President Obama has named GE CEO Jeff Immelt as head of the new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The move is a definite switch from the President’s previous Economic Recovery Advisory Board, lead by Paul Volcker. Now, the focus is not on repair, but on creating new jobs.
Do you still print hard copies of your employee handbook and distribute them to all employees every time there is a change? Going the online route will probably make updates more timely and efficient, as well as more cost effective and environmentally friendly (less paper), but keep these suggestions in mind.
- Attach acknowledgement forms to the e-mail informing employees that the handbook can be found on the company Intranet.
- Instruct your employees to sign the forms after they have reviewed the handbook and return them to the HR department by a specified date.
- Provide employees who have restricted access or no access to the intranet with hard copies of the handbook along with printed acknowledgement forms.
- HR should also have some printed versions of the handbook available for those employees wishing to take a copy home to review or to have a copy available if they are on leave without access to the company Intranet.
- In addition, the organization should carefully track the dates and content of updates so that, in the event of litigation, it will be possible to reconstruct the handbook as it existed on a given date.
Why not make the change now? You’ll probably be glad you did.