Editors Blog

Do you think your HR director is one of the best in the business? Or are you an HR director worthy of greater recognition?

We're calling for more entries into Personnel Today's 2008 HR Director of the Year Award.

This award is for an individual HR director who can demonstrate outstanding leadership. Entries should explain the contribution the HR director has made both to their own team and to the organisation as a whole.

Candidates must demonstrate that they have developed an effective HR team and present evidence of their contribution to the business. Past winners have submitted testimonials from across the organisation and its customer base to back up their entries.

Shortlisted individuals get invited to the glitzy awards ceremony in November and the chance of picking up the top prize in front of 1,300 guests. Fame and success awaits!

Visit www.personneltodayawards.com for more details and to enter.

A new website that allows employees to rank their workplace was launched this week.

Work Rewired is designed to give a heads up for prospective employees interested at working in certain companies, using feedback and written reviews

Anonymous entries are permitted, which may allow for the website to be abused.

In one of the most extreme cases of flexible working we at Personnel Today ever seen, it appears an executive director at Fenland District Council in Cambridgeshire will be working from his home in Adelaide.

Not Adelaide in the UK (and Google Maps has nine options), but Adelaide, Australia.

Yes, Mat Taylor, also the council's chief finance officer, wanted to leave his £100,000 job to move Down Under in October.  But the council has arranged for him to work one day a week over the next 12 months to manage its £18m annual budget from Australia by video link and email.

And they'll be paying him the pro-rata salary of £20,000 to do it.

Sick to death of the gloom and doom surrounding the dire state of the UK economy? Well, you'd better get used to it.

With Meryvn King's bleak forecast and this week's news that the number of firms planning redundancies has shot up to 27%, there's no denying now that Britain is inching uncomfortably close to the brink of the dreaded R-word.

It seems the depression of a recession is setting in - a 'feel-bad factor' that many of us are experiencing as we slide towards it. There's a chill in the air and we know it's not just the weather.