28 February 2025 - 5 min read
Guest
As hospitality scheduling experts, we frequently hear from businesses exploring Time Off In Lieu (TOIL) as a way to manage overtime costs and provide flexibility for their teams. While TOIL might seem like an attractive solution, our experience shows it often creates more problems than it solves in hospitality settings.
In this article, we’ll explore what time of lieu means, why it can become problematic and demonstrate how enhanced scheduling practices offer better solutions for both your business and your team members.
Time Off In Lieu allows employees to take time off instead of receiving overtime pay when they work additional hours. The concept appears simple: someone works an extra shift during a busy period and takes equivalent time off when it’s quieter. However, in the dynamic setting we operate in, this seemingly straightforward arrangement quickly becomes complex.
As more employees accumulate TOIL, tracking and managing these arrangements becomes increasingly challenging. Without proper systems, managers often lose track of who has worked extra hours and when they plan to take time off.
Understanding why TOIL is particularly problematic in hospitality requires examining several factors that affect both hospitality operations and team well-being.
Hospitality businesses face constant fluctuations in customer demand that make TOIL particularly challenging to manage. Unlike office environments where workload can often be redistributed, restaurants and hotels need specific numbers of team members present to maintain service standards. When employees take TOIL during unexpectedly busy periods, managers often must operate with reduced team numbers, directly impacting service quality and putting additional pressure on the remaining team members.
This frequently leads to asking other employees to work longer hours, creating a perpetual cycle of accumulated TOIL that becomes increasingly difficult to fulfil without compromising operations.
The alternative—bringing in additional workers at short notice—typically incurs premium rates and effectively negates any cost savings the original TOIL arrangement was meant to provide. This unpredictability makes it nearly impossible to plan effectively for TOIL.
Managing time off in lieu creates significant administrative challenges that many hospitality businesses struggle to handle effectively. Managers must track overtime hours worked by each team member while simultaneously managing individual TOIL balances and coordinating when people can take their accumulated time off. This involves complex calculations of hours worked versus time owed—not to mention ensuring fair distribution of additional hours among team members and maintaining accurate records for both payroll and compliance purposes.
In a 2024 survey, it was discovered that 22.5% of hospitality managers spend between four to six hours planning employee rotas during busy periods, indicating significant time invested in managing employee schedules. The burden of these administrative tasks takes managers away from more valuable activities like training team members, improving customer experience and developing their business.
The impact of TOIL on team wellbeing manifests in a few ways. For one, it interferes with the work-life balance. The irregular scheduling created by TOIL arrangements often forces team members to work when they would normally be off, disrupting their personal lives. When they later try to take their accumulated time off, business needs might prevent them from choosing their preferred dates, causing frustration and resentment.
Team morale and retention is another aspect impacted by TOIL. As requests are repeatedly denied during preferred times, team members often become demotivated. This decreased morale can spread throughout the team, particularly when some employees seem to have more success taking their TOIL than others.
PeopleSafe reported a staggering 77% of employees feel disengaged at work, which can result in an 18% drop in productivity. This lack of engagement is costly, with businesses potentially losing around 20% of an affected employee’s annual salary.
One of the ways to combat this is through smart scheduling. When you have clear, well-organised rotas, managers can spend less time sorting out scheduling issues. Your employees can see their upcoming shifts well in advance, helping them plan their lives around work more easily.
With straightforward overtime payments instead of complex TOIL arrangements, managers can focus on more important matters and give sufficient attention and time to the employees and the customers. This creates a more positive working environment where employees understand their schedules, maintain a healthy work-life balance and know they’ll be properly compensated for any extra hours worked.
Time off in lieu creates several compliance challenges that businesses must carefully manage:
With the minimum wage increasing to £12.21 per hour from April 2025, ensuring compliance becomes even more important as businesses face greater scrutiny of their working time arrangements.
Instead of implementing complicated TOIL systems, hospitality businesses should focus on managing and compensating overtime fairly through effective scheduling and workforce management tools.
Smart scheduling tools help you manage your team’s time and overtime payments more effectively. You can see exactly how much you’re spending on wages as you build your rota, including any overtime rates that will apply. By reviewing historical sales data from your EPoS system and entering sales forecasts, you can build schedules that match your expected busy periods, ensuring proper staffing levels while managing overtime costs through automated threshold rules.
Your whole team can access their schedules through a mobile app, making it easy for everyone to check their upcoming shifts and request changes when needed. The system automatically flags when employees are scheduled beyond set thresholds, such as working more than their contracted hours or consecutive days, ensuring they’re paid the correct overtime rates.
Keeping track of hours worked becomes much simpler with a proper time and attendance system. Instead of manually recording overtime and trying to manage TOIL arrangements, your team can clock in and out using our mobile app with GPS tracking. This creates accurate timesheets automatically, showing both regular and overtime hours worked. Managers can quickly see the difference between scheduled and actual hours, helping them process overtime payments correctly.
Automated time tracking gives you instant, accurate data for processing overtime pay. The mobile app makes it simple for team members to manage their own attendance, while GPS functionality ensures all records are trustworthy. This means no more disputes about hours worked or overtime owed.
Managing holidays doesn’t need to be complicated. Your team can request time off through the mobile app, and managers can see these requests alongside their rotas to make informed decisions. The system calculates holiday allowances automatically, removing the administrative headache of tracking entitlements.
Unlike TOIL, which requires constant juggling of accumulated hours and available coverage, proper holiday management gives everyone clarity about their time off without affecting overtime arrangements.
While other scheduling solutions rely on complicated TOIL arrangements to handle extra hours, Rotaready’s threshold rules offer a simpler, more efficient way to manage overtime.
Instead of tracking owed hours and juggling staff availability, Rotaready automatically calculates and applies the right pay rates when employees work beyond their set limits. This automated approach removes the administrative burden of TOIL, ensures your team gets paid fairly for their extra hours and helps you maintain accurate payroll records without spreadsheets.
Rotaready offers different types of threshold rules to match your business needs:
Rotaready’s flexible settings give you control over how you apply these:
All costs triggered by threshold rules are separated for payroll processing, providing clear visibility and accurate reporting.
Making the transition from TOIL to better scheduling requires a strategic approach:
Time off in lieu simply doesn’t work well in most hospitality businesses. The constant changes in customer demand make it hard to plan when staff can take time off, tracking extra hours becomes a headache and team members often feel frustrated when they can’t use their accumulated time. These problems affect both your operations and your team’s happiness.
Our scheduling system offers a better way forward. It helps you create staff rotas that match your actual needs, tracks working hours accurately and makes holiday management straightforward. Managers spend less time sorting out schedule problems and more time improving service, while staff get clearer work patterns and better work-life balance.
Ready to improve your scheduling approach? Contact our team to learn more about building efficient rotas without time off in lieu.
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