Summer has officially arrived and that means 90°+ temperatures here in Atlanta, GA and at least that hot in Washington, DC. That heat plus the wonderful east coast humidity gives us plenty of reasons to stay inside and crank out some new updates for our beloved customers.

Changed Your Handbook? Tell Everyone!

When you publish updates to your handbook, you’ll now see the above modal. If you choose to send a notification, we’ll email everyone with access to your handbook whatever note you enter in. And because we know you always want to look good, you can now…

Customize All Notifications

We’re talking text, colors, font, who they’re from, hair color. OK, we made one of those up.

All of this can be accomplished on the new “Emails” tab within your Organization. Click your company name in the top right to find this tab.

This week we released some exciting changes to the Blissbook platform. Although many of the changes are under the surface, there are a couple of new features that you can take advantage of right now.

Documentation Center

The main update is the conversion of the Dashboard page to the Document Center. The Documentation Center puts all the documentation you would ever need for an employee in one place, easily accessible and printable with just a couple clicks.

You’ll notice a new column: Communications! Blissbook now keeps track of all the communications you’ve sent to your users.

You can click any of the dates within these columns to see a detailed report for any user. You can even print that report to a PDF.

Users Tracked By ID

In order to implement this change, we changed the way Blissbook keeps track of users. It’s now done by ID, rather than email address. That means you can now change someone’s email address and we’ll track them as the same person and keep their documentation in order.

It also means we can handle archived users much better. You now have self-serve access to reporting for archived users.

These two changes set us up for some big improvements this summer. Custom notifications! Repeat signatures! Self-service to old versions of your handbook! We’re also working on increased video support and a new editor to make customizing your handbook even easier.

Other Changes

• Support for two new SSO options: Office 365 and Okta. If your company uses either of these services, you can enable them on your Integrations tab to make it easy for users to sign in to their Blissbook.
• Searching your published handbook is better – you can now see what chapter or section text belongs to within the search results.
• Using our variable content feature? You should now see tags for the sections or chapters for which it’s enabled. You no longer need to open the access control modal to see what your settings are.
• Is Blissbook down? Probably not… our uptime is over 99.9%. See for yourself on our new status page: http://status.blissbook.com
• Lots of minor bug fixes and upgrades to the Blissbook technology.

We’re looking forward to a fun summer here at Blissbook. Stay cool out there!

Your company values. Of course they’re important. And it’s easy to throw them into a list that can be used in many places. On the back of an ID card. Painted on a wall. In your email signature. You get the idea. But as Netflix points out in their culture deck, actual values are not just words you show in a lobby. Your actual values are shown by how you hire, reward and release people.

If you want everyone who makes those decisions at your company to make them correctly – i.e. based on your values – they must truly understand what those values are and, more importantly, what they mean. That requires more than just a list.

Creating this type of training content can be difficult. With that in mind, here’s an excerpt from our upcoming e-book entitled “How to Make a Culture-First Employee Handbook” that might give you the helping hand you need to turn your values content into more than just a list.

Company Values

Every company has core values, whether they’re written down or not. To make them more than just nice-sounding words, everyone at your company must live them unconditionally every day.

Before any decision is final, employees should ask, “Is it in line with our values?”

Core values are the behaviors, skills and attributes that employees value in all people. They define who you and your employees are deep down inside. Each value must be universally beneficial: something you think everyone should hold in high regard; not just those within your company (yes, even competitors).

Tips:

The format of your values should be an adjective for a person. You can think of values as virtues. Most companies have 3 to 10 core values.

You may want to go into detail about each value to make sure employees know what you mean. If you’re having trouble thinking of some good details, try answering some of these questions:

• What actions demonstrate this value, in general? You can write these out as: You do / make / think / identify / recognize / understand, etc. …
• Why is this a value? What is its intent?
• What are some specific examples of how someone can demonstrate this value?
• If someone asked what the value means, is there an easy answer? Why is it a good answer?
• What other adjectives would you use to describe a person with this value?
• Is this value a new idea of how to live your life? What’s the old way and why is this way better?
• Are there any exceptions to this value?
• Are there any famous quotes that express this value?

Bonus!

A generous and thoughtful Blissbook customer saw the values help text inside of Blissbook while they were creating their employee handbook and were inspired to send a list of dozens of example values. We thought it’d be valuable to pass on so click that link if you’re interested. And if you’re in need of a therapist in DC please talk to our friends at Therapy Group of DC!

This is a long one, so let’s get right to it.

Signing in to Blissbook has been a pain in the butt for our non-SSO (Single Sign-On) users for a long time. It’s been a pain because Blissbook is password-based and… get ready… we never ask users to create a password. Users get a link in their invitation email that signs them in to their Blissbook automatically. However, if they ever sign out or use a different browser, they can’t access their Blissbook without a password. The workaround is to tell Blissbook you forgot your password and the system emails you a link to set up a new one.

We want to make it easy to access Blissbook. If your company’s policies are hard to access, they aren’t protecting your company. That’s bad!

There are 3 basic options for a computer system to confirm a user’s identity:

1. The user and computer system know the same secret, such as a password, PIN, etc. Ideally, this secret is impossible for others to guess.
2. The user has a physical object in their possession that verifies their identity to the system, such as a key, a bank card, a phone/computer/key fob with a secret token, etc.
3. The system knows a physical characteristic of the user, such as a fingerprint, eye iris, voice, etc. This is known as biometrics.

Blissbook has traditionally used option #1. We’re switching to #2.

When a user tries to sign in to Blissbook, they’ll enter their email address. If that email address is in Blissbook, we’ll know who they are and what organization they belong to.

They’ll then get an email with a special link that they’ll click to sign in to Blissbook. Users will remain signed in for 60 days unless they explicitly sign out or switch web browsers.

This means your employees never have to create or remember a password to access their employee handbook. They just need access to their email account!

Happy Spring, faithful Blissbook reader! It’s already in the 70s here in Atlanta as we celebrate our latest release of goodies. This update touches both parts of our tagline: protect your company and show employees you care.

Search and a Table of Contents

Published handbooks got a big upgrade a few weeks ago with a new table of contents that includes links to all of your policies, not just the major chapters. We also added search, so handbook readers can easily find anything they’re looking for, whether it’s in a hidden section (the Nitty Gritty) or not. Just one more thing to help make sure you never hear “I couldn’t find the policy” ever again.

Better Branding

Part of showing employees you care is presenting information to them with the same amount of effort and attention that your company puts in to presenting information to customers. We’ve got 2 updates to help you do that.

You can now upload a custom favicon (the little icons in your browser tabs) so everything about your Blissbook can be “on-brand”.

A lot of our customers like the ability to add images to their “guiding principles” section (or whatever they’ve turned that section into). Since the core values section is basically the same format, we thought our users might like to add images there as well. Now you can! Check out the Rocket Whale Blissbook to see it in action.

Easy Sign In

This one is a doozie. We changed the way signing in to Blissbook works, so that our users’ employees don’t have to create or remember a password. This one deserves a longer explanation – read that here.

In January, the Blissbook team survived 2+ feet of snow in DC and at least 7 minutes of flurries in Atlanta in order to bring you some new Blissbook goodness!

Here are the updates for early February!

Upgraded Print & PDF

For a long time, we’ve supported printing a handbook by applying special styling that gets applied if a user printed a handbook from their browser. This didn’t work right for some older browsers, the formatting wasn’t always perfect, and there was nothing in the interface that let users know they could print. Those days are over!

All users now have a “Print to PDF” option when viewing their handbook. This opens or downloads a pdf file (depending on your browser) that can easily be printed. This works across all browsers.

Admins also have a link at the bottom of their CMS, next to “view”, that they can use to print the handbook. You can also “print” a preview, although it gets a DRAFT watermark.

The print/PDF handbook respects all access control, so users printing a handbook will only be able to print the content that they’ve been given access to.

If you take a look and notice that your print version looks funky, please let us know so we can fix it!

Happy New Year! We’ve had a fun and busy winter so far. Our new customers (one with 2500 employees) are pushing our engineering team hard to support new functionality, and we’re rocking it!

Here are the latest updates:

Employee ID

You can now include an employee ID in your import file. That ID will stick with an employee throughout their life on Blissbook and is included in all reports and exports. If an employee’s email address changes, they’ll still be tracked as the same person. We’ll be migrating even more functionality over to this paradigm as we move along to ensure your data in Blissbook matches how you work in the real world.

SFTP HRIS User Sync

Linking your employee list in Blissbook to your HRIS means adding and removing employees happens automatically. However, some HRIS systems are not API-friendly. That means we can’t program something to link the two, even if we wanted to.

Now, if you have one of these HRIS systems, you don’t have to worry! We can work with your IT team to set up an automatic and secure file transfer. First up is the SFTP format. FTPS (notice the slightly different acronym) is coming very soon!

Signature Image

Does your CEO want to put a real signature on that welcome message? You can now attach an image as a signature so that it shows up exactly how you’d like. Check it out on the Welcome chapter of the Content tab.

Our next update will be a big improvement to the print version of your handbook. Stay tuned!

Last Friday, we talked about a new beginning for Blissbook. Our upcoming release marks the start of that new beginning, so without further adieu, here are the newest Blissbook features. Look for this release to drop within the next 48 hours!

Overhauled Sharing and Access Control

Handbooks now have their own sharing and access control that’s separate from your organization. You can still share something with your entire organization, but you don’t have to.

So go ahead, share your Blissbook with your lawyers or with the HR pro you met at the last SHRM meeting. It’s easy!

When Blissbook launched in late 2013, we felt pretty good about what we knew and what we were launching. We combined our knowledge of the policies and procedures industry that we acquired over 1-2 years of research with the momentum we saw behind engagement initiatives and the growing sentiment that company culture is something companies should invest in.

It made a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the real world often doesn’t make sense. In the real world, people don’t act rationally. It may seem like they do from the outside, but if you dig deep enough, you’ll find it’s usually an illusion.

Looking back with that knowledge, we realize we knew a lot less than we thought. I’d say we were at the beginning of the “I’m an expert” phase shown below.

In late 2014, after an intense 6 months of startup engineering education, we decided that we knew nothing. Or, at least, not enough. Not only that, we were burned out. So although we remained committed to serving our existing Blissbook customers, we weren’t sure what to do next. We took a break and in addition to taking on some consulting work with Home Depot (our team has deep, real expertise in designing and building software), we built a completely unrelated product in a totally different market.

 

Blissbook, if you didn’t know, is built by the amazing folks at RW Code Lab. By keeping our “day jobs”, we make sure Blissbook remains independent. This is very important to us because we always want to make sure Blissbook’s users long-term interests are our first priority.

Sometimes we’ll post about topics on the RW Code Lab blog that we think would be interesting to our Blissbook audience. Today is one of those days.

Change management in the enterprise is hard! We have an interesting take on it (boats and sharks?!), so head on over to the RW Code Lab blog to give it a read.