If you've not yet lent it an ear, XpertHR's Weekly podcast provides an excellent, thoroughly enjoyable and completely free weekly digest of key HR and employment issues. The current edition includes an introduction to the newly launched XpertHR benchmarking service from my colleague David Shepherd, explaining how it works and what XpertHR subscribers can get out of it.

The implications for the workplace of social networking technologies and how people interact with them look set to rise in importance as touchstone issues for HR over the coming decade. And reading, commenting on, or even writing your own HR blogs can represent one of the most direct and accessible routes into social networking for HR professionals and employment practitioners. We're currently running a brief online survey of HR blogs and blogging habits (external website), and we'd greatly appreciate your views. It's entirely free to take part, and should take up no more than 30 seconds of your time. The results will be published here on Employment Intelligence in the coming weeks.

I'm delighted to announce that XpertHR's new benchmarking service (subscription required) has been launched today (Thursday 14 January 2010). This is a major enhancement to XpertHR, providing our subscribers with the opportunity to access a huge resource of customisable HR benchmarking data. The interactive features of XpertHR benchmarking enable you to tailor your own bespoke HR benchmarking data. We think it'll quickly prove to be an invaluable tool for our users.

Strictly speaking this is 14 floors above the XpertHR editorial offices. The picture shows south west London still in the grip of snow and with the threat of more to come as the weather continues to cause high levels of employee absence.

With the busiest months of the pay setting calendar now upon us, employers can turn to some bang up-to-date salary data from CELRE, published exclusively on XpertHR Job Pricing, to inform their decisions.

Annual reports published in the final few weeks of 2009 as part of CELRE's core business survey cover staff working in HR and personnel, finance and accounts, and sales and marketing roles.

There is also fresh data for engineers and technicians, and for the distribution and media industries.

The trial of a new occupational health advice line for employers is launched today in seven pilot areas in England, and in the whole of Wales and Scotland. The service (called Health for Work in England, Healthy Working Lives in Scotland and Healthy Working Wales in Wales) is part of the Government's plan to reform support services for people with mental health conditions, aimed at helping people remain in work, or get back into work if they are unemployed.

With both main political parties now wedded to the idea of public sector pay freezes and major private sector employers such as British Airways weighing in with similar initiatives of their own, reward specialists may wonder how they are going to fill their days.

Many HR professionals’ remit extends beyond the UK to other European countries. This demands that they are familiar with employment laws and developments in countries across Europe.

XpertHR covers employment law across Europe, with information on national employment law in European countries, covering issues such as the law on Sunday working, hours of work, holiday and maternity leave, and trade union recognition rights.

XpertHR JobPricing has won a double dose of recognition in prestigious industry awards.

The service, which allows subscribers to access the CELRE salary survey database and create tables and charts based on their own criteria, has been shortlisted twice in the 2009 Data Publishers Association awards.

From next week a UK directory will be connecting customers to mobile phone users in the UK, something that may well prove to be occasionally useful, and occasionally irritating.

The Information Commissioner was poised to order the release of the full details of MPs' expenses, including receipts, three years ago but reportedly changed his mind after pressure was exerted by the House of Commons. Read more on the Telegraph website.

This blog is now approaching its second birthday, during which time the number of visitors has steadily built up while those of us working at XpertHR have gradually incorporated blog posting into our daily routines.

Since we track traffic using Google Analytics, I thought you might be interested to see some statistics about how the site is used. (Don't worry, Google Analytics doesn't allow us to know who our individual visitors are or which pages they visit.)

It’s always good to get out to a conference, sit in a room of HR professionals and hear exactly what’s concerning them - and yesterday’s IRS discipline and grievance masterclass at the Cumberland Hotel in London was no exception.

You wait forever for the employment tribunal statistics - and then two sets come along at once. Well, not exactly, as the figures for April 2008 to February 2009 provided to XpertHR by the Tribunals Service today are only provisional, and therefore subject to change. They do, however, give an indication of what the final figures are likely to look like.

Well, the bad news is that the Employment Tribunals Service has decided against the disclosure of the 2007/08 employment tribunals statistics, which we requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

It looks like Freedom of Information Requests are the way forward for employment tribunal statistics, with Eversheds apparently requesting (and receiving) recent age discrimination figures (see story on FT.com).

If you are online and reading this, the chances are you aren't one of those people who regards the whole interwebby thing as a passing fad akin to CB radio.

Quite possibly, you've even read a few reports recently about Twitter - and wondered whether this is perhaps one futile tech development too far. But stay with it, and you may even discover a useful application for it in your own working life.

Almost half way through February 2009 and still no sign of the employment tribunal statistics for the period from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008. With an increasing number of XpertHR subscribers demanding to know why the figures on our site are so out of date (we can only pass on what we’re given), we’ve been left with no choice but to submit a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice asking them to reveal last year’s figures.

If you’re suffering from micro-boredom at any point this week, take a minute to acquaint yourself with the words and phrases destined to become part of your working life in 2009.

Do you know how many disability discrimination claims were brought in 2007/08? Or the average age discrimination award in that period? How about the number of unfair dismissal cases where more than £50,000 compensation was awarded?

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.

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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?