Your monthly at-a-glance answers to frequently asked questions. This month we look at holiday entitlements, working hours, and the rights of part-time employees.
Q: What are the forthcoming changes to minimum holidays I’ve read about?
A: Currently, full-time employees are entitled to a minimum of four weeks’ holiday a year, which can (or cannot) include the UK’s eight bank holidays. The government now intends to make the entitlement, across the board, 28 days inclusive of bank holidays. The details of implementation have yet to be confirmed, but the plan is to increase the entitlement in two stages: from 4 weeks to 4.8 weeks on 1 October 2007; and from 4.8 weeks to 5.6 weeks on 1 October 2008.
Read about Statutory holiday entitlement
Q: Are there any rules for setting the hours of my employees’ shifts?
A: Yes. There is a range of requirements you have to comply with when deciding on your workers’ hours. The most high profile of these is the limit of 48 hours in an average week that employees are allowed to work (although they can opt out of this). Other things to bear in mind are that employees are entitled to:
- at least one day off per week
- 11 hours of rest each day
- a rest break if the working day exceeds six hours
There are stricter rules for employees working at night. They cannot work more than an average of eight hours per 24-hour period, and they are entitled to free health assessments to ensure their night-work isn’t adversely affecting their health.
Find out more about working time regulations
Q: Are part-time employees entitled to fewer rights than full-time workers?
A: No. You cannot treat part-time employees less favourably than comparable full-timers. They are entitled to the same rate of pay and the same holiday entitlements (on a pro rata basis). They must also be given the same access to training, maternity and parental leave, and any career-break programmes you operate. And if you have to make redundancies, you cannot treat part-time employees less favourably when choosing who is to be made redundant.
Read more about employing part time workers
Liberalisation of the UK’s postal services market began in 2004, but it was at the beginning of 2006 that deregulation was completed, giving small and medium-sized businesses the chance to shop around for a new service provider.
The high-profile changes in the market have been concentrated at the larger end of the market – deals such as those concluded earlier this year between Business Post and the Department for Work and Pensions, or between TNT and BT. But further down the scale, liberalisation has brought greater choice, increased flexibility and the prospect of lower prices.
There are now 18 licensed operators in the market, although Royal Mail remains the dominant player, accounting for 97 per cent of mail by volume. But the others are growing fast. Many have “access agreements” with Royal Mail, allowing them to collect and sort mail before feeding it into Royal Mail’s network for final delivery. The number of deliveries under these access agreements soared from 87 million in 2004-05 to 1.2 billion in 2005-06.
According to the postal services regulator, Postcomm, there are a few key questions you can look at to help you shop around among postal service providers. Answering them will give you a better sense of your key requirements, so you can see how different providers compare:
- How much mail do you send and what kind?
- Where are your dispatch points and how many are there?
- How bulky or heavy is your mail?
- What’s your priority – speed or cost?
- Can you cut costs by pre-sorting your own mail?
- Can you give advance notice of your mailings?
Find out more about the basics of Direct Marketing
Even the most successful businesses have to face customer complaints. In fact, often what separates them from the rest is the professionalism with which they deal with complaints.
Every interaction with your customers is important in terms of ensuring their repeat business and maintaining your business image. But when you’re dealing with a complaint, the stakes are higher. Customers will remember the one time things went wrong more than the 99 other times when things were fine.
“The key is to try to turn the situation to your advantage,” says Business Link Business Adviser Peter Weeks. “One way or another, the customer is going to remember their complaint. The challenge for you is to make them remember not what the original problem was, but how well it was dealt with by you.
“There are a few key points to remember when it comes to managing customer complaints,” Peter adds. “The first is consistency. You need to make sure that you have clear guidelines that all your customer-facing employees understand and implement.
“Second, be honest about any failings on your part. Customers don’t want the run-around; they want to know what’s gone wrong and how it will be fixed.
“And third, go the extra mile to make your customer happy again. Often, a simple gesture is enough, such as refunding the costs of the problem transaction or upgrading to a better product or service for free.”
Read more about managing customer care
Whether you file your own tax returns or have an accountant do it for you, it pays to keep an eye on every possible deduction and allowance that can help you keep your tax bill down.
“For example, while most businesses are good at keeping a careful record of the allowable expenses that they can offset against their profits, most businesses don’t claim what they’re entitled to when it comes to capital allowances,” says Business Adviser Peter Weeks of Business Link.
“Where expenses apply to day-to-day running costs, capital allowances permit you to claim a proportion of your bigger purchases, such as computers, vehicles and other equipment,” adds Peter
“Rather than claim the whole cost of these assets back, you usually get to claim a proportion of the value back each year. Normally, this proportion is 25 per cent. However, small businesses can claim up to 50 per cent in the first year after the asset is purchased.”
There are also categories of capital spending that attract a 100 per cent first year allowance. “These include environmentally friendly equipment as well as assets bought for any research-and-development activities you carry out,” Peter explains.
Find out more about Capital Allowances, or visit the Taxes, Returns and Payroll section of the Business Link website.
No business can expect to achieve its full potential if it doesn’t have someone confidently driving things forward. “There’s no real magic to it – to a large extent it’s just a matter of being clear about where you want your business to go,” says Business Link Business Adviser, Peter Weeks.
“The most important attribute you’ll need to lead your team is a sense of vision. This doesn’t have to be a grand plan for strategic change. It might just be a target to improve sales or profitability by a certain amount in the coming year.” The key thing is to identify an objective you believe in 100 per cent – only then can you expect others to buy into it, too.
The next thing any prospective management leader needs to get right is communication. “Once you know what you want from your business, you have to convey that to your employees – perhaps just to the managers that report to you, maybe to your entire workforce,” Peter argues.
A pitfall to watch out for when trying to develop your leadership skills is over-confidence. “Great business leaders tend to be great listeners, too,” Peter adds. “Be decisive and strong-willed, by all means, but don’t forget that there are usually people around you with a lot of experience and expertise that you can draw on in leading your business forward.”
Read more about developing key leadership skills for directors and owners