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HR Manager Guide

This guide is written for HR Managers who need to track policy acknowledgements across the workforce, produce evidence for HR audits, manage employee-facing documents, and onboard new staff to the acknowledgement system.

This guide can be customised to describe your organisation’s HR policy framework and the specific documents your team manages.

Before you start: your access

There is no built-in “HR Manager” role. What you can do depends on the WordPress role your administrator gives you:

  • Administrator — everything in this guide
  • Editor — create and update employment policies, but not the compliance reports or acknowledgement screens
  • Policy Auditor — view the compliance reports and exports, read-only, but not edit documents or send reminders

Many HR teams combine these: an Editor account for writing policies, with an Administrator handling reminders and exports. Ask your administrator which parts of this guide apply to you. Steps that need Administrator access are marked (Administrator).

Your primary use cases

  1. New staff onboarding — make sure every new employee reads and acknowledges the induction documents within their first days
  2. Ongoing compliance — monitor acknowledgement rates for employment policies (Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy, WHS Policy, etc.) and follow up with staff who are outstanding
  3. Audit evidence — export acknowledgement records when HR audits, employment disputes, or regulatory reviews need proof that a policy was distributed and acknowledged
  4. Policy updates — publish updated employment policies and track that affected staff acknowledge the new version

Giving staff an HR view of the documents

Every member of staff sees the main Document Hub, filtered to the documents their role is allowed to read. To give them a focused HR page as well, ask your administrator for one of these:

  • A tag-based documentation portal — tag your HR documents (for example hr) and create a page with:
Document not found.

This shows only documents carrying that tag, with a sidebar and its own search.

Document not found.

Page gating (Administrator) can make new starters acknowledge the required documents before they can open chosen pages of your site. Logged-in staff who are still outstanding see a list of the documents they need to acknowledge first.

Managing employment policies

Creating a new employment policy

You need an account that can edit documents (Editor or Administrator).

  1. Go to Documents → Add New
  2. Write the policy content
  3. Set Document Type → Policy, choose Categories → HR (or your HR category), and add the Tags your HR pages use (e.g. hr)
  4. In the Document Settings box, set Confidentiality (usually Internal Use) and the Target Audience (Roles) who can see it, and choose the Document Owner
  5. In the Acknowledgement panel in the editor sidebar, turn on Require acknowledgement, choose Who must acknowledge (target roles and/or user lists), and set the Expiry — for example Rolling days with a renewal period of 365 for an annual re-read, or an Annual date
  6. Optionally add the policy to an onboarding Acknowledgement Campaign (in the Acknowledgement Content & Comprehension box) so you can track and chase the whole pack together
  7. Publish

Updating an existing policy

Edit the policy, then add a changelog entry in the Version & Changelog box with a Change Type and Description of Changes, and click Update. If your organisation uses version approval, the change goes to the policy’s owner for approval first. The current version stays live until then.

Whether staff must acknowledge again depends on the change type. By default only Major changes need a new acknowledgement:

  • For a typo or formatting fix, choose Patch — existing acknowledgements stay valid
  • For a change to what staff must do, choose Major — everyone in the audience is asked to acknowledge the new version and receives an email saying so

List the specific employment policies your organisation manages in this plugin (e.g. Code of Conduct, WHS Policy, Social Media Policy, Privacy Policy).

Tracking new staff onboarding

The onboarding acknowledgement flow

  1. The new staff member is given a WordPress account with the right role (and added to any User Lists used for targeting)
  2. They log in and open the Document Hub or your onboarding page. Their outstanding documents are listed at the top of the hub
  3. They read each document, tick the confirmation checkbox, pass any comprehension quiz, and click Acknowledge
  4. The system records the version, date, and their role, and emails them an Acknowledgement Confirmed receipt

Staff do not receive an automatic email when they are first required to acknowledge a document, so tell new starters where the hub is as part of their induction.

Checking onboarding completion

The easiest way to track an onboarding pack is with an acknowledgement campaign — a named group of documents, such as “New Starter Pack”. Your administrator creates the campaign under Documents → Ack Campaigns; document editors then add each document to it.

  • Policy Management → Compliance Overview → Campaign completion shows each campaign’s completion rate and due date
  • Acknowledgements → Reports → Campaign lists each person with how many documents they have acknowledged and which are still pending
  • Acknowledgements → Reports → User shows one person’s full status

Following up on incomplete onboarding

The plugin sends reminder emails automatically on the schedule your administrator set. For new starters you can also act directly (Administrator):

  • From a Campaign report, click Send reminders to email everyone with outstanding documents in that campaign (once per day per campaign)
  • From Acknowledgements → Overview, open a document and Send Reminder to Selected, or Schedule… reminders for later
  • Escalate to the line manager for anyone still outstanding after their first week

Generating evidence for HR audits and disputes

HR audits and employment disputes sometimes need evidence that a staff member received and acknowledged a specific policy.

Evidence for one person

  1. Go to Policy Management → Acknowledgements → Reports
  2. Choose User, select the staff member, and click Generate Report
  3. The report shows every required document with its status, the version acknowledged, the acknowledgement date, and the expiry date
  4. Click Export CSV to download it (Administrator)

Evidence for one policy

  1. Go to Policy Management → Acknowledgements → Attestation Export
  2. Choose CSV or PDF, set the date range (it defaults to the last 30 days, so widen it for older evidence), and select the Document
  3. Click Generate attestation export

Each row shows the person, their role at the time, the version they acknowledged, the content fingerprint (SHA-256 hash) of that version, and the time in UTC.

🔒 Pro feature — requires the Pro plugin.

The Pro add-on adds an Evidence Pack (a single ZIP containing the attestation export, a PDF of each document version, lists of staff who have not acknowledged, and integrity checksums), PDF export of individual user reports, scheduled weekly or monthly compliance report emails to the people you nominate, and automatic escalation of long-overdue acknowledgements to document owners and a nominated escalation manager.

Expiry and re-acknowledgement

Employment policies often need re-acknowledging every year. The plugin handles this automatically once a policy has an expiry set:

  • Staff receive Acknowledgement Expiring Soon emails on the days before expiry that your administrator chose, and Acknowledgement Overdue emails afterwards
  • When an acknowledgement expires, the document shows as Expired on the staff member’s My Acknowledgements page, appears in their outstanding list on the hub, and the acknowledgement panel appears on the document again
  • If your organisation uses an Annual Compliance Date, staff with outstanding documents also get a combined reminder in the run-up to that date

You can see all expiring and expired acknowledgements on the Compliance Overview under Expiring soon (30 days) and Already expired.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Can staff download a copy of a policy for their own records? Yes, if PDF downloads are available on your site. Staff will see a Download PDF link on the document page.

Q: A staff member left the organisation. What happens to their records? Acknowledgement records are kept as compliance evidence. Check with your administrator before deleting a departed staff member’s WordPress account, and export any evidence you need first. Your organisation’s privacy settings control how personal data is erased on request.

Q: Can I require staff to answer comprehension questions before acknowledging? Yes. On the document, in the Acknowledgement Content & Comprehension box, tick Require a passing comprehension quiz before acknowledgement and add questions. Staff must reach the passing score before they can acknowledge. Your administrator sets the default number of questions, pass mark, and retry limits.

Q: Can I set a minimum reading time before acknowledgement? Not in the free plugin. The free plugin can record how long staff spend reading, if your administrator turns that on, but it does not enforce a minimum.

🔒 Pro feature — with the Pro add-on, your administrator can set a site-wide Minimum Reading Time (seconds) and Minimum Reading Reach (%) that staff must meet before they can acknowledge.

Q: We have multiple HR sub-teams with different document visibility. How do we handle this? Use separate WordPress roles for each group, or ask your administrator to create User Lists. Set each document’s Target Audience (Roles) for visibility, and its Who must acknowledge roles and lists for acknowledgement.

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