Woo, Friday is here! We had a great week, how about you? Spring is here in Atlanta and everything is starting to turn yellow from the pollen. Is it time to give your employee handbook a spring cleaning? While you decide, why don’t you check out the HR and policy management articles we gathered for you? Have a splendid weekend!
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Article eBook of the Week: This week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) is our very own eBook! Whether you’re using Blissbook, a slidedeck, a PDF, or some other platform to distribute your handbook, it pays to make it culture-first! Read the eBook to find out how.
TGIF! One more week gone forever. Since we’ll never get it back, let’s look ahead and get better for tomorrow. We plowed through a field full of HR and policy management articles this week so we could harvest (see what I did there?) the best stuff for you. Here’s hoping your Saturday and Sunday are Blissful!
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Article of the Week: The subject of this week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) is inspired by the recent Day Without a Woman protests in that the article’s headline has the word “Woman” in it. Hey, I didn’t say it was a strong connection. Also, the issue shouldn’t be a gender one – we all hold ourselves back in some way from time to time.
Since Blissbook was relaunched at the end of 2015, we’ve grown a lot. The ability to scale is taking on new importance for us, and we know it’s important to you.
Most HR software charges by the person. You try to figure out how many seats you need up front, you buy that much, and then you’re charged regardless of how many people are actually using it. Usually you’ll buy more than you need so you don’t have to add a seat every time you hire somebody. That means you end up paying for people who aren’t using the software or you micromanage your account to keep from being overcharged. Seems like a pain in the caboose or, at the very least, unfair.
Greetings from Atlanta with another update to the Blissbook platform! The month of October has the best weather here in Atlanta. For one whole month, we get to experience the weather southern Californians have all year long. On to the updates…
YouTube Video Support
You can now embed YouTube videos throughout the custom sections of your handbook. Need some video training for a policy? Or do you have a fun video explainer or some other demonstration? Now you can post that thing right next to the content. And since we know you’ll ask, support for Vimeo is coming soon!
BambooHR Groups
For our customers using the BambooHR integration, you can now define groups for your employees by Location, Division, or Department. This allows you to use the variable content feature in conjunction with your BambooHR integration. It also enables sharing by groups (or signature rounds).
Other Updates
We fixed a number of rare bugs and errors that should improve the stability and speed of Blissbook. There are also a few other upgrades:
Set who your notifications emails come from on your emails settings page (Click your company name in the top right, then Emails, then Settings).
Using our FTP file sync? You can see if there’s an issue with the sync on your People page. Just hover over the “Last updated” text.
If you’re a new customer who has recently asked your employees to sign acknowledgements (outside of Blissbook), and you don’t want to ask them again, you can set your signature round to only ask new employees.
Filter your lists of people by ID (if you’re including that in a CSV upload or file sync)
We love hearing from you, our customers. If you have any feature requests, bug reports, or if there’s anything else you’d like to see us tackle – please let us know! You can email us or click the ? in the top right corner of your Blissbook account to send us a support message.
Keeping your company protected doesn’t end on an employee’s first day. Over time, laws, regulations, and best-practices change and your handbook changes right alongside. We recently made it easy to keep employees informed of those changes but sometimes the changes are so big that you want to collect new signatures. Or maybe you added your code of conduct to make it easy to keep updated, and that code gets signed off every year. We’ve heard from you that these are very real situations and our latest update addresses them.
This also forced a change to the documentation center. The new documentation center’s purpose is to communicate the following, clearly and efficiently, on your behalf: Am I current? Am I doing everything I can to keep the company protected? If not, where (or who) are the risks?
Every employee now has a risk rating, and all those ratings contribute to an overall risk mitigation grade. If everyone has signed the latest signature round, you get an A+. If employees haven’t signed, you get points when you’ve made sure they know about the handbook and when they view it.
Look for the dashboard to get improved and tweaked over time!
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!
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:
The user and computer system know the same secret, such as a password, PIN, etc. Ideally, this secret is impossible for others to guess.
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.
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!
