How to make visitor NDAs as easy as 1,2,3

Securing your workplace means more than just protecting your physical building and the people inside. You also need to safeguard company information. This is especially important when non-employees visit the office for meetings that cover private corporate or product details. That’s why companies use non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs, to protect private business information. Many types of visitors might walk through your doors: contractors, candidates, investors, consultants, prospective customers—to name a few. It may be a good idea to have these visitors sign an NDA for their time on-site. Traditionally, NDAs have been printed on paper, signed with a pen, and filed away amidst mountains of other paperwork. These days, visitor NDAs are often distributed and signed digitally. This smooths out the visitor experience to a degree, but you still want to take the extra step to make a stellar first impression on your visitors. How can your workplace maintain compliance and uphold security standards while still creating a delightful welcoming experience for your visitors? Here are three quick tips for making the NDA process seamless for you and your visitors.

1. Keep your NDA as concise as possible

An NDA can provide the protection you need without being densely complex. Unless your visitor happens to be a lawyer, confronting them with pages of legal jargon right off the bat is not a great idea. At best, you’ll bore them. At worst, you’ll come across as intimidating or condescending. Those aren’t the best notes to start your visit on. Instead, craft your NDA with your visitors in mind. Work with your legal team or counsel initially to hammer out the key requirements. Then, go back and make the language as concise and straightforward as you can, looking for ways to translate legal jargon into plain-English. If you can, try to limit the content to one page only. This makes it quick and easy for visitors to read and digest. Of course, certain types of visitors might require greater levels of security clearance than others. You can use a visitor management system to customize NDA documents and requirements based on visitor type.

2. Integrate with a secure legal document storage vendor

Done wrong, digitizing legal documents can present security risks. To prevent this, you need to safeguard sensitive documents and control who can access which files. Rather than taking all this on yourself, leave it to the experts. Companies like DocuSign and Box are leaders in the electronic document storage space.In addition to the security and credibility they provide, these vendors make life much easier for your front desk admins, too. They can automatically ensure signatures are collected from every visitor and stored securely. That means if your legal teams ever need to locate a document, it’s not a frantic scramble. They have one go-to place that they can access securely from anywhere.

3. Send NDAs before each visit

Less paperwork is great, but an overcrowded lobby is not. That’s why it helps to let visitors complete forms from their personal device, ahead of time. And not just NDAs. Ideally, this pre-registration step is where you include other compliance measures, like health checks and safety videos. Allow visitors to complete these requirements ahead of time—in the comfort of their own home or on the way to your workplace. Whatever is most convenient for them.Speaking of convenience, it’s also wise to streamline sign in for returning visitors. If they have already provided the required signatures and information, keep a record of that. Let them skip those steps for their next visit. This both builds a stronger relationship and creates a great impression every visit.

Why visitor management software is key

Many companies rely on a visitor management system to oversee who comes into their building. Chances are, your front desk admins are already overwhelmed. Tracking registrations, verifying documents, distributing name badges, repeating the wifi password, and alerting hosts when each visitor arrives is simply not feasible. Hear from a few of the thousands of companies using Envoy Visitors to digitize and optimize the visitor NDA process.

“When I look at Envoy, it gives me peace of mind knowing every guest who comes to our office has registered with our sign-in process, has acknowledged our NDA, and is wearing their visitor badge within our office space,” - Alexander Hokokian, Facilities Manager at Box. Read the case study.

‍“Envoy has an intuitive UI for visitors to navigate. It also has the wonderful feature of having someone sign an NDA before entering our space, which is extremely important to us. To complete the sign-in process, visitors take their photograph through Envoy, which gets printed onto their visitor badges right away. It doesn’t feel like there is all this paperwork or ‘old-school’ sign-in stuff,” - Alana Smith, Head of Workplace & Real Estate at Zoom. Read the case study.

“Envoy Visitors had already automated so many parts of the visitor management process for us. We love the sign-in experience for visitors, the host notifications, and the easy way to collect and store signatures on our non-disclosure agreements,” - Alex Pezzulo, Senior Office & Facilities Manager at Conductor. Read the case study.