DocuSign : Using DocuSign to Quickly Collect Employee Vaccination Status

As early hopes that mass vaccination programs in the United States would turn the tide against the COVID-19 pandemic ran into the realities of fast-moving variants and slower-than-expected vaccine uptake, employers face new challenges in determining whether, when and how to bring employees back to offices. In July of 2021, the states of California and New York, the City of New York, the entire federal government, Google, Facebook and a number of other organizations announced that they would be requiring employees and federal contractors to provide proof of vaccination or submit to regular testing to work in an office.

These large organizations made news with their employee vaccination and testing policies, but some units of local government had already implemented similar policies. For example, the health officer of a large county recently issued a public health order, effective immediately, requiring public and private employers in the county to ascertain the vaccination status of each employee.

As a prominent local government entity and the source of the order, the county needed to move fast to set a strong example. This required distributing information quickly to the entire workforce and organizing incoming data as employees provided their responses.

The program that the county implemented distributed information requests to the entire employee base of more than 20,000 workers in a single weekend and achieved an incredible 90% response rate. Here are some of the key lessons the county learned while implementing its vaccine information program:

Communicate directly from senior leadership

With more than 20,000 workers spread across a broad range of services, the county needed a strategy to reach everyone. Some employees had easy access to computers and regularly communicated via email. Others-including cafeteria workers, custodians, etc.-did not routinely use technology to fulfill their job responsibilities.

Ultimately, county leadership decided to use email and DocuSign eSignature to send employees requests for vaccination status. Before they sent the email, senior leadership alerted the employee base of the incoming request, explaining the public health order requirements and how workers could help the county comply. With clear expectations about what information they needed to provide and why they needed to provide it, employees were ready to participate in the program. A manual option allowed employees who did not use email to send in their vaccination status.

Reduce hurdles to employee engagement

To distribute vaccine status requests, the county used DocuSign eSignature's bulk send feature to email questionnaires to all active employees, sending one-page custom forms to groups of employees in targeted batches. With key integrations to their Active Directory employee database, the county pulled key pieces of data from other systems to prepopulate each document with personalized information. Employees were only required to select one of six predetermined vaccination statuses and submit the form to complete the process. By minimizing the information each worker was required to return, the county had the best chance at a high response rate.

Since employees don't all check their email with the same frequency, county leaders gave employees a long window to participate in the vaccine status program, improving its chances for a high rate of participation.

Plan for unresponsive employees

To date, the county has sent vaccine status requests to all active employees. Around 7 in 10 responded right away because of all the work the county team did to prepare the workforce for the request. By giving employees extra time to respond and sending reminder emails, the county increased participation in the program to around 9 in 10. While response rate varies by department, fewer than 1,000 employees left the status request emails unopened.

While that response rate is high, the requirement is for employers to collect vaccine status from every employee. It's critical that leadership develops a plan to target the holdouts and encourage them to participate. After the initial email blast, the active employee roster is regularly filtered to identify unresponsive employees and follow up with them.

New mandates are already underway to require public sector employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. As more governments at all levels make mandates requiring employees to be vaccinated, employee responses can also be filtered to separate vaccinated workers from unvaccinated ones. Vaccinated employees can upload proof of their vaccine (usually an image). Those who haven't started the vaccination process can be provided with information about the vaccine, how to get it, employer policies and timelines for compliance.

Handle personal information appropriately

The county's response to the initial public health order in May was quick and thorough. However, the pandemic is still not over and new requirements may come up that could require distributing information to the entire employee base and potentially collecting new data in return.

Since proof of vaccination is personal health information (PHI), employers may need to work through legal considerations when planning a program requiring employees to disclose proof of vaccination or testing. Those considerations may include ensuring employee PHI is handled appropriately.

DocuSign eSignature is routinely used by healthcare providers to send and store PHI. By default, DocuSign provides full document encryption to ensure the privacy of customer data and documents are securely stored in ISO 27001 and SSAE 16 data centers using the highest levels of encryption. However, not every organization will be comfortable storing employee PHI for the long term. Those teams can use DocuSign eSignature's targeted envelope purge capability to delete the scanned proof of vaccination while retaining the metadata that confirms that the employee is vaccinated or has been tested. There are many ways to implement a proof of vaccination program. Organizations concerned about storing employee PHI can build a workflow that works for them.

Looking forward, county leadership is preparing to transition from a fast reactive program to agile, robust proactive programs. As new guidelines continue to come out, the county has a strong infrastructure in place to distribute and collect information from employees to make sure that its public is safely and efficiently served.

State and local governments have often been early movers in the push to collect vaccination status to return employees to the office in a safe way. Organizations at all levels across the country can learn from these early successes and implement similar strategies in the future.

*DocuSign understands the sensitivity of this topic and is not encouraging employers to track or not to track employee vaccinations. Rather, we are here to provide solutions for employers to navigate the many challenges presented by Covid-19, including helping to generate, distribute and collect employee signatures on documents.