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?
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!
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.
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!
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.
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?
