Monthly Archives: August 2021

Hot Business News Today

Small businesses failing their HR staff – poll

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By Anna Jordan on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Over a quarter (26.8 per cent) of SMEs haven’t invested in additional training to handle pandemic-related wellbeing concerns and HR staff felt ill-equipped to cope.

Breathe, a people software platform, asked 82 HR employees about how the HR function has changed over the past 18 months and whether they feel they’re being supported. More than half (58.6 per cent) say they are not being supported, while a staggering 95.1 per cent say their workload has increased since March 2020.

Figures also show that existing HR policies aren’t fit for purpose following a huge increase in pandemic concerns, with 92.6 per cent having to adapt HR policies.

Since March 2020, HR staff have cited updating company policies (21.4 per cent) and recruitment-related admin (17.3 per cent) as the two areas where they’re spending the most time on. This is followed by maintaining employee records (15.8 per cent) and furlough management (15.1 per cent) following as the next tasks.  

Almost 80 per cent saying that the duty of care has changed, with staff needing to go further to protect their teams. Plus, a whopping 74.3 per cent of HR teams

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Hot Business News Today

A complete list of Scottish business grants

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By Ben Lobel on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs
If your business is based in Scotland, you’ll interested to learn there are Scottish business grants that you may be able to access.
Grants are a type of funding provided by the government, local councils and some private organisations.
You don’t normally have to repay them. But you might have to meet some terms, for example a job creation target or deadline.
Grants are usually available to help ideas or businesses that will create jobs or develop new products, services or markets.
Grants are there to help you fund a specific project and will usually cover only part of the total costs involved, so you will need to provide match funding in most cases.
Furthermore, most grants are paid retrospectively which means that you’ll need to pay out money upfront and reclaim the grant money later.
Every grant will have a different application process, although there will be common things you’ll need to show, like how the grant will cover shortfall in funding and what other efforts you’ve made to raise funding.
The main grant funding available in Scotland is to help ideas or businesses that:

Will create social or economic benefits, for

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