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Saxon Air is proud to announce the successful completion of the Air League’s inaugural Electric Flying Scholarship, hosted within the Klyne Business Aviation Centre at Saxon Air’s Flight Training school.

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Trust, but Verify. A phrase you may have heard from Ronald Regan during his time as president of the USA.

Being an employer, you are the president and leader of your company. A company you may have started from scratch and poured everything into making it a success. You have a team of staff employed to support the business and help it grow and exceed your expectations.

The staff have been chosen by you. You trust them and have a good working relationship to know the work will be completed. But how well do you really know them? We often hear leaders and directors tell us how they know their staff well and can tell us about family connections from the chat they had at the kettle last week while making a cup of tea. But do your employees really tell you everything? The answer I’m afraid is no.

You could have a brilliant member of staff but for whatever reason a personal matter puts them into financial vulnerability. You may notice they are not as punctual with their time keeping. They may be slightly quieter than normal maybe. You know them though, right? They are continuing to manage your payroll on their own and keeping up with the workload during your own busy workload right?

Then you realise money is unaccounted for. Verify.

You notice this has been ongoing for over 12 months.

Tens of thousands of pounds gone. No trace and it is all gone.

That one employee who you knew well and trusted but didn’t verify, has taken thousands from the business. The money has gone. The employee used the money to keep afloat after that personal matter which made them financially vulnerable.

Verify. This is the key.

Former GP staff member pleads guilty to stealing £22k from surgery

A former GP staff member who had taken over the sole banking of cash from payments for prescriptions and other items was not banking the money and keeping it for themselves. This went on from 2019 til 2022 before it was picked up by external accountants.

Placing one employee as the sole responsibility for banking and cash transactions is where this GP practice went wrong. They did not evaluate their staff processes to ensure it went through 2 or 3 other employees to verify any transactions. It unfortunately went undetected for nearly 3 years. This employee is currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of fraud by abuse of position and acquiring, using, or possessing criminal property at North East Derbyshire Magistrates’ Court on 27 June 2024.

Some tips to manage risk of employment theft and fraud from your business:

1. Know your employee – Employees at risk of stealing from your business maybe suffering financially in their personal life. Before employment, we always advise using our background checks. We can verify references, build a picture of their personal life and carry out financial checks to ensure they are not vulnerable to committing theft to help a dire personal situation.
2. Notice change in behaviour – Are they turning up to work late? Unusually stressed and short tempered? This may indicate personal problems which could lead to poor judgement. The welfare of employees should be paramount for an effective workforce and spotting any unusual behaviour first could prevent further problems.
3. Track your finances – Always keep on top of your finances within the business. Once a month ensure your numbers match up. Doing so regularly can highlight any anomalies quickly. The sooner it is detected the quicker to tracing the culprit and preventing further loss of revenue. Also ensure you are completing the audit to ensure numbers aren’t presented as being tampered with.
4. Staff sickness – When an employee is on long term sick that they are being paid for, you want to ensure this is the case. If you have any concerns your employee is fit for work we can carry out surveillance to gather any evidence of wrongdoing. Detecting this quickly again will ensure further loss of revenue.
5. Security – Ensure you have well developed security equipment within your business. High quality CCTV systems are an effective deterrent to dishonest employees. This can also ensure employment safety from other staff and the public.

If you have any concerns around your employees or business partners, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a free consultation to discuss how our services can help.

And remember, Trust, but Verify!

If you need assistance for any of our employment or commercial services, get in touch!

• Employment Investigations
• Surveillance
• Theft/Fraud in the workplace
• Person Tracing
• Asset Tracing

www.taylorinvestigations.co.uk | enquiries@taylorinvestigations.co.uk | 01603 904031

Smash Marketing are very excited to announce that they are finalists for the Getting S*** Done Award: Implementor Of The Year at the National Entrepreneur Awards! Beks from Smash says, “This is a huge privilege for us and our very proactive team and we are excited to see what this holds for us.

At OPCoachUK we describe ourselves as organisational psychologists and coaches. We also have deep HR expertise. However, we know that doesn’t automatically describe our offering. Particularly with our focus on SMEs, we know that we need to outline what we do, and how it creates positive impact. We don’t expect any CEO to cry out, “Help! For the love of Mike, I need an Organisational Psychologist!”. However, experience tells us that we have a lot to offer any growing SME with ambitions to be a top employer.

At the highest level, we enable organisations to give to and get the best from their people in a way that is fully tailored to business goals, culture and individuals. We have over 10 years of experience of being the oil that gets the engine into perfect performance and allows the leaders to drive the supercar.

That still isn’t very descriptive, so in more detail, what we do depends on the size of business. In organisations that are pre-HR, we can set you on the road to building effective and efficient mechanisms that enable your team members to grow with you. We know how to accurately define an organisation’s culture so that the culture feeds the organisation’s success. All the best People/HR processes feed and refine that culture, while boosting the success of the business.

We can also start from a point of enabling you to manage your team’s performance in a meaningful, but lightly engineered way. The words “performance management” can be very off-putting to a CEO who values their team already, but performance maximisation is quite a different thing. Light touch, heavy impact performance maximisation enables leaders, managers and their teams to stay firmly on a path of professional growth.

In larger organisations that are more “M” and already have an HR/People team, we work to ensure that the nuts and bolts of people management are aligned to your business goals. We can provide training and upskill your managers in the smooth running of their team. If it will work in your business, we can introduce the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to smooth working. Alternatively, we can embed CliftonStrengths to help people to focus on their talents. We also offer straightforward, traditional coaching to leaders and managers. Your people come to sessions with something they want to work on professionally, and we enable and encourage them to succeed within your framework. Coaching is very powerful; it powers growth, reduces stress and drives up retention.

In terms of duration, we can do short-order pieces of work, such as a culture diagnostic. We can do medium-term projects, such as setting up/refining people processes. We can even do long-term work, where your team gets to work with the same coach over a longer period. In these instances we become the oil that keeps the team growing and we vastly reduce the time a leadership team spends on negative People issues.

Regardless of size of business, this begins with discussion around your business goals and your aspirations for your team. Tell us your ambitions and we will suggest how we can support you. If you are situated close to Norwich or Bristol, we’d love to come and meet you. Otherwise, we have traditionally performed most of our work remotely, so you’re more than welcome to speak to us through video call.

We naturally won’t charge for the initial consultation or the resulting proposal. The first 10 leaders who respond to this post and decide to go ahead on the first project of any size will get a 10% discount on our usual prices for that project. For more information, please contact us through opcoach.uk and mention NCC August 2024.

Can your firm still benefit from CBILS?

Yes! And even if you were one of the lucky few businesses that have secured a CBILS facility already, there is still time to apply for another. Fortunately, here at Credo, we have access to additional lenders who can consider a further facility of up to £250k.

The scheme has been extended to 31st January 2021!

This means that you can still lodge an application via Credo until 31st January 2021. As it stands new applications cannot be lodged after this point.

As of 18th October, just over 73,000 firms had benefitted from a CBILS facility, a total lend of £17.16bn. Many of these firms have benefitted from multiple facilities.

If you’ve already accessed a facility via your bank and still feel your business could benefit more from the scheme, there’s potential for further access. If your current borrowing on the scheme is less than 25% of your company’s annual turnover, then please get in touch as we could help you further.

Questions to ask yourself before considering this;

• Under the scheme, how much have I already accessed? What was my annual turnover in my last set of accounts?
• In the next 12 months, am I confident that my company’s cashflow will not need any support?
• Can I utilise this loan facility to benefit my business for the next 12 months and further?

If you would like to discuss your options then give us a call today and let us do the hard work.

We pledge to uphold five key commitments: ensuring inclusive and accessible recruitment, effectively communicating vacancies, offering interviews to disabled individuals, providing reasonable adjustments, and supporting our existing employees.