The weekend is almost here! We hope your work week was fun, challenging, and drama-free. We read a wheelbarrow full of articles to find the best HR and policy management content for your reading pleasure. Enjoy and have an awesome Saturday (and Sunday)!
Article of the Week: This week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) takes a “Moneyball” approach to hiring. We like it because (a) we like baseball and (b) finding creative ways to grow your company gives you a competitive advantage. What other under-valued objects have you discovered and utilized to your advantage?
Friday Friday Friday. Another week in the books. You deserve a break. How’s 2 days off sound? Until then, we’ve gathered the best HR and policy management resources to help you get ever so closer to the weekend.
Article of the Week: This week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) takes a deep look at the unspoken things that make some people great at their job and others… not so much. There are also 5 lists that would be great inspiration for someone creating content around core values.
Your company can reduce the risk of a data breach by having strong data safeguards in place. A great way to disseminate these data safeguards with an Information and Data Security Policy in your employee handbook. This article covers an overview of all the different information that you may want to include in your data security policy.
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!
It seems like every month there’s a new story of a company being hacked. Earlier this year it was Anthem / Blue Cross Blue Shield and last year it was Target (who recently settled for $10mm) and Home Depot. The most recent incident was a couple weeks ago when the US Government’s Office of Personnel Management was hacked.
This one hit home for me. Many years ago, I passed all the necessary tests to be a Foreign Service Officer. This included a thorough background check, which includes where I’ve lived, where I’ve traveled, any drugs I’ve ever taken, and extensive personal information of my friends and family. It’s all now in the hands of the Chinese government and whoever else they sell/give it to. Oops.
Think this problem is going away? Not a chance.
Now, although it’s up to IT/IS departments to keep information safe, there is something HR can do to help their employees prevent identity theft.
Have them place a security freeze on their credit report.
Pace Salsa seemed to have had a pretty epic social media failure over the weekend, which the Huffington Post covers pretty well. The twitter conversation contains a ton of intrigue, including:
Robots
Salsa blackmail
Fake Twitter accounts
Employees trying to get others fired
Pretty great, huh? Too bad it was totally fake! But for training purposes, let’s pretend it was real. The obvious lesson is not to automate your Twitter account. Twitter is simply another communication channel and you wouldn’t automate your responses to support emails, would you? Didn’t think so.
Josh, a new dad, is suing his employer, Time Warner, for discrimination because they won’t give him the same 10 weeks paid leave that they give new moms and new adoptive parents (dads included). His claim is discrimination. If these other classes of people get that benefit, why not him?
What’s the Law Say?
The Family Medical Leave Act requires an employer to allow 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a new child. If both parents work at the same company, those 12 weeks can be split any way the parents choose (but they’re still capped at 12 weeks). Employers may also require employees to exhaust paid leave options first before unpaid leave kicks in. Employees can elect to do this anyway if they so desire.
There is no law that says employers must provide paid leave to employees. That makes this case purely about discrimination. Or is it?
Since we launched Blissbook, we’ve done a lot of talking with customers about the content that goes into one. We classify this information into three categories: culture, onboarding / general information, and case-specific. Although no Blissbook is the same, they will all contain one or more of these types of information.
Culture
Bubble Hockey ≠ Culture
Defining company culture is hard. Is it chemistry? Fun things people like to do together? How employees or customers are treated? It could be all of those things, but we agree with Rand Fishkin in that company culture can be boiled down to the following:
What you believe in and why your company exists (your mission and guiding principles).
Who you collectively are deep down inside (your core values).
Whether or not you respect these things (how you hire, reward and release people).
These are not shallow questions and they require deep thought. There should also be collaboration with all employees within a company so that everyone is bought in and the culture reflects everyone’s belief of what the company is, not just leadership’s view of it.
We wrote a guest article on Zen Payroll’s blog about the new Employee Handbooks that companies are putting out these days, how they differ from the handbooks of old, and when companies should think about getting either one of them.
Here’s how the article starts…
Traditionally, employee handbooks have been snooze-inducing legal documents crafted or at least reviewed by a lawyer with the goal of protecting an employer from lawsuits and fines. But the definition of an employee handbook is expanding. Recently, companies have begun usingemployeehandbooks in a different way: to define and publish their company culture for employees and recruits alike. These culture handbooks set the tone for interactions throughout a company and paint a picture of what new employees can expect upon joining. So when do handbooks matter to you, and which kind should you have? Depending on your company’s size, you may have one, both, or none.
