Today’s BBC Working Lunch was well worth watching for small business owners. Topical as ever it covers work, the weather and absent employees, as well as Suchi Mukherjee, the Managing Director of Gumtree, who was guest of the day.
For small businesses, if you have employees that didn’t make it in to work, today the program will let you know if you still have to pay them. Can you make them work extra hours to make up missed work? Can you make them take time off due to the snow as annual leave or can it be classed as special unpaid leave or can they simply opt to work from home? There’s also a sample severe weather policy for employers on the FSB website (opens in .pdf)
Suchi from Gumtree talked about selling on the site, safety and recruitment. Working Lunch presenter Naga Munchetty also asked her about closing Gumtree dating categories and Suchi explained that some of the most dissatisfied users were those using the site for dating.
Another question was whether Gumtree is partly responsible for local papers losing ad revenue and going out of business. Suchi answered reasonably that it’s the choice of those placing the adverts – Gumtree offers them for free, they only take a couple of minutes to create, and more importantly they reach a much larger audience than local papers.
If you missed the program you can still watch it on BBC iPlayer.
