UnPlugged

The tax and NIC savings of salary sacrifice have grown in popularity over the last few years. The January 2012 decision of the First Tier Tribunal in Reed Employment plc v HMRC has highlighted the need for salary sacrifice arrangements to be effective in the eyes of HMRC if they are to deliver the intended tax and National Insurance (NIC) savings.

When business representative organisations, such as IoD and CBI, claim there is too much bureaucracy the most often quoted example is employment legislation; their frustration, at needing to treat people fairly and take care when seeking to make them unemployed, is evident.

Today, more than ever, companies are looking at new ways of improving employee retention levels. One area where companies lose female staff is when they take maternity leave. So how do companies ensure they support and retain women through this career crunch point?

For too long Instant Messaging (IM) has been relegated to the ‘lunchtime chatter’ league by industry leaders who felt it was too informal and too unproductive to be of any use in the office. For years this streamlined form of communication has been undervalued and in hindsight completely misunderstood.

Economic pressures, changes to employment law, and pensions auto-enrolment all present major challenges to HR professionals in 2012. As a result, you could be forgiven for overlooking the Sickness Absence Review (SAR), which was published by the Department of Work and Pensions in November 2011. Which is a bit of a shame, as this report could well be the first small step in tackling what is a huge problem for the government, employers and staff.

The implications of recent trends are clear: Britain’s rapid university expansion is producing a deluge of graduate applicants and forcing employers to expend valuable time and resources sifting ever-increasing piles of applications. This is harming business confidence in the graduate market, because many recruiters no longer see degrees as a reliable measure of candidate aptitude.

Organisations, and specifically HR, need to ensure that they are always encouraging everybody to make the best possible contribution – but how can this be achieved? It can be difficult to know where to start sometimes. I’d recommend the very first steps – recognising when employees are showing the signs of innovation, or ‘intrapreneurship’. But how can HR practitioners encourage it, capitalise on it and even adopt it themselves? Where we find intrapreneurs we find innovation, engagement, high performance and most interestingly of all the catalyst is choice. It’s the choice to be engaged, to perform well and use discretionary effort and the choice to be brave, different and to stand out.

In an increasingly service-orientated economy, more and more organisations have large numbers of employees working in front-line roles on a 24/7 basis. For those organisations, the workforce accounts for a large proportion of costs. The way it is managed and deployed is a critical success factor and fundamental to profitability and growth.

I should point out that I’m, not, never have been and never will be an early adopter. This, and the fact that I am approaching grumpy old man territory, may inform one or two of my observations! I’ve included the Twitter handles of the speakers where I know them. This isn’t an outline of all the sessions but rather a personal take on some aspects of the day.

On 23 November 2011, Vince Cable announced what have been touted as the biggest changes in decades to employment law. The measures proposed include increasing the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from one to two years, introducing a scheme to facilitate the rapid resolution of workplace disputes, providing small businesses with greater ability to dismiss staff through ‘compensated no-fault dismissals’ and modernising the clogged-up employment tribunal system.

In the first article in this Interim Management series I looked at when and why to engage an interim manager. The second article looked at how to find the right interim manager. The third article focussed on why interviewing an interim manager is different. I now look at how interim performance can be measured.

Having collated studies in over 20 countries in our new book Women in Management Worldwide (with Ronald Burke), our results are quite startling. Despite women making up half the workforce in most developed countries, occupational segregation still exists. Childcare is still an important concern for women in nearly every country and women had increased their participation rates in university education over the past decade, equalling or exceeding that of men (in all but one country women now outnumber men taking business degrees). However, women managers still have less job tenure, earn less money and remain at lower organisational levels.

Your employees may already be planning to attend or watch certain events, volunteer as London Ambassadors or London 2012 ‘Games Makers’ or avoid London altogether during the Games. It is expected that London’s creaking transport infrastructure will have to accommodate an increased volume of tourists from June 2012 onwards. During the Olympic Games themselves, a further 500,000 people on each day of competition are expected to use public transport, creating huge issues for commuters travelling to work. Businesses in affected areas of London are already being asked to look at alternative plans for how their employees travel to work and enabling employees to work from home is being championed.

Disability is non-discriminatory. Four fifths (78%) of all disabled people acquire their disability post the age of 16. Today almost one in five people of working-age are disabled and the numbers increase daily as demographic change reflects an ever older working population. And yet, only 48% of disabled people are employed, as opposed to 78% of non-disabled people.

In the 21st century, we still cling to a rigid model of fixed working time and place better suited to the industrial age. Long hours are often required and rewarded without any measure of the productivity involved. But a revolution in work that will see many employees decide when, where and how they do their jobs could well take place within the next decade. It’s already happening in some organisations. Offices are shifting from being nine-to-five workplaces to meeting places, and successful businesses of the future will be those that measure and reward people by results, rather than hours.

There is an impression of political ping pong about this as the last time the qualifying period was changed was in 1999 when, shortly after Labour came into power, it was set at the current length of 1 year’s employment, Of course in the meantime the UK has been through a severe economic downturn against a backdrop of a world wide economic crises and such events are unsurprisingly going to cause the government to respond to demands from businesses to take certain steps such as this.

A proposal made by Vincent Cable at the Liberal Democratic Party conference contained a suggestion to require firms to report the ratio between CEO compensation and the compensation of the median firm employee. At first glance, this seems like a worthy idea - the gap between the compensation of CEOs and workers has grown considerably since the 1970s. However, first impressions can be deceiving, and very hard to translate into tight, reasoned arguments based on the governance objectives, even the governance objectives of Mr Cable.

In the first article in this Interim Management series I looked at when and why to engage an interim manager. The second article looked at how to find the right interim manager. I now want to turn to actually interviewing for an interim manager. Probably the best place to start is to emphasise the difference between interviewing for a permanent role and an interim assignment.

Salary sacrifice schemes are a popular way to provide tax-exempt benefits to employees. The idea behind a salary sacrifice scheme is that the employee gives up some of his or her salary in exchange for a non-cash benefit. Where the benefit taken in exchange is exempt from tax and NI, the employee saves the tax and NI on the salary given up. The employer also saves employer’s NI. Consequently, salary sacrifice schemes can be something of a win-win situation.

The UK already has some of the toughest strike legislation in the world and yet it is relatively prone to strike action compared to other countries. The UK lost 23.8 working days through industrial action per 1,000 employees between 2005 and 2009 according to European Industrial Relations Observatory data, ranking behind France (132), Spain (60.4) and Italy (34.8). However, the UK ranks much higher than other countries such as Germany (6.2), the US (1) and Japan (1).