As soon as a small business employs one person, that makes the owner an employer and thus responsible for ensuring they run their little company in the most legally efficient way. Taking the amount of time really needed to ensure all the ‘i”s are dotted and all the “t”s are crossed. These HR matters probably seemed less important when the new boss took over the reigns. Their energy should be expended on creating a good working environment at the place or places of work, rather than constantly checking they’ve not learned all there is to know about HR. There are consultancies who deal with that very specialised subject. They know everything connected to the world of Human Resources and will deal with all sorts of layers. Be it taking on the tricky subject of payroll and the various permutations within that such as maternity and paternity issues; They will know all there is to know about the working time regulations acts within current Employment Law in England and Wales – and if in Scotland, then up there as well. These employment law issues can seem like a nightmare to any employer. There are many things that a novice boss has no hope of knowing when they take on that first employee. Whether that person is an employee at all is sometimes a difficult area – they may only be a contractor, with no legal rights to paid holiday leave or any protections usually afforded to employed persons who have their all important Contract of Employment offered to them. Although a company with a pension scheme will normally converse regularly with the administrator of the group team, the actual company’s owner has responsibility to ensure the funds in the pension pot are absolutely safe and cannot be waylaid by errant behaviour. So many times in the past, unscrupulous bosses have felt the pinch in their incomes during lean periods and think it will be a good idea to ‘borrow’ a little bit from the company pension scheme. They always intend to pay it back, but for the same reason they got into the situation of never being able to afford that repayment, it gets left and left and the situation gets more serious. That is why we now have stringent rules governing company pension schemes. the newer schemes must be in a sort of bonded warehouse and no one is to take money out that is not designated to them.
A decent HR consultancy will have the answers to these points up their sleeve and the trouble they save by doing the job on a fee basis is hard to imagine