Real Business

Government statistics are often best ignored, but there is one that recently caught my eye. According to a survey of 300 small businesses by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), only 32 per cent of owners are “confident” about employment law.

There are two possible ways of interpreting this: either employment law is so absurdly complex and contradictory that very few employers can understand it, even if they have been in business for years; or businessmen are too stupid or lazy to use the exciting online tools available on BIS’s Business Link website, explaining how to keep on the right side of the law when you pay someone to work for you.

 

There are no prizes for guessing which of those conclusions the government prefers. It is, of course, the latter. We must all visit the Business Link website and try harder.

I’m afraid I came away from my computer feeling shattered. I certainly won’t be making employment law my specialist subject if I ever appear on Mastermind.

One of the first things I learned was that I must have a diversity policy. If I was in any doubt as to the wisdom of this, all was explained in a 26-page pamphlet published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management, explaining how diversity management can improve business performance.

I nearly gave up during the forward, finding myself choking over several pages of management platitudes such as: “the one certainty in business today is that change is the only thing that is constant, but change is itself changing”. But I ploughed on. Next I learned that there is a growing body of academic evidence to prove that diversity policies improve business performance. One study concluded that without a diversity policy in place, businesses suffer a “350 per cent reduction in enthusiasm”. I don’t know who is funding this “academic”, but they might want to pay for him to do a GCSE in maths. You can’t suffer more than a 100 per cent reduction in anything.

The booklet also didn’t explain what scientific units enthusiasm is measured in, nor how you measure it. I’m picturing rows of office workers with probes sprouting from their heads that send meters whirring as they read through their company’s new diversity policy.

Clearly, I need help setting up my diversity policy, which is where a 40-page guide from ACAS comes into play. I learn that I must start asking my employees questions about their ethnic identity, age, sexual orientation, and start counting them up. It is none of my business, I want to protest, what age people are, who they sleep with and where their grandparents came from. But apparently I haven’t got the point. I might be inadvertently discriminating against people via my internalised prejudices. Here’s the tricky bit: if I discover that I do have
an inner loathing of, say, young people, I still don’t know what to do about it.

I’m becoming less concerned about the 68 per cent of businessmen who say they don’t feel confident about employment law and rather more concerned about the 32 per cent who say they do: they must be as bonkers as the government.

I did learn, thanks to Business Link’s free advice, that the employment laws that apply to small businesses do not apply to the prime minister. In a section about anti-harrassment policy, I read that “harassment occurs when someone engages in unwanted conduct which has the purpose or effect of violating someone else’s dignity or creating an intimidatory, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

Now, I’ve never come across an SME run this way, but, as we’re learning from reports of people who have had jobs there, it’s a spot-on description of working life at Number 10.