As the New Year dawns, some changes to the detail of your employment contracts, leave arrangements and holiday pay will need to be made in April. Furthermore you will need to start to think about how you are going to resource your business with changes in how ‘temps’ are paid and, further down the line, how your company is going to employ contractors. Employment contracts Two changes may be necessary depending on your current contracts and your process for issuing them to new starters after April 6th 2020. Firstly, all new starters (including employees, zero hours’ workers, casual and seasonal workers) after this date need to be issued with a written statement on or before the first day of employment (rather than within the first 8 weeks of employment as is currently the case) Secondly, for new employment contracts issued after 6th April 2020, the mandatory information that needs to be included has been extended to include the following: normal hours of work, days … [Read more...]
Why you need to focus on values and behaviours for business growth
In my experience of working with MDs of their own companies over the last 14 years it doesn’t take very long before they start talking about why they set up their business, what is important to them in running the business and keeping it solvent/profitable, the differences that exist between them and other Directors and shareholders or conversations that start about a manager who just doesn’t get it. There are many insightful stories and anecdotes. Passions and frustrations run high in equal measure. So in a very conversational way, the values of the MD become very clear i.e. what really matters to them. With a bit of gentle probing, it doesn’t take a lot to get an MD to define the behaviours that enable success in their business. ‘If only people did this, we would be even more productive.’ When the MD set up the business, working with a small team, direction, focus, consistent behaviour was all a lot easier because everyone could see what was happening, everyone was involved in … [Read more...]
How to design a robust profit-sharing bonus scheme for 2019
In the last newsletter we talked about what to do about awarding a Xmas bonus. [If you missed it click here to find it] Now we talk about putting a bonus scheme into place for 2019. If your financial year-end is say March, the next few months could be a good time to develop and trial a scheme before launching it in April. What should l incentivise people on? The profitability of the business is a simple way to measure business success. If there is a large minority of support staff then you might also consider cost-savings/efficiency savings as being the other side of the profit coin. You might be tempted by the achievement of individual objectives. Our general experience in the SME space is that staff appraisals don’t happen consistently enough so we wouldn’t recommend a performance pay system based on the achievement of individual objectives, as MDs usually haven’t the infrastructure in place to make this watertight. What do l need to do first? You will presumably have a business … [Read more...]
