International Hotel Group – TRONC Project

The Brief

This hotel group has been long term client of ours. They manage and run large 4 and 5 star hotels around Gatwick and Heathrow, and contacted us about implementing a TRONC system. A TRONC scheme is a special payment arrangement that allows companies to fairly distribute service charges, tips and gratuities across all of it employees. The company employs around 300 people at each hotel and has to maintain its services at a very high standard due to holding superior hotel ratings.

The main reasons for the project were that:

the company had acquired a number of hotels in recent years and wanted to align the rules around staff sharing the hotels’ Discretionary Service Charge
management wanted the staff to receive a greater benefit from the Discretionary Service Charge levied by the hotel, in line with HMRC guidelines
the TRONC gratuities system cannot be managed by the employer under HMRC rules, so employee committees needed to be formed to make decisions and run the scheme

Date:

February 3, 2022

Categories:

Employment Documentation, HR Helpline, HR IT Systems and Reporting, HR Manager Service, HR Training, Specialist Projects

Location:

Gatwick & Heathrow

Type of Business:

Hotel Group

The Solution

The hotel group engaged Heidi Rush of HR Smart to act as an independent consultant responsible for setting up the TRONC Committee at each hotel. Heidi designed the policies and procedures, ensured that the TRONC scheme rules were implemented independently of the Company Management and ran the communication meetings.

Heidi started the project with a nomination process to appoint Department Representatives before a kick-off meeting could take place.
Once Representatives from each Department were in place, Heidi worked with them on the TRONC scheme design and rules, so that the service charge could be split across the Departments equitably. A TRONC Master was elected by the Representatives and put in place for each hotel.
Payroll was set up through the Payroll Department.
The policies and procedures drawn up for the scheme rules were agreed by the TRONC Committee.
The project took four to six weeks for each hotel.

The Result

The effect of this project has meant that our client has been able to better reward its staff and increase staff satisfaction. All team members now have increased earnings as a result of this project as neither the Company nor team members pay National Insurance on these earnings (under approved HMRC rules). The project has been an overriding success and we were delighted to be able to assist with a quite complex and interesting HR request.

Testimonial

As a trusted partner to our Hotel Group, we chose Heidi from HR Smart to run our TRONC implementation project as she is an experienced HR Professional who we have worked with for many years. We engaged Heidi to plan, communicate and manage our TRONC Project through our dedicated Hotel management teams. Heidi managed all of the discussions around the sharing of the discretionary service charges, created the policies and procedures and made sure each hotel had a TRONC committee set up. We managed to complete two large hotel projects within a two month timeline thanks to Heidi's excellent approach.

HR Smart have been incredibly supportive with our growing business and with staffing issues in particular. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. Thank you.