#OzHR needs your input!

Thank you to everyone who has contributed in the first two weeks of the return of #OzHR. It is wonderful to have all the wonderful HR people coming together. 

To kick things back off again after our hiatus, we dusted off the old timeslot and format, and put it out there. In the time #OzHR has been on the shelf, the Twitter chat community has moved along in leaps and bounds. For example, our very good friends at #NZLEAD chat on Thursdays too, starting two hours before we kick off (with a one hour gap in between). 

NZLEAD represents the kind of enthusiastic community we'd love to emulate in Australia. In re-launching #OzHR, we've made sure to seek the advice of the awesome Amanda Sterling, and really want the Australian and New Zealand HR communities to complement each other. NZ currently reigns over us in rugby league, rugby union, while we still hold the cricketing honours - so let's even up the ledger and get our #OzHR community as vibrant as theirs! 

We're really keen to work with our fellow online Tweeting communities, so we want to know what's best for the #OzHR tweetchat in 2015 and beyond.

We have put together a VERY QUICK survey just to get the times, days and topics sorted for #OzHR in the short term. We would very much appreciate your input here: http://ozhr.typeform.com/to/qQsFML

(in the very least, fill it in so you can check out typeform - a pretty nifty questionnaire tool). 

Let's make this, YOUR COMMUNITY, as awesome as it could be.

Thank you so much. 

While you think about that, here is some feedback that's already come in about our #OzHR community.

So we've stuck our toes back in the water with our #OzHR tweetchats. Do we need to tweak the time/day/format? Would love your thoughts.

— OzHR (@ozhrtweets) June 12, 2015

@ozhrtweets approx once every two or three weeks about right. Perhaps change up days and times to catch more people overall

— Michael Sleap (@michaelsleap) June 17, 2015

@HRManNZ @ozhrtweets It is surprising not more Aust HR are active on SM/ Twitter. If I can help, assist or carry parts of OzHR, let's talk.

— Mark Souter (@MarkSouterLive) June 17, 2015

@ozhrtweets I'm happy to help out with a topic. Perhaps what role social media/ozhr plays/can play in improving the way HR operates?

— Adam Axon (@AdamAxon) June 10, 2015

@ozhrtweets there you go then! Publicize the weekly chats on the AHRI group for a kick off.

— Richard Westney (@HRManNZ) June 13, 2015

@HRManNZ @ozhrtweets This is something we'd be keen in getting involved with.

— wattsnext (@wattsnexthr) June 12, 2015

@ozhrtweets yes... Friday's suck... maybe Monday or Tuesday pm?

— Mark Mansour (@MarkMansour01) June 12, 2015

#OzHR 26 - The Space Race - Are funky workplace designs gimmicks or essential?

You don't have to have been around human resources for long before you can start to rattle off examples of funky workplaces and their uber-cool facilities. 

Workplaces with ping pong tables and bar fridges were the first to impress, workplaces started "hotdesking", and over the past decade we've seen workplace design on steroids, as slides become more common (here's an article on the best 10!), open plan becomes the norm, and organisations are building the world's biggest single room (yeah, of course it's Facebook).

Many say that radical workspace redesign if vital - it's essential for communication, teaming, projectising, and even plays a role in teleworking although that's another topic all together.

There are also many more examples of organisations without central workspaces, particularly new small/entrepreneurial companies. This is has led to a burgeoning growth in co-working spaces around the world, such as Spacecubed in Perth (where I was for #OzHR 25 coincidentally!).  

So, is it all a big gimmick, is it essential, or is it somewhere in between? 

This Harvard Business Review article titled Workspaces That Move People highlights a growing body of evidence for it's importance in the future of work. 

As with most things, the answer may lie somewhere in the middle.

So let's throw it open to our #OzHR community. What do you think? And please, let's not focus on the one-in-a-million examples that I've given above, let's talk about REAL workplaces. What you've seen, what you've experienced and how it's worked. 

The chat will be Thursday 11 June starting at 7pm AEST. Find your city (or corresponding time zone) below, for the starting time:

7:00pm - Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne (AEST)

6:30pm - Adelaide, Darwin (ACST)

5:00pm - Perth (AWST)

We know it's such an exciting topic that our international people will want to join too. To help, we've done the maths for you (correctly this time I think!) - 9:00pm in Auckland, 4:00pm in Singapore, 8:00am in London, 5:00am in New York and 2:00am in LA (we know you're keen!). 

Just make sure to pop a #OzHR in your tweet so we can see it, and be sure to invite others along for the ride!

The questions for this topic are:

1. Contemporary Workspaces - gimmick or essential? Let's start with a black or white answer, nowhere in between just yet.  

2. How important is workspace design? Is it high, medium or low priority, and why? 

3. How do we manage and/or adapt our workspaces to cater for vastly different personal preferences?

4. What's one radical change you'd love to see in workspaces? Why?