Lucie Mitchell: Editor’s blog

Dear members,

I wanted to take this opportunity to say goodbye...for now. I am off on maternity leave at the end of this week and will be leaving you in the very capable hands of Charlie Duff, former assistant editor of the HR Director magazine. From this Friday, you can email Charlie at editor@hrzone.co.uk if you want to contact her about anything.

In the meantime, I hope you continue to enjoy HRzone.co.uk and please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any comments or suggestions for the site!

Thanks for your support,

Lucie Mitchell
Editor, HRzone.co.uk

HRzone.co.uk is dedicating September to equality and diversity. We've already covered the benefits of a diverse workforce and the challenge of Generation Y, and we have a whole host of other articles on this topic coming up over the next few weeks so look out for them on the site!

One issue we will be looking at is the reasons for and against having a default retirement age and whether or not it should be scrapped. In July, HRzone reported that the government is to bring forward a review of the default retirement age by a year, to 2010.

Corporate wellness has proven to be a hot topic with many of you, and one of our contributing experts in this area is Rob Woollen, who has leant his knowledge to articles including Cutting the cost of wellness as well as manging our Wellness/wellbeing at work discussion group.

Rob's presently running a survey to find out how relevant HR professionals think wellness is, why they consider it important (or not) and what barriers they have come up against in implementing wellness schemes. A prize of a free Nintendo Wii is up for grabs for one lucky participant.

Click here to take part in the survey.

Rob has kindly offered to exclusively detail the results of the study on HRzone.co.uk - so watch this space.

Next month on HRzone.co.uk, we will be taking an in-depth look at how to manage the survivors, following any redundancy process. So, this obviously involves issues such as employee engagement, loyalty and motivation, talent management, performance management, communication and trust.

To this end, HR has a tough job ensuring the top talent don’t get up and leave, and that morale, trust, engagement and productivity don’t decline during these tough times and after a number of job losses have been made. Otherwise, what hope have UK businesses got in emerging from the recession a success, and remaining competitive in a global market?

The HR department must create an environment in which motivation levels are maintained across the workforce, the employer brand remains in tact, and that those remaining employees don’t feel guilty, unsettled and disillusioned. No mean feat.

But how exactly should HR be going about this? Does it lie in great leadership? Great communication? Great people strategies? I would think it is a combination of all of these, and more.

It may be a side-effect from the recession, with burdens of longer hours and increased workloads, but a new survey has revealed that a quarter of employees do work on their laptop in bed, before going to sleep (much to the annoyance of their partners).

The report by Credant Technologies also found that over half of the respondents work in bed for between two and six hours every week, and 8% admitted that they spend more time on their mobile devices during the evening than talking to their partners.

This got me thinking about our modern, mobile way of living and working. In the old days, work was restricted to the office, and the home was for family and social life. Simple. Nowadays, whilst it is often valuable to be able to work from anywhere, at anytime, I do think that this fast, frenetic world we live in can be detrimental to good old-fashioned family values.