When you run any sort of business, unless you are self-employed and operate your business entirely on your own, you have to take on employees. When you first start out you may run your business from home, but as you start gaining new customers – assuming you are successful – you will need to take on an employee to help you. The minute that you do that, you are in uncharted territory!

Why? Because 30 or 40 years ago we didn’t have all the rules and regulations that we do today. Yes, we looked after our employees and kept them as safe as possible in the office, but there were not any laws that told us HOW to do that.

The reason that you are suddenly in uncharted territory is that, when you are manufacturing an amazing fingleferk that is going to sell by the million, or whether you are simply an accountant with more clients than you can handle alone and you have to take on an employee, it has probably never even occurred to you that there ARE all these rules and regulations. How would you know? You are an accountant, not a lawyer, so you can be forgiven for not being aware that many of these laws exist, but nonetheless they do. The worst part about it is that you are DEEMED by government to know that they exist and to abide by them. You are now officially "an employer" so you are supposed to know all about them!

Unfortunately, there is no school or college for employers. Even if there was, you are rushed off your feet building a business for goodness’ sake. Furthermore, while most of these laws are perfectly sensible, they cover things that you probably do not know how to handle.

Take fire risk assessment, for instance. Did you know that you are legally obliged to undertake an office fire safety assessment? You probably rent your office from a landlord, so why would you ever think about it? But the fact is that YOU are the employer and the law says that it is YOUR responsibility to ensure the safety of your employees, not your landlord’s!

Even if, by some chance, you DID know that you were required to undertake an office fire safety assessment, have you got the first idea how to do that?

Answers on a postcard!

Quite.

If you are an accountant, what do you know about fire safety? OK, some things are obvious. You wouldn’t sit and have a cigarette in a stockroom filled with reams of paper of your clients’ accounts. If you are a manufacturer you wouldn’t stock oil drums next to an electric heater.

You might own an engineering company and you decide that it would be more efficient to change the position of some of your machinery, and it might. But it might not occur to you that by doing so you could actually be blocking off an escape route to the outside in the case of a fire. Or that although you have installed fire alarms, one of them is not working. Or that your fire extinguishers are not in the right place. Yet you are deemed to know all about this.

Quite frankly, it can be a nightmare. Certainly, you might run a business for many years and never have any sort of problem, and it is sincerely to be hoped that you don’t.

However, like anything else, it is a matter of specialities. Now that we have all these laws that we didn’t have 30 years ago, we also have companies who have sprung up in order to help you deal with them. Talking about fire safety, as we have been, there are now companies that can come into your office and undertake a fire safety assessment for you because they have people who know what to look for. You don’t, but they do.

They will also supply you with a written report of their findings and any recommendations which – if you employ more than four people, which you probably do – you are required by law to keep. You probably didn’t know that either, but nonetheless that is also a requirement!