Some new additions have been made to XpertHR's employment glossary, which provides clear explanations of over 450 legal and employment-related words, phrases and abbreviations.

XpertHR was named business website of the year 2008 last night at the Association of Online Publishers awards - the online publishing industry oscars.

I've just published the second XpertHR screencast. This one shows how to use XpertHR's content icons to find items of interest quickly and easily.

Some new additions have been made to XpertHR's employment glossary, which provides clear explanations of over 450 legal and employment-related words, phrases and abbreviations.

CELRE is currently recruiting new participants for the 2008 Distribution Salary Survey. If your company is a player in the industry and would like to benchmark salaries at all levels from forklift truck driver to warehouse manager, we would like to hear from you.

The best bit about it is that new participants this year will get the full report free of charge.

I spent this morning recording and publishing the first XpertHR screencast - a demonstration of the optional "idea cloud" enhancement for our search results page.

This will be the first of several video guides on aspects of the service that will be published over the next few weeks.

If you are reading this blog using Internet Explorer you are in good company. According to our web analytics system, some 91% of readers of this blog and the main XpertHR web site over the past month accessed the services using IE - as illustrated in the graph above, which you can click to see a full version.

The techies here at XpertHR Towers will be getting their heavy-duty hammers and monkey-wrenches out at the weekend to do a spot of essential blog maintenance.

A story on The Scotsman's website today has prompted me to introduce an award for most misguided employment-related news story.

Our inaugural Golden P45 Award goes to a report on Edinburgh City Council's efforts to address equal pay issues among its workforce which informs us that

"Workers have been denied extra payments offered to their female colleagues because sex discrimination laws do not apply to men."

Admittedly, I'm no expert in Scottish law. Maybe their unfair dismissal laws don't apply to those who have been sacked either.

James Purnell is to return to the Department for Work and Pensions as secretary of state following Peter Hain's resignation from the Cabinet this afternoon.

Purnell was previously pensions minister, before moving on last summer to become culture secretary. In his previous incarnation at the DWP, Purnell distinguished himself by writing a regular pensions reform blog.

XpertHR's parent company, Reed Business Information, was named online business publisher of the year last night by the Association of Online Publishers.

XpertHR itself was also shortlisted in a further two categories: as business editorial team of the year, and as business website of the year. Sister site Personneltoday.com joined XpertHR on the business website shortlist.

Confused about the distinction between ordinary and additional maternity leave? Not sure what the difference is between a case management discussion and a review hearing? Come across a Latin phrase? Help is at hand.

If you miss the days when BBC Television cleared its schedules to offer wall-to-wall coverage of the Trades Union Congress, then the TUC has a little treat for you.

If you're lucky enough to receive an IRS email bulletin you may have noticed a new addition to the options on the right-hand side of the page. Sharing benchmarking data is nothing new to IRS - take a look at any of the 15 pieces of research that we've already completed this year. What is new is the ability to see what surveys we're currently running.

The end of August is almost upon us, and with it comes an end to the traditional newspaper silly season - though sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

Your friends you choose; your family you're born with. But the people you work alongside for eight hours a day are chosen by a team of middle managers. It's no wonder the office is such a war zone.

My Personnel Today colleague Natalie Cooper is launching The Work Clinic, a blog dedicated to workplace counsel and career advice, today - and it kicks off with the results of a confidential survey of people's top office irritations.

More than 7 million people worked in production industries in 1907; a century later that has fallen to just 3 million. But after 100 years of industrial rise and fall, there is a great deal about work and industry in the Edwardian era which is familiar today.

The publication of this year's Annual Business Inquiry has given the Office for National Statistics a good excuse to draw attention to it, by highlighting some interesting findings from the first Census of Production (PDF format, 76KB), published a century ago.

Here's a video from the common craft show explaining RSS feeds for beginners.

Click To Play

Previous post on this topic:
Feed frenzy

Office life is a rich source of inspiration for cartoonists, and Dilbert is without doubt the uber-cartoon of the genre. Tormented and exploited by his heartless boss, Dilbert is an everyman for our times.

But do you see anything of yourself in Catbert, the evil HR manager and possibly the world's most famous fictional human resource practitioner (albeit in cat form)? Apparently, American HR people do.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who draws from experience of office life, having both an MBA and 16 years' corporate employment under his belt, was guest speaker at a recent Society for Human Resource Management conference in Orlando, Florida. Apparently he had them rolling in the aisles.

Looks to me as though the speech lost a little in the translation, but perhaps Adams' own blog will do it for you.

XpertHR is now offering a range of feeds across a number of employment-related topics, including employment law, HR strategy and practice, pay and benefits, recuitment, and training and development. In most cases, you get the titles and summaries for free while the main content requires a subscription. But the employment law FAQs feed is free to all.

Also, why not subscribe to this blog's feed and my shared items feed on Google Reader while you're about it?