Entering a family-run business can be a difficult proposition for both family and non-family members. Here’s a simple guide to getting it right.

Check for Rules

A family business can often have no clear structures, as family members pick up (and put down) tasks and responsibilities in a fluid fashion. While this can be a great way to transfer skills, it’s also a recipe for chaos. A good business still has guidelines, job descriptions and clear lines of decision-making – if the business doesn’t seem to have this, think carefully about joining it, as you have no way of objecting to requests or arbitrary changes to your work, if that’s how everybody else operates. Remember that these rules should apply to everybody and prevent overdue leniency where family members are concerned, and stop nepotism.

Work Relationships

If you are in a family business as a family member, it’s important that you have a clear demarcation between family and work life. One way to do this is to have a separate workplace (even if it’s a desk within your home) that you only go to for your ‘day job’ and to have distinctive clothing that you only wear when you are ‘at work’. This stops you slipping into family relationships in the work zone and also stops the constant intrusion of work into family time. The rule should be if you’re dressed for work you are at work, if you are not dressed for work, work should not be mentioned.

Conflict

Every workplace has some conflict, but in family businesses it’s important to demarcate work conflict and family issues;

•    Never mention relationships or personal issues in a work argument – if your little brother outranks you in the office, don’t call him ‘baby bro’ in a work based argument, it’s an abuse of family privilege.
•    Keep work arguments to the workplace, don’t let them spill into family time or space
•    Keep to the policies established in the workplace when handling work conflict
•    If necessary, use an independent mediator to help you and family members explore work-based conflict.

Performance

Ensure an annual review applies to all staff – and don’t let off family members because you know their personal circumstances. It may be best to appoint an outsider to conduct reviews alongside the boss, to keep everything honest and fair.

When schools or nurseries shut through bad weather, parents need to have a Plan B, especially if they have to combine working with childcare.  It’s a good idea to make sure you have the resources to entertain stuck at home children whilst continuing to be work, as best you can, from home. But finding the balance between amusing the kids and being an effective worker can be difficult. Here are 3 ideas to make the process easier.

Swiss Family Whoever

When the weather is bad outside, getting the kids to play survival inside is fun and even educational. Set up a tent in the living room (it can just be blankets stretched over chairs for the littlest ones, whilst older kids can use their ingenuity to build a camp from bedding and furniture) and turn off the lights. Hand out torches, and get them to conduct ‘raids’ into various rooms to get the equipment needed (food, books, phones, games consoles etc) whilst remaining silent. Back at camp they can work out how to ration the food etc for themselves. Smart kids will even set up their own missions and treasure hunts.

Winter Wonderland

Simple science can be good fun in bad weather if you take a few precautions. Ensure your children are well wrapped up in layers of outdoor clothing and that you have warm, dry garments to hand indoors. Then let them try a few experiments: examining snowflakes under a powerful magnifying glass, for example, or raindrop races down a window. Perhaps give them some equipment to try and make a wind gauge or if it’s very muddy outside, send them out to discover and identify bird and animal tracks. Even in a city you can get the kids to look at the growth of moss and lichens between paving slabs and on city trees and try to work out how the plant got there and what it survives on. Back home, write up a science journal and drink hot chocolate to reward the budding scientist.

Artistic Endeavour

Teens can be encouraged to make snowmen or snow angels if the weather is really bad, or even to paint pictures in the snow using food colouring. If it’s really atrocious outside, get them to customise their own old clothing, or yours, using fabric paint, scissors and ingenuity – then hold a fashion show!

For many of us there are jobs that have to be done outside in winter, whether it’s our full-time work in the outdoor weather or just a small part of our working day like taking the bins out to be emptied or walking to or from our car. It’s important to dress appropriately for the weather so that we are able to be healthy and safe and to face whatever the day throws at us.
The current long-range weather forecasts suggest an early winter, with snow in the UK predicted from November to January and with December having lower than average temperatures. Exactaweather.com, a non-profit-making organisation which has accurately predicted the last two harsh winters, says 2011/12 could be record-breakingly cold.
Hypothermia begins at much higher temperatures than most of us realise and is more common than many British workers recognise. While in the USA around 700 people die each year of hypothermia as a result of work conditions, figures for the UK are not broken down in this way – but a staggering 30,000 deaths a year are considered to result from exposure to cold. Hypothermia is a potential killer and often goes unrecognised in the early stages because the symptoms are fatigue, nausea, confusion, and sweating.

• Wearing gloves and a hat are important for outdoor work. Gloves insulate the hands but need to be flexible enough to allow a worker to manipulate tools or controls. A hat needs to provide good heat conservation and may also help with visibility – a peaked cap can keep rain and snow from the eyes, but some hats also impede hearing and it’s important to ensure that one form of safety is not sacrificed to another.
• For outdoor work it’s better to wear lightweight clothing in layers that can be adjusted to the prevailing weather conditions because it is as important to remove layers to avoid getting over-warm as perspiring can lead to chills that in turn lead to hypothermia as the cold moisture near the skin triggers a physical reaction – damp clothing is up to twenty times less heat retentive than dry clothing, so layers are vital to ensuring safe outdoor working.
• For those working near machinery, scarves are a particular hazard, as are the dangling drawstrings of hoodies – it’s vital to ensure that clothing that keeps us warm is also safe in the work environment and anything that can catch or entangle in moving parts is dangerous.
• Winter food is vital to productive working – complex carbohydrates and simple warmth are important to stop people, even those working at desks, developing the lethargy that results from becoming cold and using up calories to keep the body warm. Hot drinks can really make a difference to performance too.

There seems to be an increasing concern about the role of clothing in small businesses, particularly those that offer some kind of professional service. As companies downsize and out-source, it’s becoming important that the appearance of all those involved in a company reflect the company ethos, including the professional nature and status of the organisation. The loss of intervening layers of middle management often means that those at the front of the business, such as receptionists, are the figureheads for the business in general and so their appearance becomes vital.

However, it can be difficult for small firms to discuss, let alone impose, a dress code on members of staff who have got used to dressing casually or provocatively. One sensitive way of dealing with this issue is to hold a firm-wide seminar or lunch meeting on the subject of Appropriate Work Clothing using one of the many online guides to dressing for success. Divide the company on gender lines for this event and offer some light-hearted fun as well as serious exploration of what counts as professionally appropriate clothing.

You can, for example, invest in some clothing props: these could be anything from fridge magnets of famous figures with a range of magnetic outfits through to paper cut-out dressing up dolls, right up to shop window dummies and cheap clothing in the form of second-hand or discount clothing. These can be used during the session to create the most and least appropriate outfits for various situations: work, barbecue, going to the theatre etc – this stops it feeling like a lecture and gives people an idea of how to put an outfit together: not a skill that everybody possesses!  If you really want to invest in your staff, you can even get an image consultant to come in and suggest the best colours for each member of the team to wear.

Once the seminar has taken place, you can have one-to-one conversations with any team member who is sloppy or overly sexy in their dress habits, confident that you can hold a conversation on professional grounds without it being seen as a judgement on personal style.

One London-based charity helping the homeless has found an unusual way to raise funds – it’s auctioning hats on eBay. Not just any hats, but celebrity hats!
Dame Shirley Bassey has donated a purple felt hat, while LeAnn Rimes has presented the charity, St Mungo’s, with a signed baseball cap. Other donators include Stephen Merchant: co-creator of The Office along with Ricky Gervais and Fern Britton, Eric Clapton, Alexei Sayle, Paris Hilton, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Joan Collins, and Richard (Hamster) Hammond. The hats are going on sale on a schedule: currently on offer until 5th November are the Bassey, Rimes and Merchant hats.
Money raised in the auctions goes to fund St Mungo’s work with rough sleepers. On Friday 4th November, the charity is holding a Woolly Hat Day where members of the public are asked to show their support by putting on a hat for homeless people. The day will include activities in schools and companies too, with donations (£3 is the suggested level) per hat worn being made to St Mungo’s.
To bid on a celebrity hat you can visit St Mungo’s and the charity welcomes individuals and companies coming up with their own hat-related fund-raising event on 4 November.