If you are an internal communications professional, arguably the most rewarding part of your job is the assurance that the information you disseminate is read by employees.
But as you know, this isn’t always easy.
Even with the best efforts you are still likely to get a handful of employees who claim they didn’t get the information (even when you know they received it!). This can be a huge challenge, especially if you are required to report on the number of employees who have reviewed a particular piece of content—like a new policy to comply with strict regulations.
How do you make sure employees read critical content?
The most reliable way to make sure employees read critical content is to ask them to confirm it. Assign the content to the people who need to review it, ask each person to acknowledge once they’ve read it, follow up with anyone who hasn’t, and keep a record you can access at any point.
A few practices help:
- Target the right audience. Customize the policies and documentation you show to the roles, teams or locations it applies to, so critical messages don’t get lost among everything else
- Ask for confirmation, not just views. A read confirmation gives you a record of who has read the content, not just a page view count
- Follow up with anyone who hasn’t confirmed. Reminders close the gap between “sent” and “read.”
- Use more than one channel for urgent messages. For time-sensitive updates, pair the policy update with a banner, email or mobile alert
- Re-confirm on a schedule. Policies and certifications that change or expire often need a fresh acknowledgement each year, sometimes called re-attestation
This is why we created Required Reading in ThoughtFarmer.
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What is Required Reading?
The Required Reading feature allows you to designate essential content on your intranet as a mandatory read. Required Reading is available to all ThoughtFarmer customers.
Required Reading is the ideal way to ensure any employees—from seasoned staff to new hires—are up-to-date and informed on current policies and processes, or regulatory requirements and SOPs. Or really any content you consider to be critical to your organization. Think of it like when you sit in the emergency exit row on an airplane. The flight attendant requires verification that you understand the expectations of sitting in that row. But rather than a verbal yes, you are getting concrete and exportable proof of who read what.
We use Required Reading on our own intranet for policies every employee needs to acknowledge, like our Work from the Office policy. It’s important that employees review this information, and equally important that our leadership and HR teams know who has read it.
That’s just one use case. There are many more that our customers are enjoying including:
Onboarding/HR policies
Enable new hires and existing employees to read and review all important HR policies relating to working at your organization.
Company-wide communications
Ensure your employees are informed on things like merger and acquisition information, meeting minutes, and CEO town hall meetings. This includes time-sensitive updates like IT security notices or system changes.
Regulatory and compliance information
If your organization is subject to an internal or external audit, you will want an easy way to confirm information to auditors. This could include security standards, ISO standards, or standard operating procedures (SOPs). If you work at a bank or credit union, see our intranet best practices for banks and credit unions.
Training and certifications
Manage relevant employee training, and ensure employee skills are up to date. There is also the option to reset Required Reading every year for new re-certifications.
How does Required Reading work?
Like most of our features, the Required Reading feature is easy enough for anyone to master.
Simply open up a published page, click on the Required Reading tab, and start building your audience. Your audience can be built individually or by adding teams or groups.
Once the required readers are added, an employee sees a banner across the top of the page, prompting them to confirm. Once confirmed, a thank you message appears. All of these messages can be customized, so if you want a softer approach like “Pretty please read this” you can do so.
If an employee is unsure if they have any outstanding pages to read, they can easily access their full list of Required Reading items within their intranet profile.
How do you track who has read a policy?
Policy attestation is a record that each employee has read, and agreed to follow, a specific policy. Sending a policy by email or posting a link only proves it was distributed; attestation needs an active confirmation from each person. Most teams track it with some form of digital acknowledgement, and many use more than one system.
In a 2026 ThoughtFarmer survey of HR, comms, and IT professionals, bank and credit union respondents most often tracked policy attestation through intranet read confirmations (56%), followed by a learning management system (44%) and an HRIS (41%). Another 15% still relied on paper sign-offs. See how ThoughtFarmer supports banks and credit unions.
Perhaps the best part of Required Reading is the ability to view an entire report of who has confirmed they’ve read the content, and who hasn’t. The page owner then has the ability to email outstanding readers and notify them of outstanding pages that require their attention. This report can be exported as an attestation record for audits.
As mentioned above, Required Reading has been extremely useful to us and our customers! If you would like to see this feature in action, please contact us for a personalized demo.
Source: 2026 ThoughtFarmer survey of 66 HR, comms, and IT professionals who manage their organization’s intranet.
