On 13 October 2020, Microsoft will end support for Office 2010. This means any devices running the software after this date will put your business at risk. What does this mean for you?
Microsoft will no longer provide technical support, bug fixes or security fixes for Office 2010
You’ll no longer receive Office 2010 software updates
No further updates to support content will be provided and most online help content will be retired
Running outdated software not only makes your devices vulnerable, but it means you’re not taking advantage of modern software upgrades which could help the efficiency of your business. Although the software will still function, eventually you will see difficulties performing daily tasks.
What is the risk? With Microsoft no longer providing bug fixes or security patches, your devices could be vulnerable to attacks. Security updates help protect your PC from harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. Without these updates, attackers will be able to easily penetrate your devices. How do I upgrade? We’d strongly recommend upgrading to the latest software as soon as possible. Our technicians can look at the options available to you, and support you in transitioning between the software. If you’re a Breakwater client still running Office 2010, we’ll be in touch before the October 13 deadline. If not, get in touch to see how we can further support your business with our services. E: enquiries@breakwaterit.co.uk T: 01603 709300 Visit our website
Although it may feel like it was only yesterday that you finalised your self-assessment tax return for the 2018/19 tax year, the uncertainty arising from the COVID-19 pandemic means there is more value than ever in supplying us with the information required to complete and file your 2019/20 tax return early; the potential benefits may include:
cashflow – if you have a tax liability, early calculation of what you owe should allow you more time to plan payment. If you are due a repayment from HMRC, this could be repaid to you more promptly following an early submission of the return. HMRC has announced extensions for the payments of some taxes as detailed in our blog here https://www.larking-gowen.co.uk/insights/blog-tax-payment-deferrals/.
tax planning – if your affairs have changed in the year, or you anticipate making key decisions that will affect your future, early completion of your tax return allows for consideration of planning opportunities that could mitigate the tax payable in the future and help manage the challenges ahead.
making time for you -taking a proactive approach in addressing your tax affairs well before the January deadline will allow you to focus on the things that matter the most to you and your business.
If you have any queries, or would like to discuss your self-assessment tax return or payments on account, please get in touch with your usual MHA Larking Gowen contact in the first instance or email:
In this current climate, Businesses are having to make business critical decisions to survive. These may include making employees redundant, leading to restructure of their workforce to ensure continuation of business performance.
Steadfast Training are the Prime Contractor for Skills Support for the Workforce/Redundancy (SSW) in New Anglia and can support these employers and employees (including those affected by redundancy) through FREE upskilling/training provision.
Working with a number of specialist training providers, we offer a wide range of courses across all sectors from short programmes to level 2 and level 3 qualifications. All of our training provision is currently offered remotely, using our online delivery model, consisting of a mix of tutor-led ‘virtual classroom’ workshops, short online course & video tutorials, followed by learner calls, providing 1-2-1 phone or digital (Zoom, Teams, FaceTime etc) support.
These courses include: Employability Skills, MS Office courses in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Customer Service Diplomas (Level 2) and ILM Level 3 Award in Management.
Somerset House is London’s working arts centre built on historic foundations around one of the most beautiful courtyards in Europe. Situated at the very heart of the capital, we are home to the UK’s largest and most exciting creative community and are overflowing with new ideas, young businesses and fresh perspectives.
The Challenge
The Challenge was to enhance their existing safety and security processes by empowering their security team and reception staff with a soft escalation system that they could use when required. Being in the heart of London, in a very public space, the team need to be prepared for all scenarios – and so our easy-to-implement and roll-out solution seemed ideal.
The Success
Fortunately, the team hasn’t had a live incident on site yet. However, our product was so easy to roll-out and implement that all staff had the software up and running within the first 24 hours of purchase. Using our simple how-to guides, they’ve implemented a process for testing their little green buttons alongside their regular fire alarm drills. Staff are happy and secure in the knowledge that their workplace is safer thanks to LGB.
Having worked in sales and sales management for most of my career, I know how the demand and expectation of a sales role can affect physical and mental health. The sales industry sometimes has a reputation for being fast-paced and stressful. I regularly worked evenings and weekends and would always be available for customers and my bosses, as did many of my colleagues. This is still common place for many with detrimental effects.
Employers must be focused on wellbeing to ensure employee health and efficiency are peaked at all times. Remember that your sales team are the face of your business. How they conduct themselves reflects directly on your brand. Do whatever you can to ensure your customers are presented with a happy employee.
Here are a few tips on how to assess your sales teams’ wellbeing needs:
My first tip is to communicate. It seems obvious but we often presume we know what our employees want but we haven’t actually asked them. So, ask and ask again so that your staff feel that their needs are being considered.
Another tip is to hold 1-2-1 wellbeing meetings. Once a month or quarter is fine but they will help you make sure your staff feel supported by you the manager, and the business.
Finally, consider appointing a wellbeing or mental health champion who can provide support to those suffering from mental health issues. They can support your wellbeing programme by letting your staff know they have someone to talk to, without being judged and in confidence.
Rod Springall has helped dozens of business owners successfully sell their businesses over the years. As such he is perfectly placed to share his experiences, to include:
How can company values help people be their best selves at work? An organisation’s company values can play a significant role in creating a workplace culture which enables employees to bring their best selves to work and therefore be more engaged, motivated and productive. Using her own experience as a co-founder of Pure, a values-led organisation, Chief Operating Officer Gill Buchanan has shared some of her top tips on embedding values into a business and the reasons why this makes a positive difference. Gill said: “In our day-to-day work as professional recruitment specialists for the eastern region, we are increasingly seeing just how much importance candidates place on finding an organisation which genuinely cares and which has a set of values they can really relate to. Companies with clearly communicated values are often the most successful when it comes to competing for top talent and having high levels of employee engagement. Supporting vision and purpose A company’s vision and purpose can be used as the inspiration and guidance to set company values. This will help to ensure that they are authentic and can successfully form the basis for the organisation’s culture. For example, when we established Pure, our vision was to create a company which was different to others within the recruitment industry. We wanted our business to focus on developing long-term client and candidate relationships rather than being driven by numbers and KPIs. Having a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve helped us to choose our values. We wanted them to represent everything we believed was important about the way we wanted to work and achieve success. Our six values are: Pure Quality, Pure Teamwork, Pure Supports, Pure Delivers, Pure Rewards and Pure Innovates. Bringing people together Employees who feel a sense of belonging are far more likely to be engaged and motivated to go the extra mile for themselves, their colleagues and the business as a whole. Shared values can bring people together whatever their background, interest, age or level of expertise. They enable businesses to celebrate and encourage diversity while still uniting people in day to day behaviours, standards and attitudes. We recognise that our business is a people business. We want to bring our people together and look after them as they are our ambassadors and the ones engaging with our candidates and clients. Our values have helped us to create a culture where great work is rewarded, teamwork is celebrated and everyone is supported to deliver high quality. Company culture foundations People spend a lot of time at work, so it is understandable that they will want to be in an environment which is a positive place to be. An organisation’s values can help to achieve this as they set the foundations for a company’s culture and the attitudes and behaviours to develop and maintain it. For example, we have a people-first culture and our Pure Supports company value helps us to achieve this. As well as supporting each other, and our candidates and clients, we want our employees to have the support they need to do their job well. It helps us to shape everything from the equipment and training we provide to the initiatives we put in place to support the mental and physical wellbeing of our team. Embedding values into day to day business For company values to make a real difference they need to be brought to life and embedded in day-to-day working practices. This means more than just displaying them as part of the office branding, although that is still a very positive thing to do! They also need to become foundational to the business and genuinely underpin everything. Values can be embedded by making them a part of every aspect of your business from recruitment and onboarding through to referencing them in staff reviews, reward and recognition schemes and L&D plans. They also need to be reinforced and authentically displayed by the leadership team to ensure they flow from the top down. As part of the leadership team at Pure, our values have given us the basis of establishing a consistency of how we want to do things. Because we all really believe in the values, we can live them while still being our true selves, we don’t have to robotically try and demonstrate them. They have also become a key part of the language we use when talking about our business, from updating our teams internally through to our external communications. We believe that being able to share our values with our clients and candidates helps to give them a real understanding of what it is like to work with us. The same goes for potential new recruits. Our values help us to explain more about how we have created a culture which differentiates us from other recruitment firms. To help share this with prospective employees, and new recruits, we have put together a Pure book to explain more about our company in a fun, easy and tangible way. After a few months of being part of our team, we also ask new employees to deliver a presentation which includes sharing examples of when they have seen our values being demonstrated day to day. This really helps people to understand why they are so important to us and how they benefit everybody.”
Are you struggling with your mental health or do you know somebody who is?
In Norwich, the ST MARTINS HOUSING TRUST provides a place for people in mental health crisis to gain help and support. Known as Under 1’s Wing, it provides an alternative service to A&E or mainstream mental health providers.
People who visit the service come from all walks of life.
They are often the strong ones in their families – the people that everyone else relies upon. But one day these people might find themselves in an emotional space where they simply can’t cope.
Under 1’s Wing provides a safe place for people to go, to speak with someone about what’s going on or simply just to sit and have some quiet time. The service is run by a group of extraordinary people and there is also a mental health nurse on site.
So, please be aware that this service exists and pass it on to anyone who might need it:
The Criterion Theatre is one of London’s premiere West End Theatres found at the heart of the capital. With seating capacity for over 500 guests each performance, the venue caters for a huge volume of visitors each day.
The Challenge
Due to the high volume of visitors and the complex layout of the venue, staff needed a quick method of calling for support and alerting the network to an incident – even when internet or phone signal may be an issue. A potential terrorism incident in the heart of London caused a influx of members of the public seeking shelter in the building. Front line staff needed a panic alarm solution to immediately notify the network in case of future events.
The Success
Little Green Button has been implemented quickly and easily, fulfilling the theatres dedication to staff and visitor safety. Deployed discreetly on devices across the network, the team can call for assistance or raise an alert regardless of mobile signal or internet availability.
With coronavirus forcing people to self-isolate have you thought about how your current IT infrastructure will support your business if your staff need to work from home?
If you aren’t already setup for remote working, you need to start exploring your options to make sure that your business is prepared, and your staff are supported.
Protecting your employees and your business in the event that remote working is needed takes careful planning and strategies should be tested regularly.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Can I quickly communicate an office closure to all staff out of working hours? Outside of working hours it cannot be expected that staff will be checking their emails. Do you have a way to text or send push notifications?
Are all staff able to take their equipment home with them? If employees are restricted by desktop computers, you’ll need a way to relocate equipment, including phones, if needed. Do staff know how to reinstall this equipment at home?
Will the team be able to effectively collaborate with each other, with contractors or with customers? Collaboration tools and shared documents will ensure that your team are still productive, even if they are miles apart. Does your team have access to Microsoft Teams or other collaboration tools?
If you need help making sure that your business is ready for remote working send us an email at quack@greenduck.co.uk
St James CE Infant School is a small primary school located in Whitehaven, Cumbria. Safeguarding of both the children and staff is of the utmost importance in every aspect of their school life.
The Challenge
Michael Craig, Headteacher, needed to implement a simple and effective safety solution for St James. He’d previously used Little Green Button in another school – for added security when behavioural problems arose – and was keen to use it again having seen how effective it was.
The school needed a way to get alerts out to other staff members, without leaving the children unsupervised. This could be for any number of things – they could be sending a request out for an ice pack, or it could be for part of their lockdown procedure. Little Green Button gave them the flexibilty to continue with the day to day running of the school
The Success
Little Green Button has been successfully installed and embedded at the school. The Teachers are able to communicate effectively with each other, and the children are never left unattended.Using our simple how-to guides, they’ve implemented a process for testing their little green buttons alongside their regular fire alarm drills. Staff are happy and secure in the knowledge that their workplace is safer thanks to LGB.
The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) team at Tudor Lodge Consultants is proud to announce that we are now working with Aaron Jonah Accessories (https://www.aaronjonah.co.uk). Aaron Jonah Accessories provides men and women accessories, including designer cufflinks and jewellery gifts.
Our SEO Aproach
Aaron Jonah Accessories approached us to help launch their new website – and ensure that it starts to rank on Google for their brand name and products.
We began by carrying out a full technical SEO fix-ups – going through every product page and optimising the images, product names, meta-titles, headings and descriptions.This ensures that Google and other search engines can read [crawl] the website and rank it as high as possible.
To build up the domain authority, we have been acquiring some clean links on some shopping, fashion and style websites and magazines – not only providing links by good PR for Aaron Jonah in the process.
We have been carrying out extensive keyword research and competitor analysis to find keywords of focus that best represent the offerings and products of the Aaron Jonah Accessories brand.
Finally, will be working with the content team at Aaron Jonah Accessories to produce original and SEO-friendly content for the website throughout all pages including the homepage, information pages and new pages that will be built and populated. All of these pages will make use of SEO-best practices.
We are excited to be working with Aaron Jonah and expect to see some very positive results in the next 3 to 6 months.