flow. Our solution gives you the tools to solve this problem by allowing feedback on read and signs as required.
The problem of click through read and sign – Whilst read and sign is a great way to get vital information out to team members and partner organisations, it can be tempting for staff under operational pressures to simply click and acknowledge they have read a document or notice, when in reality they haven’t.
There are lots of reasons for this, Some of our team have worked in industries that use read and sign extensively, and we know at times you can get more information than it’s physically possible to read due to the ongoing workload. This can be especially true in operational environments where the demands for time can fluctuate greatly, such as operational aircraft maintenance or healthcare. Our company manual employee handbook software has countermeasures in place to mitigate against this, we can prevent acknowledgement or signing until certain criteria are satisfied, ensuring the temptation to simply make it go away is removed.
Nowadays information overload can be a significant issue. Quite often a person can receive so much critical information in such a short space of time, it can be difficult, or even impossible, to remember all of it. That’s why our company manual software lets users go back and view their read and sign history.
An employee has a faint memory there was an issue about something they need to be aware of, but can’t quite remember the detail, no problem, they can simply go back through their read and sign history (or use the filtering and search features), find the document they want, and get the latest version of that document, so even if it was updated after the initial issue they are always referring to the latest current version.
With the advent of the internet age, most people are used to remembering where to find information, rather than remembering everything they read. We live in the information age, and we’ve built our software with that in mind – the reality is that users will remember there is information and know where to find that information, rather than remember every detail of everything sent to them.
For the recipient, our software will generate an expected reading time for every document you issue a read and sign requirement for. This estimate is based on the average reading speed of users and the content of the document.
This lets users see on their read and sign list what the likely time to read that document might be, allowing them to plan their time more effectively. When the system notifies users they have an item to action, it tells them how long it’s been outstanding for and how long it will take to read, allowing an easy decision to be made around priority.
This is an effective way to ensure users make the most of their time when they have outstanding read and sign obligations and counter the ‘no time to action’ argument. It can be very easy for someone to state they have no time to read a document if the time to read is unknown, if the estimated read time is 3 minutes for example, then that argument tends to go away.
In addition, our solution allows management to identify exactly what amount of time they need to allow for users to complete their read and signs, and also provides an idea of the total time required for the business over a period to absorb critical information. This aids engagement, as recipients can see straight away approximately how long the item will take, and perhaps complete a quick requirement in a short period of downtime.
Using the company manual read and sign solution, you’ll understand the total time spent on read and sign activity across the board, the total time required to read individual documents and recipients will see at a glance, a reasonable estimate of how long a document will take to read before opening it.
Since read and sign is for critical notices and information, it’s good to understand the time it takes for that information to be read, understood and acknowledged, and the impact on manpower planning information distribution can have.
Information requiring a read and sign is usually important, often detailed, sometimes complex, and as such requires a reasonably peaceful environment in which to read – there’s a reason libraries are quiet. Taking in key information requires the ability to focus. As an aside, one of our team used to work for a national flag carrier airline within aircraft maintenance, and their approach to read and sign was to allocate dedicated time for employees to sit in the technical library to catch up on read and sign notices.
If information is critical, it’s just as critical to make sure you provide enough time and an appropriate environment for people to absorb that information.
With our solution all you need is a browser and internet connection, so your environment is limited to wherever both of those are available. By default, we support tablet size devices and upwards in our company manual client web application – in reality, reading a document on a phone, particularly if it contains photographs and technical illustrations, is difficult and generally a less than favourable user experience. For critical information we think you’d agree you want an acceptable user experience so understanding is as good as it possibly can be.
We do appreciate there are some cases where it’s a perfectly acceptable experience on a phone and for clients that do want the ability to read documentation on mobile phones, we can provide a dedicated client app just for mobile phone use, which makes the experience a little better.
Our company manual read and sign solution comes with comprehensive reporting to allow you to monitor read and sign compliance. We also have full featured data export, so you can export the read and sign data out to Microsoft excel, or a similar analytical tool, to analyse in depth or on an ad hoc basis.
The minute a read and sign is created or actioned it’s available on a report, or visible in the system.
This brings us to a common problem specific to read and sign monitoring and reporting/analysis. There are many times when a staff member, a recipient of a read and sign is unavailable. They may be out of the business on leave, for example sickness, maternity or military/jury service. In these kinds of scenarios, you can get misleading information from reports, as a shift manager for example you might realise a person is out of the business, and so unable to complete a read and sign in a timely manner. A quality manager or some other user with broader oversight responsibility may not, and could end up generating questions, or worse, about why a person has sat on something for three months, when in reality they are out of the business temporarily for one reason or another.
If information is important, you want staff to know about it, even when they are out of the business. This way, when they do return, they can get up to speed quickly with what was considered important in their absence.
You can allocate the read and sign as usual, and with the company manual read and sign feature you can exclude users from reports, this way they don’t clutter up your data, but the user will still have the vital important information available for them to read and sign when they return to work.
You can always determine, when looking at a record, if the user was excluded at the time of the read and sign, so can always differentiate between genuine slow accomplishment and users not being available to complete an action .
Our company manual employee handbook read and sign feature can display the expected time taken to read a document or notice, records how long a read and sign item has been sat on someone’s list, the date it was set, if and when it was read/acknowledged, and any feedback received on the content. It can also prevent reading of documents that can’t possibly have been read with click through mitigation. The reporting and export features allow you to ensure and demonstrate compliance. You can gain insights into the load placed on your organisation’s resources generated by read and sign, allowing effective planning, so the recipients always have sufficient time to read those vital notices.
Our solution is flexible enough that it could be used just for read and sign management quite happily. It’s flexible enough to cope with many scenarios, from being a simple read and sign system, right through to being able to construct a fully-fledged employee handbook for a group of companies. There’s no obligation to use any of the other great features we offer to help aid information and compliance management, but our company manual document management and distribution software is so much more than read and sign.
Read and sign is a great tool in its own right, but we offer tools in the same product subscription to make life easier.
We offer hierarchical reading lists, multi entity support, the ability to relate documents to legislation or quality standards, roles within the business, enforce reviews, online document change control process – all of which can help you to comply with regulatory requirements or quality standards.
If you’d like to find out more, please call us, email us, or fill out our contact form and one of our team will be in touch. If you already have an existing read and sign solution, perhaps that’s all it does – we’re confident we can provide that and much, much more and probably for the same price or less. Call us to find out, you have nothing to lose (except the time for a call) and potentially a lot to gain.
Setting up a full featured demo environment to find out doesn’t cost anything.