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Establishing a successful recruitment process and clear written employment contracts for new employees can have a major impact on your business.

Every business needs to be aware of its obligations under minimum wage and equal pay laws, as well as recent pensions auto-enrolment changes.

You must comply with legal restrictions on employees' working hours and time off, or risk claims, enforcement action and even prosecution.

The right employment policies are an essential part of effective staff management. Make sure any policy is clear and well communicated to employees.

While sick employees need to be treated fairly, you need to ensure that 'sickness' is not being used as cover for unauthorised absence.

Most pregnant employees are entitled to maternity leave and maternity pay, while new fathers are entitled to paternity leave and paternity pay.

As well as undermining morale, illegal discrimination can lead to workplace grievances. Employee discrimination is covered by the Equality Act 2010.

Home, remote and lone workers are becoming increasingly commonplace. Key issues include communication and how to manage and motivate people remotely.

The right approach to consulting with and providing information to your employees can improve employee motivation and performance.

Disciplinary and grievance issues can be a major burden to employers. Putting in place and following the right procedures is essential.

Following the right dismissal and redundancy procedures helps protect your business and minimise the risk of a legal dispute at tribunal.

Employment tribunal claims are a worrying prospect for any employer. A tribunal case is a no-win situation – even if the claim is unjustified.

SMEs with one employee now eligible for digital discounts

26 July 2022

The UK government's Help to Grow: Digital scheme has been expanded to businesses with at least one employee; as a result, up to 1.2 million small firms can now get discounts on the latest digital technology.

The Help to Grow: Digital scheme offers UK small businesses discounts worth up to £5,000 on approved software. From this week, the government has extended the eligibility criteria so that any business with one to 249 employees can now access the discounts. Previously, only businesses with more than five employees were eligible for the scheme. Government figures suggest that this boosts the number of eligible businesses by 760,000 so that it reaches up to 1.24 million small firms.

Also from this week, the software on offer under Help to Grow: Digital includes ecommerce as well as CRM and digital accounting. Research suggests that businesses which adopt ecommerce software see on average a 7.5% increase in sales over three years.

Through the Help to Grow: Digital scheme, businesses can access a £5,000 discount on 30 software solutions from 14 leading technology suppliers, including Sage, Crunch, Quickbooks, Big Commerce, Shopwired, Capsule CRM and Gold-Vision CRM.

Business minister Lord Callanan said: "Boosting productivity isn't some abstract concept to be sniffed at - for individual SMEs it means bigger sales and breaking into new markets. It can add £100 billion to the British economy overall, creating jobs and opportunity across the country."

The Help to Grow: Digital scheme sits alongside the Help to Grow: Management scheme, which offers business leaders 50 hours of leadership and management training across 12 weeks, with government covering 90% of the costs involved.

Research by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has found that the smallest firms are the least likely to have adopted tech products because of a lack of resources - even though they stand to make the most productivity gains through adoption.

This is supported by the findings of a new survey by SumUp that has found that a worrying 24% of new businesses don't use technology in their first year. However, just 3% of firms are not using technology by the time they have been trading for four years. Overall, 91% of entrepreneurs make use of technology to run their business. The most common software used is for sales (used by 26%) and marketing (24%).

Commenting on the government announcement, FSB national chair Martin McTague said: "Until today, the majority of small businesses were arbitrarily excluded from the scheme due to the requirement to employ at least five employees. Many of them want to make productivity gains through technology adoption. However, they often do not have the resources to do so, especially when they are faced with steep inflation, soaring energy bills, supply chain disruption and a widespread labour shortage under the cost of doing business crisis.

"Reducing the threshold to one employee really makes a difference in this space. Together with the addition of ecommerce software and one-to-one advice for SMEs on technology adoption, this will enable more small businesses to fulfil their growth ambitions and in turn spur our economy."

Written by Rachel Miller.

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