If you have 100 or more employees in the UK, and you carry out an "economic activity" (which has a very wide meaning), then YES you will be. This includes subsidiaries or branches of overseas firms. Companies, partnerships, charities, public sector bodies - they’re all covered.

The rule is, to decide if you have 100+ employees, you only count people who are your employees, working for you under an employment contract. This usually excludes agency workers, but includes fixed-term and part-time employees. For the purpose of the 100+ employee threshold, you can count part-time employees as half an employee if they work 75 hours or less a month.

You can protect existing consultation arrangements from being overturned by setting them out in a document. This doesn't mean they'll be set in concrete, but once you've done it, the legislation makes it difficult for a small group of employees to force you to make changes. But your communication needs to be two-way, not just management handing information down. The law says your written document must "set out how the employer is to give information to the employees or their representatives and seek their views on such information."

Not if you don’t want one, and your employees don’t either. One of the best aspects of the Information and Consultation Regulations, unlike laws in the rest of Europe, is they allow employers to inform and consult directly with employees. So you could have team briefing, all-employee (“town hall”) meetings, or even do it all via the company Intranet. As long as the arrangements are set down in writing, cover all employees, involve two-way communications, and are supported by employees, they will comply with the law.

Definitely not. It’s for you and your employees to decide what issues you are going to discuss, and you’d do better avoiding trivial points like the state of the toilets. You can also exclude commercially sensitive and other "big ticket" issues.

The law says your arrangements must be "approved by the employees", and the Government’s guidance lists three ways to indicate their support:

• a simple majority among those voting in a ballot of the workforce.;
• a majority of the workforce expressing support through signatures. This may be most appropriate in smaller organisations; or
• the agreement of representatives of employees who represent a majority of the workforce (including trade union and other “appropriate” representatives).

Detailed guidance on what this means in practice is provided as part of the Just15 advice and guidance. For example, could it include an e-mail to all staff saying "tell us if you don’t like what we’re proposing"?

• Don’t ignore it.
• Check that it’s valid (you can ask us what this means)
• Talk to the people who have made the request to find out what they are looking for
• Use Just15 to guide you through the decision-making process and to produce a draft agreement to discuss with employees.

The law doesn’t give trade unions any special role or privileges in this area. But unless you positively want to upset them, you are best talking to them about what you want to do. The law gives employers a lot of freedom as to the role trade unions will play. Most companies who recognise unions and also have a consultation forum don’t give the unions automatic places – union reps usually have to get themselves voted on by their colleagues (and don’t always succeed).

It may seem like they aren’t now, but the first thing you hear when making big changes is "we're always kept in the dark round here". Good employers take the initiative, and make sure their internal communications are helping not hindering the business.