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Chamber Blog

Your glass need never be half full

Those businesses who attend our free Sustainability 2012 conference at John Innes Norwich yesterday were treated to a rare opportunity to hear from a truly inspirational speaker with big ideas and a great presence. Gunter Pauli an entrepreneur in the true sense of the word really blew the audience away with his dynamism and pure business drive.

Gunter feels that it is not enough to protect our environment but to regenerate. His ideas relate to what he calls the ‘Blue Economy’ and he is looking to change the rules, encourage local entrepreneurship, create jobs and change the business model to achieve competitiveness. This is one of those occasions where you really needed to be there to get the full affect, trying to write this down just demonstrates to me the power of presentation.

Gunter’s thoughts and examples of his fantastic work are illustrated in his books about the Blue Economy and his children’s fables will be given to every primary school child in China and they have asked him to write 365 – one for each day of the year.

What I particularly liked right at the beginning of his talk was his scenario that although people talk about a glass being half full or half empty in his world it is always full -50% is water and 50% air! Now that is looking at the world in a positive light!

We did video the conference and took a number of photos which will be added  to our website shortly www.norfolkchamber.co.uk. 

New red tape hassle

Norman Lamb was the speaker at Steeles Law breakfast I attended this morning and he gave an overview of what he felt the key issues were for business relating to red tape and what he was working on relating to his key areas. I have a great deal of time for Norman and he does understand many of the issues affecting business but I am still concerned that decisions are being made without really understanding the impact on business.

An example was in the Queens Speech this week relating to fathers being able to share parental leave to care for babies.  Officials said current rules on maternity and paternity leave were “outdated” because they presumed that women will do the “vast majority” of caring for infants and a spokesman for the Department for Business said: “Parents should be able to choose their childcare arrangements for themselves.” However there were few details about how the new flexible parental leave arrangements could work. Possible options include allowing mothers to return to work and transfer up to nine months of a year’s parental leave to fathers. The devil as ever will be in the detail.

As employers we do support maternity leave even though the cost to the business, especially small businesses, can be significant especially the hidden costs of recruitment and training. There is also significant impact on the uncertainty felt by the business and the person covering the post whilst they wait to see if the mother does in fact return to work.

From what Norman said this morning this new regulation is to help balance the work place and enable women to get back to work quicker as they are a valuable resource. Now I am not going to argue with that last point, but it will mean that not only will employers have to arrange maternity cover when their female workers take time off, which they understand and have learnt to cope with, now their male colleague will also be taking time off.  However whereas the majority of women take 9 – 12 months maternity leave their male colleagues are likely to take less from a few weeks up to 9 months making it a real problem to find cover. Will fathers have to give the same length of notice was mothers do? What if half way through mothers change their minds and you have given a maternity contract to someone else? How is a business meant to plan around that sort of arrangement!

If you are a small business any time taken by an employee hits your productivity and subsequently your bottom line. When managers are fighting to keep their businesses on track, this type of new regulation is just not helpful but more than that we need to understand how it will work.

What are your views? 

Aviva in the news

At a time of economic uncertainty, which we currently have, the sudden change of a CEO of a major Norwich employer such as Aviva can cause concern.  Andrew Moss will be seen as a loss to Aviva as he had been responsible for the successful integration of 40 brands into the single Aviva brand as well as doing much to reduce costs within the organisation, including the sale of RAC. He was well known in Norwich and this change is likely to cause concern to Norwich employees.

However, Aviva have moved swiftly so as to not give time for speculations or uncertainty and Mr McFarlane has a good reputation as CEO at ANZ and for making the improvement in shareholder value at Standard Chartered. Mr McFarlane was also involved in the recent organisation structure changes so this is unlikely to be changed. Aviva has a strong brand, dedicated people many of them employed in Norwich, and a solid business foundation and so I am sure they will be able to recover quickly from this situation and continue to move forward.

Coming on the back of Lotus being in the news, reconfirms how important it is that the Chamber continues to work closely with our national brand business members to ensure as a business community we do all we can to support them.

Please stop tinkering with employment legislation

As commented in our article found under ‘News’ I feel that the Government could have been bolder in its Queen’s speech content.

However the area that gets me most aerated is the constant tinkering or should I say meddling with employment law. What may be possible to cope with from a larger business point of view is a nightmare for smaller businesses.

The plans for more flexible parental leave will allow women who want to return to work earlier after having a baby to do so, by transferring some of their maternity-leave entitlement to the baby’s father.

Ministers have chosen to ignore the fact a complex new system of shared parental leave brings massive complexities and huge uncertainty for employers. At a time when Norfolk businesses are trying to cope with a very challenging economic situation they are hit with these proposals.

While most businesspeople identify with the idea of gender-neutral parental leave, they’ve warned time and again that the government’s proposals are unwieldy, difficult to understand, and fraught with potential complications.

Businesses may now be exposed to endless appeals, legal challenges and grievances. The government has promised to cut red tape, but continues to tinker with employment legislation, bringing uncertainty and costs to businesses. If shared parental leave is introduced the government must ensure that the possible patterns that can be requested are limited to reduce complexity.