How We Used Ironclad to Enforce Our Return-to-Office Vaccination Policy

In March of 2020, Ironclad closed our offices in response to stay-at-home orders in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working from home these past nineteen months has looked like working in our pajamas in makeshift offices, including everything from kitchen counters and coffee tables to guest rooms and music studios.

We had meetings, lunches, and happy hours with coworkers through computer screens, and we watched as cats, dogs, and children made special appearances in important meetings.

Though life will likely never return to what it was before the pandemic, the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines makes us hopeful that we can safely reopen the doors to our office and meet in person once again. As a result, Ironclad recently rolled out a return-to-office (RTO) plan for our employees.

Like many companies, Ironclad is requiring that those employees who wish to return to the office be fully vaccinated (as defined by the CDC). As part of the RTO plan, we created a vaccination policy, which needed to be reviewed and acknowledged by all employees prior to reopening the office.

In years past, employee acknowledgement of company policies has been a lengthy process. We’d send out the policy to be reviewed and signed by all employees, either by e-signature provider or via email. In either case, the process was quite manual and time-consuming.

This year, we decided to leverage a new Ironclad product: Public Workflows. The public workflow product offering automates acceptance of contracts by enabling Ironclad workflow designers to create and publish a URL that counterparties can navigate to, launch a workflow from, and seamlessly accept.

For employee review and acknowledgement of our vaccination policy, we sent an email (and posted a message in Slack) with a link to the public workflow. When an employee clicked the link, they were taken to a public launch form where they filled out their name, email, and other relevant information.

Ironclad employee email

A verification code was sent to their email address, and they were presented with the policy upon entering the code. The employee then acknowledged the policies by clicking an “Agree” button at the bottom of the screen.

Ironclad’s vaccination policy launch form

And that’s it! It was a super simple workflow to set up in Ironclad, as well as an easy process for all employees to follow. Best of all, we can run a report in our repository to see a list of employees who’ve reviewed and acknowledged.