Nobody Remembers March

Somebody asks you what happened on a Tuesday in March.

Not in general. Specifically: what was said, who was there, what you did about it afterwards. You were there. You have no idea.

That question is about to get asked a lot more often, because from 1 October 2026 the window for bringing most employment tribunal claims doubles.

What changes, and when

Two dates, three weeks apart, both from the Employment Rights Act 2025 — which became law last December and is being switched on in stages.

1 October 2026. The government's own implementation timetable puts it plainly: "the time limit for bringing a claim to the Employment Tribunal will increase from 3 to 6 months". (Breach of contract claims in Scotland follow on 9 November.)

30 October 2026. Two things worth knowing if you employ anyone. The duty to prevent sexual harassment at work rises from taking reasonable steps to taking all reasonable steps. And there is a new obligation on employers, in the timetable's words, "not to permit the harassment of their employees by third parties" — meaning customers and members of the public, not just colleagues. Blake Morgan's read is that the third-party duty reaches wider than sexual harassment, into other protected characteristics.

Same day, a smaller one that catches everybody: you'll have to tell your staff they have the right to join a trade union.

The six-month one isn't really a legal change

It's a memory change, and that makes it an operational one.

Under three months, most of what you'd need is still in your head. You remember the shift. You remember roughly what was said, because it was five or six weeks ago and you've thought about it since.

At six months you're into a different kind of recall entirely. The person has left. The other two who were on that night have left. You're being asked to account for an afternoon you'd have struggled to place even at the time.

And the thing that decides it isn't what you remember. It's what you can show. A tribunal weighs a dated note written on the day very differently from a confident account given eight months later by the person with the most to lose. That gap is the whole game, and it's been true for years — the change is that you now have to hold your side of it for twice as long.

The third-party bit will catch a lot of people reading this

If your staff deal with the public — a café, a salon, a shop floor, a counter, a van with a second pair of hands in it — this is the one to read twice.

The scenario isn't one of your team behaving badly. It's a customer doing it, to your team, on your premises. From 30 October you can be on the hook for that if you didn't take all reasonable steps to stop it happening.

Notice what "all reasonable steps" actually is. It isn't a state of mind or a good intention. It's a set of things you did, before anything went wrong, that you can point at afterwards. Told the staff what to do when a customer starts. Backed the one who walked away from a table. Wrote down the incident in February, including that you barred him.

A policy nobody has read is not a step you took. It's a document you own.

Can AI automation for hospitality help with any of this?

Not with the legal part, and we'd rather say that up front than sell you something.

Nothing automated defends a tribunal claim. No tool decides whether you took all reasonable steps. If you want to know where you stand, Acas is free and genuinely good, and we're a website company, not employment solicitors. This isn't legal advice.

Where it does earn its place is narrower and duller: making the record exist without anybody having to be conscientious at eleven at night. The difference between businesses that can answer the March question and businesses that can't is almost never diligence. It's whether writing it down was the path of least resistance at the moment it happened, or a job for later that never came.

Which is the same argument we made in The Business in Your Head, pointed at a new problem. What's in your head is fine until the day somebody needs it out of there, on a date, in a form other people can read.

The practical version for a small team is smaller than the software industry would like: one place, on a phone, that takes thirty seconds and is dated automatically. It does not need to be a system. It needs to be somewhere you'll actually use at closing time.

And don't buy anything for this in September. Do it by hand for a month first. You'll find out whether the habit sticks before you've paid for the tool it was supposed to need — and if it doesn't stick, the tool wouldn't have saved you.

This week's homework: the Dated Note

Fifteen minutes to set up, then about thirty seconds a time.

Pick one place. A note on your phone, a paper book behind the till, anything that timestamps itself and won't get tidied away. Then agree what goes in it: anything you'd be annoyed to have forgotten in six months. A customer going for a member of staff. A warning you gave. A shift somebody didn't turn up for. What you did about it, in one line.

Four rules and that's the lot. Write it the same day. Say who was there. Say what you did, not just what happened. Never write anything you wouldn't want read out.

Then go back to March. Whatever you can still piece together, write that down too, today, and mark it clearly as recalled after the fact rather than noted at the time. It's worth less than a contemporaneous note. It's worth considerably more than nothing, and you'll never have a better shot at it than now.

The part of this we do help with is everything on the customer side — enquiries, quotes and jobs landing somewhere dated and searchable instead of in a phone and three notebooks. That's the same instinct as the note above, applied to the half of the business that pays for the other half. Here's how we work, and there's more on the hospitality side here.

And hit reply, because we read every one. What's the thing you wish you'd written down at the time? We suspect most of the answers are going to be about a conversation two people remember completely differently.

Built by operators, for operators.

— Kane & George