October Friday! Aren’t those the best? We’re back on our new bi-weekly schedule with the best HR, leadership and policy management articles from the past 2 weeks. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

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Article of the Week: This week’s highlighted article (look for the ✦ below) was eye-opening for us as it describes a situation where you might be making a mistake even though you have the best of intentions.

Happy First Day of Fall! Did you know – the word “equinox” was formed by two Latin words: “Equi” is the Latin prefix for “equal” and “nox” is the Latin word for “night.” The equal refers to the fact that the amount of daylight and darkness on this day are nearly equal.

This week’s pumpkin-spiced newsletter is full of cinnamon, cloves, and the week’s best HR, leadership and policy management articles. Hope you enjoy it!

Starting today, we’ll be moving to a bi-weekly publishing schedule. We want to bring you only the very best articles, and choosing from a 2-week sample gives us a better opportunity for success.

Talk to you in October!

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Article of the Week: This week’s highlighted article (look for the ✦ below) is packed with information about just how hard it is for humans to understand the complex and variable world around them. Enjoy!

Friday already?! That was quick. Short week here in the states – hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! We’re back in the saddle with the week’s best HR, leadership and policy management articles for you. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

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Article of the Week: This week’s highlighted article (look for the ✦ below) is an oldie but a goodie. Given yesterday’s announcement of a data breach at Equifax affecting 140+ million consumers, it’s appropriate once again. The article describes what you can do in HR to help your employees, short of suggesting they change their name, SSN, and date of birth every few months. Enjoy!

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.

Until next time!

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.

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.