Getting people to change the way they do things is no easy task, often a simple change feels impossible. It can be easy for us as leaders to see the problem and get frustrated when others can’t. Similarly, we get annoyed when people don’t act when we give them the advice needed to change.

Lisa is S4labour’s Customer Training Manager. She has a lifetimes experience in the hospitality sector, having been, amongst other roles, a general manager of a premium country pub for Mitchells & Butlers.

,Back when I was General Manager of a country pub, I remember getting frustrated with the team letting the fire go out. It was on the task list, and getting it going in the morning was no problem but it would always die out just as lunch got really busy! When I pointed out to the team that it had gone out, they would rush to re light it, spending ages doing it because of the ash build up and having to use more expensive kindling to get it going again. We were all busy and during service the fire seems like the last thing on the to do list, but the reality is, add a shovel of coal or a log at the right time is all that it needed, so it must have been something else? When eventually I stopped and questioned if I was missing a trick, I realised I needed to change a couple of things if I wanted this to land. I needed to share why it was important, both from an atmosphere point of view and a cost point of view to keep the fire going and not letting it die out and re-light it. Additionally I needed to stop delegating and disowning the task.  All the tools were there, the equipment they needed but I hadn’t encouraged the right habits. As soon as I spent time getting them to understand why it was important and encouraging them by reminding them even with a simple “Your fire looks instagramable, your challenge is to keep it looking like that all day” then reminding them throughout service with a simple reminder, habits started to form and eventually the fires continued to roar throughout the day and the team could focus on giving great service and all the other things that helped push our spend per head up.

The example I give was a simple task and it took a while to get the right habits in with all the different people involved to make an impact and change the way we did things. Every change still had its challenges, some more than others. I know change is hard and some people adapt quicker than others, however, this is where I get my buzz, because this is where we reap all the great rewards change brings, like improved team happiness and retention, improved sales growth, high net promoter scores and that’s what makes it exciting.

S4labour is a fantastic tool, I wish I had that level of visibility to allow me to make better decisions, it would have helped me to develop more confidence in my commercial decision making, but the challenge doesn’t stop with having the right software. It’s like being a member of the best gym in the world and not going or just walking on the treadmill a couple of times a week and expecting the results. Sometimes to get the most out of the gym we need a personal trainer to show us, guide us and give us a plan to work on when were on our own to ensure we get the most out of that gym membership and get the results we deserve and expect. It is the results that change brings that inspire the team around us too in other areas of the business.  I spent a lot of time supporting my district to achieve a successful training culture and shaped my career and moved into different learning and development roles. So when I joined S4labour I was able to  draw on my experience of running pubs, developing leaders and creating training interventions to create these effective masterclass programmes. The training programmes will embed and promote good habits within labour management. Each programme explores why the habit is important and then how you can implement them, inspiring positive change, strong leadership and sustainable changes, ensuring companies get the most out of S4labour seeing the results they deserve. 

Essentially, a tronc is an arrangement for the pooling, allocation and distribution of tips and gratuities. Leaving tips seems rather easy to understand – we pay a little extra on our bill and expect that money to be distributed to staff, right? Speak to anyone who processes tips fairly and consistently as part of an employees pay, and they will likely tell a different story.

Consider who has been a part of earning the tip – front of house / back of house / head office. Now consider factors such as credit card tips, deduction fees, the separate tax codes and PAYE references for employee’s payments. These are just a couple of reasons why the handling of tips can lead to mistakes. When HMRC come knocking, the consequences for getting it wrong can be severe.

As the waters between earnings and tips become muddier and HMRC cast an ever-closer eye over how hospitality businesses handle tronc, the role of a troncmaster is becoming ever more popular in the hospitality industry.

The troncmaster is the person or group that operates a tronc on the operators’ behalf. Having a troncmaster can ultimately save both a manager and payroll officer huge amounts of time and hassle, since all the distribution of tips, gratuities and service charges are dealt with by someone else. The ‘troncmaster’ is often extremely well equipped with knowledge on how to best deal with legislation surrounding the tronc system, as it can be rather cloudy and grey to properly understand the relationship between tronc money, employees, employers and HMRC.

Another reason why troncmasters are playing an increasingly popular role is a recent change in the rules on who can and cannot operate a tronc. While it is perfectly ok for waiters to arrange the tronc policy themselves, anyone who is a manager or above aren’t allowed to operate the tronc. The solution is to arguably hand responsibility to the 3^rd party troncmaster.

Employees may benefit through yet another element of a tronc system, the tronc pot. Let us use the example of a friendly waiter who we will call Toby. Toby earns £8.50 an hour but also has an uplift of £11 that includes tips, but what would happen if the business didn’t make enough tips? Where would that remaining uplift come from? This is where a tronc pot really lives up to its role. Say on previous weeks in the year the business made an abundance of tips surpassing their overall uplift. This surplus of tronc could either be distributed to employees or enter a tronc pot, which is up to the troncmaster. Let’s go back to our previous example of Toby, who has a promised uplift of £11 an hour but didn’t actually make that much in tips for that given week. Through a tronc pot, a troncmaster can use these funds from a surplus of tips in one week to make sure an employee receives their uplift for another week, thus leaving our Toby satisfied.

The use of tronc is still a very grey area in the hospitality industry, but the benefits of a tronc system are really starting to become increasingly apparent and clear. S4labour can help facilitate the distribution of tronc to employees, saving managers the time and hassle of organising payroll to account for tips. S4labour can facilitate tronc on a daily and/or weekly basis seamlessly, again saving time for senior staff members in the hospitality industry.  If you’d like to hear more about what we offer or have complex tronc requirements, please get in touch with us today.