It’s been a busy week for the HRZone community – you’re  chatty & knowledgeable bunch.

There were several big discussions across the site and social pages in the past few days, but our favourite was definitely seeing inside your offices!

The HR Zone office

We shared a picture of our central Bristol office in response to the blog post Does Your Office Reflect Your Core Values?, and it gave us an excuse to get you tweeting about your own spaces and what they say about your companies.

The responses were all great, we were particularly jealous of your amazing views and locations (Mercer UK were especially lucky with their view of the Tower of London), as well as some of the very imaginative decorating – special mentions go to the snazzy wall mounts at Boden HQ and Action Aid; check them out below.

Office pictures

The winner however has to be Ovo Energy in Bristol with their tree house – very cool indeed.

Can you beat them with your own cool workspaces? We’d love to see more pictures!

Chip and win?

Another article which caught everyone’s imagination this week was a BBC piece we shared about how a company in Sweden is offering their staff the chance to get a chip put under their skin to replace those clumsy old ID cards and lanyards.

The general consensus was negative – I think we’re all a bit squeamish about having some mystery tech in our hand! There were also questions around policy were more companies to adopt this technology.

Would you be happy to have an ID chip inserted into your hand? Do you think this will catch on, or is it just a gimmick?

Emphasis on Empathy

We had debates on tech, some chitchat on office feng shui (well, there was a lot of talk about ping pong tables), but talk also turned to empathy and attitudes toward mental health at work, following an article we posted about the  increasing importance of empathy among employers.

Our followers shared their thoughts on the current lack of understanding around mental health in the workplace, and whether this is a deliberate decision by many companies to avoid addressing a growing problem, whether it be workplace stress or other conditions.

How have you found approaches and attitudes in your experience?

And finally…

In addition to the discussions on our articles and shared posts, we also had some great feedback on the Employee Engagement Awards that we attended earlier this week in London – well done to all of the winners on the night, and we hope everyone else who attended had as much fun as we did!

That's it for this week's community round-up, have a good weekend everyone!

Shonette