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TL;DR
- An employee equipment agreement is a short document, signed when kit is issued, recording what somebody has and what happens to it.
- If everyone sits in one office and hands their laptop to a colleague on their last day, you don't need one and nobody will thank you for it.
- It does four things: lists the items by serial number, sets care expectations, states who arranges the return, and records that the person saw all of it.
- Three forms work: a line in the offer paperwork, a standalone one-page acknowledgement, or a per-issue record generated at the point of handover.
- Sign it at issue, never at exit, because a document produced at the end reads as an accusation.
- Done right, asking for a laptop back is an administrative step rather than a negotiation.
Somebody resigns on a Tuesday. You send the standard offboarding note, including the line about returning equipment, and get a reply that is polite and immovable: nobody ever told them the laptop had to go back, they have had it for three years, and they assumed it was theirs. You look for something they signed. There's an offer letter with no mention of equipment, a handbook paragraph written in 2023, and an issue record that exists only as a line in a spreadsheet with no signature anywhere near it.
That conversation is preventable. It also happens constantly. Equipment gets issued in the rush of onboarding, when the priority is getting somebody working rather than getting somebody to sign something. The document that would've settled it costs ten minutes at the start and can't be created afterwards, which is the whole shape of the problem.
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So the real issue isn't enforcement. Most companies don't intend to pursue anybody over a laptop and would be unwise to try. The real issue is that an unstated expectation becomes a surprise at the worst moment, and a surprise makes a routine administrative request feel like an accusation. This document exists to make the return boring. That is its entire job.
When You Don't Actually Need an Equipment Agreement
When handing it back is obvious. One office, everyone local, a leaver who walks past the desk of the person who issued the machine. The social expectation does the work, return rates are effectively complete, and adding a signature ceremony to onboarding buys you nothing at all. Plenty of good companies stay here for years.
When the friction starts showing. The first sign is a return that needed chasing. It wasn't refused, just slow, with two or three reminders. The second sign is somebody asking what they are supposed to do with a monitor, which tells you that the expectation was never set and they are trying to be helpful in a vacuum.
When it becomes a liability. Two triggers. A leaver who genuinely believes the equipment is theirs, which is a disagreement rather than a dispute and still costs you a device. Or a security review asking how you establish custody of company hardware, where the honest answer is a spreadsheet nobody's signed. Both of those turn an informal habit into a gap you have to describe.
The edge case that breaks everything. Distributed hiring with no handover moment at all. The laptop arrives by courier, the person starts, and nobody ever has a conversation about it. Three years later they're in a different country, in a different job, and the only record of what they hold is a purchase order. I've seen a company write off eleven machines in one year for exactly that reason, and the total cost of the fix would have been one template.
What Teams Actually Need from the Agreement
> "What exactly does this person have?" > An itemised list with serial numbers, captured at the moment of handover rather than reconstructed later. > A record created at issue is accurate by default, and one assembled at exit is a guess with a signature on it.
> "Does the person know it comes back?" > A sentence they read and acknowledged, at the start, in plain words. > This is the only part of the document that prevents the conversation at the top of this article.
> "Who arranges the return?" > A named role, and a statement that the company organises the collection rather than asking the person to. > Return rates depend heavily on whether the company books the courier, and an agreement that puts the logistics on the individual will leak devices.
> "What are we asking people to do, realistically?" > Care expectations that a reasonable person can meet, stated without legal flourish. > An agreement that reads as a liability transfer gets signed resentfully and remembered as a threat.
> "Can we show somebody this if asked?" > A signed record, stored where it can be found by whoever needs it, not in one person's folder. > Custody evidence that exists and cannot be located is functionally the same as no evidence at all.
The Three Forms That Work
A line in the offer paperwork. What it is: a clause in the offer letter or contract stating that company equipment is provided, remains company property and is returned at the end of employment. When it's right: as a baseline for everyone, and it is genuinely worth having. It costs nothing, it's signed by definition, and it sets the expectation before anybody has touched a device. When it fails: on the specifics. A contract clause cannot list serial numbers, cannot be updated when somebody gets a second monitor two years later, and tells you nothing about what a particular person actually holds. It establishes the principle and leaves the record unsolved. That isn't enough on its own.
A standalone one-page acknowledgement. What it is: a short document listing the items issued, the care expectations and the return arrangement, signed once at onboarding. When it's right: the default for most companies between roughly 30 and 500 people. It is quick to produce, easy to read and specific enough to be useful. When it fails: when the fleet changes and the document does not. Somebody receives a replacement laptop in year two and nobody updates anything, so the signed record describes a machine they no longer have. The fix is a reissue rule, and almost nobody writes one.
A per-issue record generated at handover. What it is: a record created each time equipment changes hands, acknowledged electronically, with serial numbers pulled from whatever system holds them. When it's right: distributed teams, or any fleet with enough movement that an annual document would be out of date within months. This is the only form that stays accurate without somebody maintaining it. When it fails: when it depends on a system nobody has. If you are generating these by hand, the per-issue approach becomes an administrative burden that gets skipped under pressure, which is worse than a slightly stale one-pager because the gaps are invisible.
How to Choose: Five Questions Before You Write It
Is there a handover moment? This single fact decides the form. If somebody physically receives a machine from a colleague, a signature is easy and an acknowledgement at that moment is natural. If a courier delivers it to a home address, there is no moment, so the acknowledgement has to be engineered into the first week and given to somebody to own. Distributed companies that skip this step are the ones that end up reconstructing records from purchase orders.
What do you actually want back? Decide and list it. Most companies want the computer and the monitor and genuinely do not want a three-year-old headset, and saying so is both honest and useful, because an agreement demanding the return of everything will be applied selectively and that selectivity becomes inconsistency. List the items you will actually ask for, and say the rest is theirs.
Who signs off on the wording? Take the care and return language to whoever handles your employment matters, per jurisdiction, before you publish it. Anything touching liability for damage, deductions from pay or what happens if equipment is not returned is jurisdiction-specific and varies more than people expect between countries that look similar. This article deliberately does not tell you what any of that should say, and neither should any template you download.
How will it be updated? Write the reissue rule now. The simplest version is that a new record is created whenever a significant item is issued or replaced, with significant defined by a value threshold so nobody has to think about a keyboard. Without that rule your signed records describe the fleet as it was on people's start dates, which is accurate for new joiners and increasingly wrong for everybody else.
Where will the signed copies live? Somewhere findable by whoever handles offboarding, which is frequently not the person who ran onboarding. If the copies live in one person's drive or in a signature tool nobody else can search, the document exists and cannot be used, which is the most common way this effort is wasted. A shared location and a consistent file name is sufficient.
What Goes In It, Section by Section
A workable agreement is one page. Seven short sections, and the ordering is deliberate because people read the top and skim the rest.
What you have been issued. An itemised list: item, model, serial number, date issued. This is the part that makes the document useful rather than ceremonial, and it is the part most templates omit in favour of generic language. Leave space for additions, or state that further items will be recorded separately.
Who owns it. One sentence. The equipment remains company property throughout. This is the sentence that prevents the conversation at the top of this article, and it does not need any supporting paragraph.
Looking after it. Two or three plain expectations: keep it reasonably safe, report damage or loss promptly, do not reconfigure it in ways that break its management. Keep the tone operational. An agreement written in the register of a liability waiver invites the reader to treat it as adversarial, and the reader is somebody who started on Monday.
Software and data. A short statement that the device is managed, that company data belongs to the company, and that personal use is permitted or not according to your actual policy. Say which, because the unwritten version of this rule is applied inconsistently and causes genuine confusion about what somebody may install.
When it comes back. The expectation, the timing and crucially who arranges it. The strongest version states that the company will arrange collection and provide packaging and a prepaid label, because that is both a better experience and a materially better recovery rate. If you cannot commit to that, say what the person is expected to do instead, in specific terms.
Replacements and additions. One line activating your reissue rule: further equipment will be recorded as it is issued, and this is the clause that stops the document going stale.
Acknowledgement. Name, date, and a signature or its electronic equivalent, stored somewhere that whoever handles offboarding can actually search, which is frequently not the same place onboarding keeps things.
| Section | Length | The thing most templates get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| What you have been issued | A table | Omitting serial numbers entirely |
| Who owns it | One sentence | Burying it in a paragraph of conditions |
| Looking after it | Two or three lines | Writing it as a liability transfer |
| Software and data | Two lines | Not saying whether personal use is allowed |
| When it comes back | Two lines | Putting the logistics on the individual |
| Replacements and additions | One line | No reissue rule, so the record goes stale |
| Acknowledgement | Name, date, signature | Storing it where offboarding cannot find it |
The Three Clauses That Cause Arguments
Across the agreements I have seen cause trouble, the same three clauses are responsible, and all three are avoidable with different wording rather than different policy.
The catch-all return clause. "All company property must be returned on termination of employment." It sounds complete and it is the source of most of the friction, because it is applied selectively in practice. Nobody is going to collect a worn headset or a three-year-old mouse mat, so the clause is routinely ignored for small items, and the moment a clause is visibly ignored for some items the reader reasonably treats it as negotiable for all of them. The fix is to list what you will actually ask for and say the rest belongs to the person, which is both more honest and more enforceable in the only sense that matters.
The damage clause written as liability. "The employee is responsible for any damage to company equipment." This creates a problem in two directions. It worries reasonable people who are now anxious about an accident, which is a bad thing to do to somebody in their first week, and it promises something the company usually has neither the intention nor, depending on the jurisdiction, the ability to pursue. A better version states the expectation of reasonable care and the requirement to report damage promptly, and says nothing about consequences. What the consequences are, and whether anything can be recovered, is a question for local advice rather than for a template.
The personal use clause that says nothing. Either omitted entirely or written as "equipment is provided for business use", which almost nobody follows and everybody knows almost nobody follows. The gap matters because it produces real confusion about whether somebody may install a personal application, use the machine at a weekend, or let a family member borrow it. Decide what your actual position is, write that, and accept that a slightly permissive rule people follow beats a strict one they ignore.
A fourth clause is worth mentioning for the opposite reason. Because its absence causes trouble rather than its wording. Most agreements say nothing about what happens if equipment is damaged or stops working, which leaves the person to guess whether they should report it, wait, or buy a replacement themselves. One sentence naming who to contact and promising a replacement route removes a whole category of silent problems, including the one where somebody works around a failing laptop for two months rather than asking.
Why It Is Signed at Issue and Never at Exit
This is the most important operational point in the article and it is worth being explicit about the mechanism.
A document presented at the start is housekeeping. The person is new, they are signing several things that week, and an equipment acknowledgement sits naturally among them. It carries no implication about them personally. The same document presented during offboarding is something else entirely: it arrives at a moment of departure, it is clearly about getting something from them, and it reads as a response to a suspicion even when none exists.
There is a second and more practical reason. At issue, the facts are available. You know the serial number because the device is in front of somebody, you know the date because it is today, and you know what was included because somebody is looking at the box. At exit, all of that has to be reconstructed from records of varying quality, and the reconstruction frequently produces a list the person disputes. Then you are arguing about the contents of a document rather than about the return of a laptop.
So the rule is simple. Nothing is issued without a record, and the record is acknowledged within the first week. If that feels heavy for a company of forty people, note that the alternative is not lighter, it is just deferred, and the deferred version lands on whoever handles your most awkward departure.
One note for distributed teams. There's no handover moment to attach this to. Put the acknowledgement in the first-week checklist alongside the equipment setup tasks, and give it to the same owner. Trying to attach it to the delivery itself does not work. Because couriers deliver boxes and have no interest in your paperwork, and asking somebody to sign for a laptop on the doorstep gets you a courier signature rather than an acknowledgement of terms.
What This Document Cannot Do
Being clear about the limits matters here more than in most of this category, because the temptation is to write the agreement as though it were a recovery mechanism.
It does not get equipment back on its own. Recovery is a logistics and timing problem, and the agreement contributes exactly one thing to it: the person is not surprised. That is genuinely valuable and it is not the same as a process. The process is the courier booked before the last working day, the packaging included, and the collection from the address the device was delivered to.
It doesn't settle liability. No template can tell you how damage or loss works where you are. Whether anything can be recovered, whether a deduction is possible, what notice applies, what a reasonable care standard is: all of that is jurisdiction-specific and belongs with somebody who advises on employment matters in the relevant country. Any article that states those rules confidently for a general audience is overreaching, and acting on it is a worse position than having no document at all.
It does not fix a record you never kept. If the agreement lists serial numbers and nothing maintains them afterwards, you have a signed snapshot of somebody's first week. And it cannot discover hardware nobody recorded. No equipment vendor and no asset platform does network discovery across this category: not Workwize, not Firstbase, not GroWrk, not allwhere. RemoAsset publishes $1,499 a year for its Subscription tier, with procurement and retrieval stated across 80+ countries and a 60% reduction on retrieval charges at that tier. Disclosure: RemoAsset is our own product. It does no network discovery, it does no software licence management, and only the Subscription tier publishes a figure because the pay-as-you-go side is quoted.
And it doesn't replace the handbook or the policy. The agreement records what one person holds, and the policy says what the company does generally, including what the standard kit is and how exceptions get handled. Those are different documents with different audiences, and merging them produces a four-page thing nobody signs attentively.
The Return Conversation, Scripted
Since the whole point of the document is to make the return boring, it is worth writing down what the return actually looks like. The script matters as much as the agreement, and it costs nothing.
The first message goes out with the rest of offboarding. Not separately, and not later. It says what is being collected, names the items, states that a courier will come and gives a date range. It asks for nothing except a confirmation of the address. That last detail is the one most often missed: the address on file is the one the device was shipped to, and people move, so confirming it is the single most useful question in the exchange.
The second message is the arrangement. A date, a window, a label if one is needed and a note that packaging is included. If your process asks the person to find a box, expect a proportion of collections to stall at that step, which is why the better arrangement is worth paying for. In my experience the packaging question is the difference between a collection that happens in the first week and one that drifts into the third.
Then one follow-up, and only one, if nothing has happened. Short, friendly, no implication. Most outstanding returns resolve at this point, and anything that does not has usually hit a practical obstacle rather than a refusal: the person is travelling, the courier came when they were out, the box is at a neighbour's. Asking what the obstacle is works better than restating the request.
After that, escalate to a person. Not to a process. A short call from somebody the leaver knew resolves more cases than a fourth email from an address they don't recognise. It also surfaces the genuine disputes early, which is useful, because those need a different conversation entirely and the sooner they start the better. Set a point at which you stop, record the outcome, and write it off on your documented schedule.
| Stage | Timing | What it says | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| First notice | With the rest of offboarding | Items, courier coming, confirm the address | Sending it after the last day |
| Collection details | Within a few days | Date, window, label, packaging included | Asking them to source a box |
| One follow-up | A week after the window | Short, friendly, asks what the obstacle is | Restating the request verbatim |
| Personal escalation | Two weeks out | A call from somebody they knew | A fourth email from a shared inbox |
| Close the record | On your written schedule | Unaccounted status, with a date | Leaving it open indefinitely |
Two things the script does that the agreement cannot. It keeps the request administrative, which is the tone that produces returns. And it generates a record of what was asked and when, which is what you will want if the device never arrives and somebody later asks what was done about it.
Who Actually Owns This Internally
A small point with a large effect on whether the document stays useful. The agreement has two owners and companies usually name only one.
The first owner drafts and maintains the wording. That belongs with people operations, with input from whoever advises on employment matters in each country. It changes rarely, perhaps once a year, and the maintenance is mostly checking that the care and return language still matches what the company actually does.
The second owner makes sure a record exists for every issue. That is a different job and it is operational rather than editorial. Because it happens every time somebody joins or receives a replacement machine. In practice it should sit with whoever already runs the equipment side of onboarding, since they are present at the moment the record has to be created and nobody else is.
Splitting those two is what keeps the system alive. A single owner with both responsibilities will do the drafting, because drafting is a discrete task that finishes, and will let the per-issue records slip, because those are a recurring obligation competing with everything else in an onboarding week. I have seen that happen more than once, and the symptom is always the same: an excellent template with signed copies for the first eleven hires and nothing after that.
One check worth running twice a year, and it takes twenty minutes. Take the last ten people who joined and the last five who received a replacement machine, and confirm a signed record exists for each. Fifteen names, fifteen lookups. If any are missing, the gap is in the onboarding step rather than in the document, and that is a much easier thing to fix once you know which one it is.
The Decision Table: Which Form Fits You
| Situation | Scale / Size | Setup | Primary Pain | Recommended Starting Point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One office, everyone hands kit back | Under 30 people | In-office | None | A line in the offer paperwork |
| First remote hires | 30 to 80 people | Mixed | No handover moment | One-page acknowledgement, first week |
| Returns need chasing | 50 to 300 people | Mixed | Slow, not refused | One-pager plus company-arranged collection |
| A leaver believed the kit was theirs | Any | Any | Expectation never set | One-pager, backfilled for existing staff |
| Fully distributed, high churn | 100 to 1,000 people | Distributed | Records stale within months | Per-issue record at handover |
| Security review asked about custody | Any | Any | No signed evidence | One-pager, stored searchably |
| Contractors as well as employees | Any | Any | No HR trigger exists | A separate record with its own end date |
I'd start with the one-page acknowledgement and add a reissue rule, which covers the majority of cases for about thirty minutes of work. The per-issue form is better and it only works if a system produces it.
Backfilling Existing Staff, Which Is Awkward and Worth Doing
If you are introducing this with people already holding equipment, you have a sequencing problem: the document is meant to be signed at issue and the issue happened two years ago.
Frame it as a record, not as a new obligation. Be transparent that it's a tidying exercise. Send each person the list of what your records say they have, ask them to confirm or correct it, and state plainly that the purpose is an accurate inventory. Most people will correct it helpfully, and the corrections are the part that's actually worth having: you will find machines that were replaced and never updated, monitors nobody recorded, and the occasional device that went back years ago and is still on the books.
Two things to avoid. I'd be firm about both of them. Do not use the backfill to introduce new care or liability language. Because attaching unfamiliar terms to a tidying exercise is how a reasonable request becomes a point of friction. And do not chase the people who do not reply. Record the non-response, treat your existing record as unconfirmed for those individuals, and move on, because a one-off inventory confirmation is not worth a conflict with anybody.
What the backfill actually buys you is a baseline with a date on it. Before this, your record was whatever accumulated. Afterwards, you can say that as of a given month the inventory was confirmed with employees and the error rate was a known figure, which is a much stronger position for any future question. Expect it to take a fortnight for a few hundred people and expect a response rate in the high eighties, which is enough.
Where the Agreement Sits Among Your Other Documents
Confusion about this costs more time than the drafting does, because four documents touch equipment and people routinely try to merge them.
The employment contract or offer letter carries the principle: equipment may be provided, it remains company property, it is returned at the end. One clause, signed by everybody, and it is the foundation the rest sits on. It cannot carry specifics and should not try.
The equipment or procurement policy describes what the company does generally. What the standard kit is, what the spending bands are, who approves exceptions and how accessibility requests are handled, and its audience is managers and the people operations team, and it changes when the company's approach changes.
The equipment agreement, the subject of this article, records what one individual holds and what happens to it, and its audience is one person. It changes when that person's equipment changes, which is why the reissue rule matters more than anything else in it.
The asset register holds the data: serial numbers, assignees, locations and history, across the whole fleet. Its audience is whoever has to answer a question about the fleet, and it is the only one of the four that needs to be queryable.
The common mistake is merging the second and third. That produces a four-page document which is part policy and part personal record, and it fails in both directions at once. It gets signed inattentively because most of it is not about the signer, and it goes stale because policy changes force a re-signing exercise nobody wants to run. Keep them separate, accept a little duplication between them, and let each one have a single audience.
| Document | Audience | Records | Changes when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contract or offer letter | Everybody | The principle of ownership and return | Rarely, with legal input |
| Equipment or procurement policy | Managers and people ops | What the company does generally | The approach changes |
| Equipment agreement | One individual | What that person holds | Their equipment changes |
| Asset register | Whoever answers fleet questions | Serials, assignees, locations, history | Continuously |
One sequencing note. If you have none of these, write the contract clause and the agreement first, in that order, because together they take under an hour and they prevent the specific failure this article opened with. The policy and the register are both more work and neither of them settles a disagreement with a departing employee.
The Cost of Not Having One
The costs are small individually, which is why this gets deferred, and they recur.
The first is the lost device, and it is the least interesting. A laptop that does not come back costs its depreciated value plus the hour somebody spent asking. Annoying, and survivable. It isn't the reason to bother. What makes it worth preventing is not the money but the frequency, because a company with no agreement and no stated collection process tends to lose a steady trickle rather than the occasional machine.
The second is the conversation. That one costs real goodwill. A departing employee who genuinely believed the equipment was theirs is not being difficult, and being told otherwise at the end of their employment is a sour note on an otherwise fine departure. People talk about how they were treated on the way out. The expense here is reputational and it is entirely avoidable by one sentence signed in somebody's first week.
The third is the evidence gap. When a customer or an auditor asks how you establish custody of company hardware, a signed acknowledgement per employee is a clean answer and a spreadsheet is not. This is not usually a serious finding on its own, and it is the kind of small gap that attracts a contractual condition: quarterly evidence, annual attestation, something recurring that occupies somebody for a day every three months.
So the diagnostic worth sitting with is this. Are you trying to recover devices, set expectations, or produce evidence, because the agreement is strong at one of those and only contributes to the others? The agreement does the second well and contributes to the third. Recovery is a logistics problem and it needs a process rather than a signature.
When You're Ready to Move Beyond an Unwritten Expectation
The signals are specific. A return has needed more than two reminders, and somebody has asked whether they can keep a monitor and you had to think about it. A leaver has claimed equipment as their own. You have people who received devices by courier and never discussed them with anybody. Any two of those and the unwritten version has run out.
Write the one-pager first. Items with serial numbers, one sentence on ownership, plain care expectations, a statement of who arranges the return, a reissue rule and a signature, and all of it on a single side of paper. Then take the care and return wording to whoever advises you on employment matters in each country you operate in. Because that is the part this article has deliberately not written for you.
If the harder half turns out to be the collection rather than the document, that is a logistics purchase. RemoAsset covers the distributed joiner and leaver cycle with a published annual figure and the three limits named above, and the single highest-return change you can make without buying anything is to trigger the collection before somebody's last working day rather than after it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an employee equipment agreement?
It's a short document. It records what equipment somebody has been issued and what happens to it. The useful version lists items with serial numbers, states that the equipment remains company property, sets plain care expectations, says who arranges the return and carries an acknowledgement with a date. One page is enough, and the itemised list is the part that makes it more than ceremonial.
When should it be signed?
At issue, in the first week. Never at exit. A document presented at onboarding is housekeeping among several things somebody signs that week. The same document presented during offboarding reads as a response to a suspicion, and by then the facts have to be reconstructed from records rather than observed, which is how you end up arguing about the contents of the list instead of the return of the laptop.
What should it say about damage or deductions?
Ask somebody local. Take it to whoever advises on employment matters in each country where you have people. Whether anything can be recovered, whether a deduction is possible and what a reasonable care standard looks like all vary by jurisdiction, including between countries that otherwise look similar. This article deliberately does not state those rules, and a downloaded template that does should be treated with suspicion.
Does it need to list serial numbers?
Yes, and this is the detail most templates skip. Without serial numbers the document establishes a principle and tells you nothing about what a particular person holds, which means you still cannot answer the question at offboarding. Capture them at issue, when the device is physically in front of somebody, because reconstructing them later from purchase records is slow and often wrong.
How do we handle contractors?
Use a separate record with its own end date. Contractor engagements finish on a date that lives in a statement of work rather than in any HR system, and that missing trigger is responsible for a large share of unreturned equipment, and no agreement fixes it on its own. Pair the record with a collection reminder tied to the engagement end date, and name an owner for it.
Should the agreement say the employee must post the laptop back?
It is better if it does not. Recovery rates are substantially higher when the company arranges the collection, provides packaging and sends a prepaid label, and every extra step asked of a former employee loses a percentage of devices. Asking somebody to source a box is probably the single most expensive sentence in most equipment policies, so write the opposite commitment in if you can honour it.
Can we introduce this for people who already have equipment?
Yes, and frame it as a records exercise rather than as a new obligation. Send each person what your records say they hold, ask them to confirm or correct it, and say the purpose is an accurate inventory. The corrections are the valuable part. Do not use the exercise to introduce unfamiliar liability language, and do not chase non-responders, since a one-off confirmation is not worth a conflict with anybody.
One Last Argument for Doing This Now
There is a version of this decision that gets made by default, and it is worth naming because it is the most common one. A company notices the gap, agrees it should be fixed, and defers it because nothing is currently on fire. Then it stays deferred. Because the thing that eventually forces it is a bad departure, and by then the document cannot help with the case that prompted it.
The deferral is costly for one reason. This agreement is retroactive in only one direction. Everybody you hire from today can sign one in their first week at almost no cost. Everybody already holding equipment needs a backfill exercise, which works but is a fortnight of somebody's attention and produces a response rate in the high eighties rather than complete coverage. So every month of delay quietly moves people from the cheap group into the expensive one, at roughly the rate you are hiring.
That is the whole argument. Not that the risk is severe, because for most companies it isn't, and not that recovery rates will transform, because the document contributes only one thing to those. It's that the cost of doing this rises steadily with headcount and the cost of doing it today is one template and ten minutes added to an onboarding checklist. Few things in this area have that shape.
Get it signed in somebody's first week, so that asking for the laptop back is never a conversation about trust.
