Happy Cinco de Mayo! May the 5th be with you! Did we do that right? No? It doesn’t matter – it’s time to read the week’s best HR, policy management, and self-improvement articles! We put ’em together just for you.

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Article of the Week: It’s self-improvement week here at Blissbook HQ. This week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) is about recognizing your blind spots. The key? Listening. Here’s to shutting our yappers!

If you don’t already have an employee handbook, writing one can be difficult. What policies do you include?  How serious should it be? Should you include cultural information? If so, what? How do you make it not boring? How do you distribute it?

We’ve been talking with a partner who’s hosting an employee handbook workshop later this month and the conversation quickly turned to company culture. In her words:

“Employee Handbooks are not just critical for mitigating risk, they introduce employees to company culture and how they fit in.”

In order to create our eBook, How to Write a Culture-First Employee Handbook, we compiled a list of references – samples, resources, and articles that helped shape our thinking on the topic.

We’d thought it might be nice to share them with you!

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.

It’s March AND Friday? Yes! Spring is just around the corner. Of course, here in Atlanta, it started a month ago. I digress… We read so so many HR and policy management articles this week just so we could filter out the best stuff for you. I suppose we also learned some things too. Have a great weekend!

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Article of the Week: The subject of this week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) is the Winner’s Effect and how small victories give us the confidence to keep winning.

Are there ways you can show off some wins to your team so they’ll keep the win streak alive?

Well hello Friday! It’s the last day of the work week, which means you’re relaxing because you already finished everything you wanted to this week. Right? Thought so. We sorted through heaps of HR and policy management articles for you to find the very best content. Enjoy and try to get some rest this weekend. You deserve it!

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Article of the Week: This week’s highlighted piece (look for the ✦ below) discusses evidence that focusing on an unrealized future might make your goals harder to achieve. Instead, try to focus on creating systems and habits that provide incremental change. Discipline is a virtue that can be trained! How do you achieve your goals?

We’re finally getting around to launching our weekly newsletter and since the info we’re blasting out every week is so valuable, we thought we’d post it on the ol’ blogaroo as well. We’ll be back every Friday with the best HR and policy management content we can find to help you become a better HR pro, leader, and person. Without further adieu…

TGIF, am I right?! You made it through the week and to commemorate your accomplishment, we’ve gathered the best HR and policy management resources for your reading pleasure. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

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Article of the Week: We love our first ever A.O.T.W. (look for the ✦ below) because it highlights just how important language is. Language exists just as much to influence as it does to communicate. How are you influencing the people you communicate with? On that note…

Which of this week’s articles do you think is the most useful?

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!

The importance of safeguarding your company’s and your company’s customers’ data is obvious. Since I wrote about data breaches a year ago in regards to how to place a security freeze to prevent identity theft, the list of prominent organizations who’ve suffered from data breaches is long. Disney, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee, the University of Connecticut, hotel(s)… the list goes on – and that’s just in the last 45 days!

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.