Managing a Less Visible Fire Risk

Do you or your employees bring electrical goods from home into the workplace? Did you realise that, if these goods have not been safety checked, you are not compliant with health and safety regulations and are at greater risk of fire? Personal items of electrical equipment brought onto your premises are subject to the same regulations as appliances that belong to the business.

Worrying Statistics

A warning about this came recently from insurance firm RSA, which conducted a survey of 2,000 employees. They found that 40% of them had connected items like mobile phone chargers, hair straighteners and other personally owned items to the business power sources. More than half of them confessed that they hadn’t had their appliances safety checked before they brought them into work.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect to come out of the survey was that nearly 10 in every 100 who had done so admitted that one of their items had caught fire, causing burns or electric shock in 9% of cases. Over a third of those injured had to be treated at a hospital. These figures clearly demonstrate the importance of having such items safety checked.

Being Prepared

Gary Long is Risk Solutions Director at RSA. He said that it is important for employers to have relevant policies and checks in place to avoid this. They should also make sure that all employees understand the regulations for electrical items at work, as well as how to react to such an emergency.

Make it a policy that if employees want to bring electrical items to work, they have to have them checked. Tell them when testers will be on site, so they can bring their own items for checking at the same time.

Despite the government’s declared intention to relax the red tape for small businesses, for your own protection, it’s a good idea to keep a record of your electrical testing. You could also keep labels on all electrical equipment at your business premises stating the date of their last check. If the worst happens and someone is badly injured or you have to make an insurance claim for fire damage, you will have evidence of your testing schedule and your proactive management of the risk.

No time for yet another admin job? If you use your outsourced bookkeepers to their full value, and employ them to assist on a variety of back office tasks, they can monitor this for you on a regular basis, make all the checking appointments you need and advertise them to your staff.

Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference

People are still talking about the amazing Olympic successes of the Team GB cyclists both in and out of the velodrome. How did they manage to win all those medals? Chris Hoy, who won two gold medals, said it was about asking the question, how can we get better? And then coming up with answers. Head coach Dave Brailsford famously named these the ‘marginal gains’, because if you make lots of small or marginal changes for the better, when they are added together they make a significant difference.

Marginal Gains for your Business

Why not apply this to your business? Take for example the number of phone calls you make to chase business. This is not something most of us enjoy doing but it usually needs to be done, if not every day or week, at least from time to time. So you set goals. This week you decide to make 9 calls and are elated when three of them pay off. That’s a third of your calls. If you’d got the same percentage when your goal was 12 calls, you’d have had one more customer or warm contact to deal with. So you could get better results if your goal had been higher. Make that a weekly occurrence and you’ll see significant growth.

Saving Time and Effort

There are all sorts of ways you can save time as well, if you think about it. You could get better at being at your desk earlier if you set the alarm 10 minutes earlier. You could devise a system for getting through your paperwork faster or filing it away so that you can find it quickly. Are these the kind of jobs you just can’t find time for? Make a resolve to give them half an hour a day until they are done. Shorten your lunch break on three days a week and use the extra time to your advantage. If you can afford it, pay for some extra help. You should recoup that amount and more before long. Think what you can achieve in all the time you have saved.

Getting Help from your Bookkeepers

The same principle could be applied to chasing late payments. You decide you’ll make that phone call next week, but it’s Thursday before you even think about it, and Friday before you pick up the phone. That’s a week longer to wait for that payment to come in. You can often get help for this sort of thing from your outsourced bookkeepers. Many offer assistance with credit control, employer and tax returns, and office management as well as keeping your accounts in order.

SMEs Making a Vital Contribution

If you are an employer running a small business, you can give yourself a pat on the back. According to a recent report by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), you are in a sector which is vitally important to the UK workforce which is making a significant contribution to the economy.

Lobbying Ammunition

Back to Work The role of small business in employment and enterprise was published in September 2012 as part of a FSB campaign to get the government to give more consideration to the effect of its policies on smaller businesses. It indicates that most of the current regulations are imposed across the board, but with mainly large private sector organisations in mind. Initiatives to assist small employers don’t go far enough. The report states the importance of the SME sector, backing this up with some persuasive statistics from the quarterly Labour Force Survey.

The Facts and Figures

Currently, SMEs make up 45% of the UK private sector turnover. Nearly three fifths of people working in the sector are employed by SMEs. Every year since 2005, smaller businesses have taken on more of the unemployed than organisations with 250 employees or more.

Looking at annual averages:

·         Each year 85,000 unemployed people set up a micro business, with many eventually becoming employers

·         367,00 find work in SMEs

·         Only 65,000 are taken on by larger corporations.

Clearly SMEs play the greatest role in getting people off benefits and into work. They are also more prepared to take risks with recruits, taking on young people entering the workforce, the unskilled, and people with family responsibilities. Those with disabilities or who have been off sick long term are often given an opportunity to work in SMEs. Of people with these and other barriers to finding work, 95% end up as employees in businesses with less than 250 employees.

Unfortunately small businesses also have a reputation for putting people out of work by going bust, but the FSB’s report puts this in proportion. “Recent evidence suggests that the highest rates of creation and destruction are among the youngest businesses, which for self-evident reasons also tend to be small. On average we can expect approximately 266,000 firms to be established in the UK in any one year, with slightly more starting up during recessions. After five years, just under half (44.4%) of these remain.”

As a successful entrepreneur then, you may be about to receive the recognition you deserve for your hard work, drive and initiative.