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)!

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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.

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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.

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?

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.

Until next time!

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.

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!

Your company values. Of course they’re important. And it’s easy to throw them into a list that can be used in many places. On the back of an ID card. Painted on a wall. In your email signature. You get the idea. But as Netflix points out in their culture deck, actual values are not just words you show in a lobby. Your actual values are shown by how you hire, reward and release people.

If you want everyone who makes those decisions at your company to make them correctly – i.e. based on your values – they must truly understand what those values are and, more importantly, what they mean. That requires more than just a list.

Creating this type of training content can be difficult. With that in mind, here’s an excerpt from our upcoming e-book entitled “How to Make a Culture-First Employee Handbook” that might give you the helping hand you need to turn your values content into more than just a list.

Company Values

Every company has core values, whether they’re written down or not. To make them more than just nice-sounding words, everyone at your company must live them unconditionally every day.

Before any decision is final, employees should ask, “Is it in line with our values?”

Core values are the behaviors, skills and attributes that employees value in all people. They define who you and your employees are deep down inside. Each value must be universally beneficial: something you think everyone should hold in high regard; not just those within your company (yes, even competitors).

Tips:

The format of your values should be an adjective for a person. You can think of values as virtues. Most companies have 3 to 10 core values.

You may want to go into detail about each value to make sure employees know what you mean. If you’re having trouble thinking of some good details, try answering some of these questions:

• What actions demonstrate this value, in general? You can write these out as: You do / make / think / identify / recognize / understand, etc. …
• Why is this a value? What is its intent?
• What are some specific examples of how someone can demonstrate this value?
• If someone asked what the value means, is there an easy answer? Why is it a good answer?
• What other adjectives would you use to describe a person with this value?
• Is this value a new idea of how to live your life? What’s the old way and why is this way better?
• Are there any exceptions to this value?
• Are there any famous quotes that express this value?

Bonus!

A generous and thoughtful Blissbook customer saw the values help text inside of Blissbook while they were creating their employee handbook and were inspired to send a list of dozens of example values. We thought it’d be valuable to pass on so click that link if you’re interested. And if you’re in need of a therapist in DC please talk to our friends at Therapy Group of DC!