The first prosecution under the act occurred this week, with Cotswold Geotechnical being found guilty at Winchester Crown Court of corporate manslaughter relating to an employee's death (link). In this case the fine was £385,000, which is a significant amount of money, but there is actually no upper limit.

Previously organisations could only be convicted of manslaughter if a 'directing mind' at the top of the company (such as a director) was also personally liable. However, now an organisation will be guilty of the new offence if the way in which its activities are managed or organised causes a death and amounts to a gross breach of a duty of care to the deceased.

It is fairly obvious that when people are performing 'risky' tasks that this could be a problem, but the act covers all activities where an organisation has a duty of care for its employees. We quickly realised that one of the areas where a business could easily transgress the new rules was in the management of the vehicles it uses. Not necessarily the company cars on their fleet, which are well maintained and insured, but in the 'grey fleet', where people use their own cars for business. These vehicles are typically more than six years old and therefore more prone to accidents, a crucial factor, when approximately 1 in 3 road crashes involve people driving 'for work'.

An organisation must ensure they have carried out their duty of care when requesting people perform tasks using their own vehicle, this can include checking they are legally allowed to drive, checking employee's cars have valid MOTs and even ensuring that they have the correct insurance cover. The key element is that an organisation must be able to demonstrate that they have approached and managed this duty of care actively getting someone to tick a box saying everything is fine is not enough.

At Selima we have made this whole process simple by wrapping the management of the process into the existing expense procedure, we call it EnvoyDrive. This creates very little additional workload, but offers benefits to both employer and employee. The business makes sure it is complying with the law, and the employee gets the advantage of timely reminders for provision of documentary proof.

This morning, as I sat contemplating the day ahead, I found myself increasingly confused by our society and the way that we deal with things – or maybe its just our differing priorities.

Yesterday I sat through the Emergency Budget presentation and winced as the Chancellor announced cuts, frozen wages and increased taxes. I heard all of the rhetoric about the mess that the country was in, about the way that we all needed to share in the payback of the debts and the long hard road we are travelling to economic recovery.

Today, I am reading news articles about the World Cup and how businesses need to allow staff to go home early or 'log off' for a few hours, schools need to send children home early and how the whole country will be coming to a stop so that we can watch a game of football. I am even hearing the TV commentators suggesting people can watch the game at work on the BBC's iPlayer (no reference to possible bandwidth or licensing policies)!

These two diverse events leave this business in a no-win situation. Everything about the way I'd like to run the business tells me to let the staff watch the football – go home, watch the game and have a good evening in the sun. I believe everyone pulling together is good for all involved – I even think the complex score prediction game that is being run internally is a great team building event!

On the flip side, 90% of our customers are local government and public sector, so how do I explain to people that have just had salaries frozen and a pension review announced that we can't respond to their support problems, as my staff are watching football on work's time?

Lastly, I have to remember that not all employees are actually that interested in the football, and would then be asking to have their 'afternoon off' at some other time.

The result is that I have tried to be flexible, and allow as many people as practical to book time off to watch the game if that is what they want to do.

Of course this may be only the beginning – what if England progress further, what if Andy Murray progresses at Wimbledon – and the London Olympics are just around the corner!!

In the next couple of weeks, you may well be surprised to be presented with a new message on your PC when you log in. This will be a message from Microsoft informing you that you actually have a choice of the browser that you use when surfing the internet. This new ‘feature’ is a consequence of the European Commission ruling against Microsoft, where it was decided that Microsoft had abused its monopolistic position and restricted choice by shipping an operating system that included a browser.

HR and Payroll software are odd bedfellows when it comes to technology and the software that people use to manage these functions.

Payroll is fundamentally a back office function that is controlled and operated by specialist staff, and the software is necessarily complex to allow it to perform all of the functions that are required - the interface to others is often restricted to payslips (be they paper or electronic).