Tool box for managers: Lessons from New Zealand small businesses

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 77-87
Author(s):  
R. Helen Samujh ◽  
Siham El‐Kafafi
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Small Businesses

scholarly journals Communicating Environmental, Safety and Health Law to Small Businesses in New Zealand: The Fundamental Missing Link

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Louisson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Fast Food ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Environmental Safety ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Dangerous Goods ◽  
Safety And Health ◽  
Training Programmes

<p>The majority of small New Zealand businesses do not understand their environmental, safety and health protection responsibilities. This is the finding of recent research, including that of the New Zealand Occupational Safety and Health Service (Bateman, 1999:19). The same problem was identified some 30 years ago by Lord Robens in the United Kingdom (Robens, 1972). Without a sound understanding, businesses can not properly meet their obligations to comply with environmental, safety and health statutes, such as the Dangerous Goods Regulations 1958, Resource Management Act 1991, Building Act 1991 and the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992. There are 63 environmental and safety statutes, which have a total of 3,993 pages. It is estimated that this total is growing at about 300 pages per year. The same level of understanding is required irrespective of organisation size. Larger companies are normally able to establish policies, sections, committees, club memberships, training programmes and effective systems to meet their needs. Somehow small businesses must understand the same law, but without the majority of the tools and resources available to larger companies. Small businesses therefore need a particularly effective communications process, which appears to be beyond their scope to develop; and therefore provides a worthy research topic. The research identifies the fundamental missing link in the compliance chain, as hypothesised by Mayhew (Mayhew, 1997:44), to be communication of law, and develops a customised compliance handbook to ease understanding of the law. The handbook concept was tested with seven small businesses involving land survey, hardware retail, car repair, petrol dispensing, electroplating, fast food supply and shipping. These case studies show the handbook is an effective way to inform small New Zealand businesses of their responsibilities under environmental and safety law. The research also identifies the need for industry based 'champions' to coach small businesses to achieve the required standard.</p>

Becoming Strategic in Small Businesses

2014 ◽  
pp. 160-179
Author(s):  
Colleen E. Mills
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Small Business ◽  
Strategic Management ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Strategic Intent ◽  
Business Startup ◽  
Relational Process

While strategy has been described as a plan or pattern of actions aligned to a conscious intent, it can also be conceptualised as the deliberate activities those in business engage in to realise a strategic intent. It is this activity oriented conception of strategy that is fuelling the turn towards practice in strategy scholarship. This chapter draws on this perspective and the ‘communication as constitutive of organisations' (CCO) perspective to explore what is involved in becoming strategic in an active and experiential sense in a small business. To do this, it uses illustrations from a series of studies of business startup or restart from the creative, ICT, and construction industries in New Zealand. The empirically-based synthesis presents strategic management in small businesses as a relational process producing a narrative infrastructure that weaves together episodes of strategy praxis to produce a coherent thread that ‘tells the firm forward' (See Deuten & Rip, 2000). The chapter finishes by briefly exploring the implications of this view for those seeking to become more strategic in small businesses.

scholarly journals Communicating Environmental, Safety and Health Law to Small Businesses in New Zealand: The Fundamental Missing Link

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Michael Louisson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Fast Food ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Environmental Safety ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Dangerous Goods ◽  
Safety And Health ◽  
Training Programmes

<p>The majority of small New Zealand businesses do not understand their environmental, safety and health protection responsibilities. This is the finding of recent research, including that of the New Zealand Occupational Safety and Health Service (Bateman, 1999:19). The same problem was identified some 30 years ago by Lord Robens in the United Kingdom (Robens, 1972). Without a sound understanding, businesses can not properly meet their obligations to comply with environmental, safety and health statutes, such as the Dangerous Goods Regulations 1958, Resource Management Act 1991, Building Act 1991 and the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992. There are 63 environmental and safety statutes, which have a total of 3,993 pages. It is estimated that this total is growing at about 300 pages per year. The same level of understanding is required irrespective of organisation size. Larger companies are normally able to establish policies, sections, committees, club memberships, training programmes and effective systems to meet their needs. Somehow small businesses must understand the same law, but without the majority of the tools and resources available to larger companies. Small businesses therefore need a particularly effective communications process, which appears to be beyond their scope to develop; and therefore provides a worthy research topic. The research identifies the fundamental missing link in the compliance chain, as hypothesised by Mayhew (Mayhew, 1997:44), to be communication of law, and develops a customised compliance handbook to ease understanding of the law. The handbook concept was tested with seven small businesses involving land survey, hardware retail, car repair, petrol dispensing, electroplating, fast food supply and shipping. These case studies show the handbook is an effective way to inform small New Zealand businesses of their responsibilities under environmental and safety law. The research also identifies the need for industry based 'champions' to coach small businesses to achieve the required standard.</p>

Personas of E-Commerce Adoption in Small Businesses in New Zealand

2011 ◽  
pp. 1491-1516
Author(s):  
Nabeel Al-Qirim
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Adoption Decision ◽  
Emerging Issues ◽  
Adoption Decisions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
E Mail

Focus group methodology is introduced in this article as one appropriate methodology to study the impact of technological innovation factors on e-commerce (EC) adoption in small businesses (SMEs) in New Zealand. The research results suggested two emerging issues pertaining to EC adoption in SMEs in this research. First, SMEs would not invest their scant resources on perceived risky advanced EC initiatives. In adopting simple EC technologies such as Web pages and e-mail, factors like cost and compatibility were found not hindering the adoption decision. On the other hand, the proposed drivers to adopt these simple technologies were not highly significant as such. Second, the SMEs retained a particular view about advancing their simple EC initiatives. They envisaged that advancing their EC initiatives, such as adopting full-blown and interactive Web sites, will give more weight to the impact of the different factors in this research on their adoption decisions of EC. The gulf between the current adoption and usage levels and the envisaged advanced EC initiatives seemed to be increasing further, suggesting the weakness of the EC phenomenon in SMEs in this research. The research portrays a path where such gaps could be addressed, and hence, this path should guide the SMEs in advancing their EC initiatives. Implications arising from this research with respect to theory and to practice are discussed in this research.

scholarly journals Is Voluntary Administration Failing Companies? An Investigation into the Operation of Voluntary Administration in New Zealand from Inception to 2019

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58
Author(s):  
Sebastian Ellice
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Rehabilitation Research ◽  
Company Directors

This article investigates the operation of voluntary administration in New Zealand from inception in 2007 to 2019. Voluntary administration is a formal insolvency procedure that is intended to maximise an insolvent company's chances of rehabilitation. Research undertaken for this article suggests that voluntary administration is not operating as was intended. It appears to have been underused and largely ineffective as a business rehabilitation mechanism. This article suggests that contributing reasons for the findings of the research include cost barriers for small businesses, a lack of confidence on behalf of creditors, and a misuse of voluntary administration by company directors. It proposes that useful reforms would be to reduce cost barriers and place limitations on when and how the procedure can be used.

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