Now that the dust has settled on the Budget 2021 and ‘Tax Day’, we take a look at the key relevant highlights from the two announcements, and what these could mean for you and your business.

Why including your digital assets in your Will is essential in helping your loved ones sort out your personal affairs – and your business succession.

Although it may seem like a gloomy topic, the fact remains that your death could prove even more distressing for your loved ones if they struggle to track down online bank accounts or access the information they might need for probate, which is stored on your email, such as life policies or legal papers. Not to mention being unable to access those treasured family photos saved on your computer or online accounts/clouds!

If you’ve made provision for your digital assets in your Will, you’re in the minority. According to new research by the Law Society¹, only 26% of respondents know what happens to your digital assets when they pass away. What’s more, of those surveyed who have a Will, an overwhelming 93% had not included any digital assets. Law Society of England and Wales President David Greene, said:

“Photos, social media accounts and emails from loved ones are often just as treasured as physical possessions – and yet very few people understand what happens to their digital assets or why it is important to include them in their Will.”

Looking after your loved ones

What happens after your death can be a difficult subject to approach, but keeping a clear record of online passwords ensures that your loved ones are able to access your digital assets, and they therefore aren’t faced with any additional stresses during probate – ultimately, helping ensure your hard-earned assets will be passed on according to your wishes.

This is especially important for the self-employed, as business succession planning in the event of the untimely death of the owner is vital in safeguarding your business’ future. An appropriately drafted Will, including digital assets and passwords, can help avoid any unnecessary fall-out at an already upsetting time.

What’s more, taking stock of your digital assets now will help you value your estate, which will help you with your Inheritance Tax planning, to make sure your family gets the best out of any assets left behind. For example, if you total up all of your assets (including digital ones, such as online bank accounts) and your estate is above the £325,000 nil-rate band, you can start planning early to remove some of the money from your estate each tax year. This can be done by using your gifting allowance, or taking advantage of annual tax allowances, such as ISAs, Junior ISAs and pensions.

The role of Digital Executors

At Wellesley, our clients have access to WealthSafe, our online personal document filing system. When we introduce our clients to this secure digital platform, we insist on having ‘Digital Executors’, so that family members can access important documents and financial papers from anywhere in the world.

This not only helps with digital assets, but also allows you to store all your paperwork securely in one place, such as house deeds, tax returns or even an insurance valuation for jewellery, alongside the information shared by us.

If you’d like to discuss what happens to your digital assets after you die, or any of the other issues raised in this article, such as Inheritance Tax or business legacy planning, please get in touch with a member of the Wellesley team on 01444 244551.

The levels and bases of taxation, and reliefs from taxation, can change at any time. The value of any tax relief depends on individual circumstances.

The writing of a Will and certain aspects of succession planning may involve the referral to services that are separate and distinct to those offered by St. James’s Place. This area of advice is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority or Prudential Regulation Authority.

Sources:

¹ Lawsociety.org, Don’t Forget Digital Assets When making a will, 6 January 2021. A Populus survey of more than 1,000 members of the public commissioned by the Law Society asked several questions about whether people had made a will. The survey took place in late June 2020.

We discuss whether working from home will become the norm, or if emerging from the pandemic will see businesses head straight back to the office.

Back in March 2020 (23^rd, to be exact), five words spoken by Boris Johnson changed the working world as we know it – “you must stay at home.” Before the pandemic transformed the UK into an almost completely remote workforce, around 87% of people already wanted to work flexibly in the hopes of achieving a better work-life balance, reduced stress and higher job satisfaction. The pandemic’s silver lining granted employees their wish – even though employers remained resistant.

Claire Ward, Founder of SME HR consultancy, The HR Hub, explains:

“Companies who previously were not open to such flexibility have had their eyes opened to what’s possible, and a lot of companies are viewing this as an opportunity to change the way they work.”

And it’s not only businesses that it changes, but ‘business’ too. The CIPD says that improved engagement – one of the benefits of flexible working – can account for 43% more revenue generation and 20% improved performance. Normalising and supporting flexible working could even help to reduce an organisation’s gender pay gap and encourage a more diverse workforce, which, according to McKinsey, could add £150 billion annually to the UK economy by 2025.¹ And as around 92% of people want to work flexibly, the business and geographical talent pool will become much wider, too.²

Of course, this work style isn’t without its own set of limitations; creative businesses that use brainstorming sessions find it difficult to find the same flow online, and wider disadvantages include increased loneliness and the financial outlay of supporting flexible working for some companies (minimal in the context of the bigger picture). It’s also likely that remote challenges to creativity won’t be there for long. “We’re already seeing technology that helps to break those creativity barriers, which have likely had their development accelerated over the last few months,” says Ward.

“Generally, the advantages outweigh any disadvantages,” explains Claire McCartney, Senior Resourcing and Inclusion Adviser at the CIPD. “Organisations should see a boost in productivity, a more engaged workforce, a diverse workforce and the ability to attract top talent.”

A four-day working week

Before the pandemic made working from home the centre of attention during 2020, the idea of a four-day week – employees working four days instead of five with no effect on their salary – was gaining in popularity.

Pre-pandemic, Henley Business School penned a white paper titled Four Better or Four Worse, which studied the world of the four-day week and revealed that UK businesses that implemented it saw combined savings of £92 billion.³ Professor James Walker, Director of Research at Henley Business School, did, however, point out a notable concern for business owners.

Professor Walker says:

“While 75% believe a less rigid working structure is key to a harmonious and diverse workplace, for some the benefits are either unnecessary or not substantial enough to warrant implementation. The biggest concern for business owners is customer availability.”

The white paper states that it is customer availability that prevents 82% of businesses from offering a four-day week, believing the need for employee availability to the customer outweighs the need for flexible working. Nearly three quarters of businesses – small businesses in particular – also felt it would be difficult to implement.

A year on

Over 12 months since the Prime Minister’s fateful announcement, many of us are still working from home (in January 2021 the percentage of adults working from home during at least some of the time stood at 45%, the highest since June 2020⁴), although we expect to see more people returning to the office in line with the government’s ‘roadmap’.

Many office workers have liked working from home, and are drawn to new “hybrid” arrangements going forward. Sir Cary Cooper, President of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester University, recently told i News:

“The evidence pre-Covid was that people wanted to work more flexibly, and work partly at home, partly from a central office. The findings showed it enhanced job satisfaction, there was higher productivity, and less sickness and absence. But what most people didn’t want is what we’ve been doing in the pandemic: remote work 100 per cent at the time.” ⁵

Companies are reacting accordingly. In February 2021, global music streaming service Spotify announced its ‘Work From Anywhere’ programme, saying it will let employees choose wherever they want to work, whether that’s from home, in an office or a mix of the two, and will even let them move to different cities and countries. At the beginning of March, BP told their office-based employees staff around the world that they will be expected to work from home for two days per week after the pandemic, in a permanent shift to flexible working.

After the pandemic

While remote working has become the go-to for flexible working, it’s important to remember that a global crisis forced it upon us in the first place. As the future brightens and we emerge from the pandemic, businesses need to reassess their working practices while considering all options. “There are many forms of flexible working, from remote, part-time and term-time working to compressed hours, flexi-time and jobs shares,” says McCartney. “Employers will have to look beyond working from home or otherwise risk creating a two-tier workforce of those who have the opportunity to benefit from remote working and flexibility and those who don’t.”

Ward believes, particularly for SMEs, that core office days may be the way forward, which, as with any alternative that doesn’t require a full-capacity office, brings the bonus of reducing a business’s carbon footprint. Before decisions, there must be dialogue, advises Professor Walker:

“There is an imperative to open up conversations between employers and their employees, to trial and evaluate different forms of flexible employment which best suit the contexts and workplace roles.”

Ironically, shifting an entire sector into a particular form of flexible working may not really be flexible at all.

Sources:

^1,2 Flexible working: the business case, CIPD, November 2018
³ Four Better or Four Worse, Henley Business School, July 2019

⁴ ONS data, February 2021

⁵inews.co.uk, Working from home: Hybrid remote working may be the future, March 2021

The opinions expressed by third parties are their own and not necessarily shared by Wellesley Wealth Advisory or St. James’s Place Wealth Management.

The pandemic has brought about a revolution in remote working, but how can companies adapt to this new way of working, and how do they integrate new colleagues into the team when they are working from home?

When you’re interviewing a potential new employee, you don’t usually expect your first ‘face-to-face’ meeting with them to be via a screen. But these are strange times, and virtual recruitment has become a reality for many businesses since March 2020.

And it’s not just about the initial recruitment – as we saw in our last article, the shift towards homeworking has led many companies to consider candidates outside their local area, and even country. Indeed, the pandemic might have changed the lives of office workers forever.

Here’s what’s changed, and tips for recruiting remote workers.

Case study: SimpliSafe

Home security business SimpliSafe recently told St. James’s Place about their ‘unconventional’ recruitment process during lockdown. Founded in the US, SimpliSafe’s UK base in Manchester was planning to expand its team when the pandemic forced the country into lockdown. SimpliSafe’s UK General Manager Jonathan Wall explains:

“We already had a few people in the recruitment process and we weren’t going to stop. So, we took on a Senior CRM Manager, a Senior CRM Executive and, of course, a Financial Controller. Those people needed to be inducted and they all started after lockdown. Initially we thought that was going to be our biggest challenge, but we have a headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, so we were already quite used to remote working and having people on Zoom. It was more about making them feel comfortable and part of the team.”

The company encouraged colleagues from across the business to contact the new team members, welcoming them on board. In addition to regular team meetings, SimpliSafe also arranged virtual social events to make integration easier, including virtual fitness sessions and a Friday quiz. Jonathan finally met his Financial Controller in person in May. They held their first face-to-face meeting on a bench in Salford Quays, but by this time they already felt they knew each other well.

How to recruit remote workers effectively

So, what can companies do to achieve similar recruitment successes?

Firstly, you need to decide whether it’s simply a case of recruiting someone virtually, with a view to having them in the office at least some of the time, post-pandemic, or whether you are happy to recruit a remote worker who lives far away. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), before the pandemic, just 11% of jobs were advertised as being flexible.¹ Having a choice of work environment and location is now a major ‘desirable’ for many job seekers, and there’s a growing sense that employers will miss out on top talent if they don’t offer flexible work options.

As with all recruitment, it’s about finding the right person for the job, and this includes the remote-working aspect. Kristen McNamara, Senior Director of Staff Development & Talent Acquisition at recruitment agency Robert Half, says companies need to identify candidates who are self-directed, motivated, flexible and able to deal with the new ways of working. She says:

“If you hire somebody who is looking for direction, looking to be told what to do and what the next step is going to be, that’s probably not going to end well. So, during the interview process it’s important to interview for that agility and mindset.”

How to integrate your new hires

Claire McCartney, Senior Policy Advisor for Resourcing and Inclusion at the CIPD, says that once a candidate has been chosen, the challenges of onboarding them are two-fold. There’s the practical issues, and the ‘social’ factor of making them feel part of the team.

On the hands-on side, Claire identifies issues such as setting up the new hire with the technology they need and making sure they know how to comply with data protection principles. She also says that HR or payroll documents should be sent via legally binding platforms like DocuSign or HelloSign.

And employers should also make sure that the new hire has checked with their mortgage provider, landlord, local authority or home insurer that they are allowed to work from home. Companies should also check that their insurance covers business equipment in the employee’s home and send new hires an electronic health and safety questionnaire as part of their risk assessment.

Making new employees feel welcome

Think about ways to welcome your new employee into the business. Send them a welcome email or e-card, and set up one-to-one introductions on their first day with managers and people who they will be interacting with on a daily basis. It’s also worth considering assigning your new team member a workplace mentor, outside of their department.

Both Kristen and Claire agree on the value of less formal interactions, such as virtual coffee breaks, that help to integrate new people with their colleagues. Kristen, whose own team work remotely, even has an informal dog walking group and informal chats with staff while they are all walking their dogs.

To conclude, then, with remote and flexible working likely to become much more widespread, business owners should consider how they will integrate new employees, making them instantly feel ‘at home’ and ready to start building a long-term career with your company.

Sources:

¹Flexible working: the business case, CIPD, November 2018

The opinions expressed by third parties are their own are not necessarily shared by Wellesley Wealth Advisory or St. James’s Place Wealth Management.