Your employee handbook is one of the most important tools your company has. It sets expectations, explains benefits, supports compliance, and helps new hires feel at home. While some organizations see it as a simple checkbox for signatures, others recognize it as a chance to genuinely connect with employees, and design plays a big part in making that happen.

After all the work you’ve put into getting the content right, it’s worth making sure people actually want to engage with it. Poor formatting, dense text, or clunky layouts can quietly get in the way of clarity, trust, and usefulness.

But when the design is thoughtful and aligned with your culture, your handbook becomes something more: a tool that unites your team, reinforces your values, and supports real understanding. That’s the thinking behind the psychology of Blissbook, where design based on the insights of behavioral economics makes handbooks more effective and human.

Design isn’t just about fonts or colors. It’s about accessibility, readability, and how well your policies connect with people. A well-designed handbook invites engagement and makes the information inside easier to absorb.

In the sections that follow, we’ll look at seven of the most common employee handbook design fails and how to fix them. Whether you’re building a handbook from scratch or refreshing your current one, these tips will help you turn a static document into a branded, engaging resource your team will actually want to use.

Workplace success often boils down to clear communication, and your employee handbook plays a major role in getting everyone on the same page. Fostering a harmonious and productive work environment requires more than just a competent team. It demands a clear understanding of your company culture, policies and procedures, and expectations.

In this article, we’ll unravel the complexities of creating an effective employee handbook, breaking the process down into simple steps. So, whether you’re refining an existing handbook or starting from scratch, our practical tips will help you create a successful handbook.

Last Friday, we talked about a new beginning for Blissbook. Our upcoming release marks the start of that new beginning, so without further adieu, here are the newest Blissbook features. Look for this release to drop within the next 48 hours!

Overhauled Sharing and Access Control

Handbooks now have their own sharing and access control that’s separate from your organization. You can still share something with your entire organization, but you don’t have to.

So go ahead, share your Blissbook with your lawyers or with the HR pro you met at the last SHRM meeting. It’s easy!

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.