Your Staff Are Already Telling You What's Wrong

A kitchen worker at a national pub chain wrote a long review on Glassdoor last year. He'd worked two shifts washing pots. The only training he got was online quizzes, and the quizzes were absurd - one asked him about the correct way to change beds in the chain's hotels. On the floor, he was expected to know where everything was in the walk-in fridge without anyone telling him, and people got annoyed when he took too long to find things. Items moved constantly, and when you only work ten hours a week you can't keep track. The experienced staff had their own shortcuts and bad habits, so he copied them and then got lectured for doing it the way everyone else did. He assumed the people who'd been there longer were doing it right. Why wouldn't you?

I've spent the last few weeks going through employee reviews at some of the biggest hospitality chains in the UK - pub groups, Asian restaurant chains, bakery chains, Italian chains, casual dining brands - trying to understand what staff actually say about their training when they think the owner isn't listening. The same story comes up everywhere, across different cities, different menus, different price points. These are companies with dedicated training teams, onboarding budgets, and HR departments. Their staff are still going on Indeed to say nobody trained them.

What they're actually saying

A kitchen worker at a national pub chain: "Training was non-existent, just placed on a station and expected to know what you were doing."

A cook at a popular Asian chain: "They didn't give me any real training and expected me to just do the job. Every time I asked questions I was met with annoyance and eye rolls."

A line chef at the same chain described their entire training in one sentence: "Look at the picture and make the dish."

A team member at a national bakery chain: "Had a bit of training on a computer for a day then stuck on the tills ever since. Manager gave me no training whatsoever. I've had to keep asking people to show me things. All I know what to do is serve, heat things up and make hot drinks. No one shows you nothing."

Then there's the one that really stuck with me - a new supervisor at a national Italian chain: "I had never worked in a restaurant before. They gave me supervisor position anyway. My manager told me not to tell anyone I had no experience in restaurants, he told me not to ask anyone for help so I don't look inexperienced. I was inexperienced and was given basic online training. Nothing about how to supervise a restaurant. I had to teach myself. By my 3rd shift I was left in charge of the restaurant on my own for Mother's Day."

By their third shift. Mother's Day. On their own. And nobody saw a problem with that until it was already happening.

The pattern

I read dozens of these. Different chains, different cities, kitchen and floor, front of house and back. The same things keep showing up: no proper training before being put on the floor, expected to know everything immediately, blamed or disciplined when they inevitably get it wrong, different managers and experienced staff all doing things their own way with no documented standard, and where online training does exist, it has nothing to do with the actual job.

A front-of-house manager at a popular Asian chain summed it up neatly: "No formal training, you have to pick up things here and there, but accountability is 10/10."

Pick things up as you go, but get held to account as if you were properly taught. That's the deal across every one of these chains.

What makes these reviews so useful is that they describe the mechanism behind the turnover numbers everyone already cites. The hours and the pay were on the job listing - people knew what they were signing up for. They show up ready to work, get abandoned, and leave before their third month because they never felt like they had a chance.

A study of London restaurant managers found that 97% identified high turnover as a major problem, and 41% specifically blamed inadequate staff training. The managers know. The staff know. The only people who don't seem to know are the ones who think "follow Sarah around for a shift" counts as onboarding.

Five chains. Same failure.

The thing that surprised me wasn't the complaints themselves - I expected bad reviews. What surprised me was how identical they were across completely different businesses. A pub chain, an Asian restaurant group, a bakery chain, an Italian chain, a casual dining brand. Different menus, different price points, different target customers. The same five failures, repeated almost word for word.

No structured training before the first real shift. Online training that has nothing to do with the actual role. Experienced staff who all do things differently and get annoyed when you ask which way is right. Managers who expect performance without ever defining what good looks like. And a culture where asking questions marks you out as someone who can't cope.

These are companies that spend real money on training. They have learning management systems, compliance modules, branded onboarding packs. Their staff are writing public reviews that say "nobody trained me." The investment isn't working because the training doesn't match the job. A kitchen porter who's been on two shifts doesn't need a quiz about hotel beds. He needs someone to show him where the cling film is and how the close works.

But that's a chain, not you

You're reading this thinking: that's a big chain, I'm not a big chain. And you're right, you're not. But consider what those chains have that you don't - a training department, an HR team, an onboarding budget, an online learning platform with quizzes and modules and pass marks. They have entire systems built for this. Their staff are still going on Indeed to say nobody trained them.

So what's happening in your venue, where training is "follow Sarah around for a bit and ask if you're not sure"? If a company with a hundred-person HR team and a purpose-built e-learning system can't get a kitchen worker to know where things are in the walk-in, what are the chances your new starter knows your close procedure after watching someone do it once on a Tuesday?

The chains fail because their training is generic - built centrally, disconnected from what actually happens in the kitchen at 7pm on a Friday. Your venue fails for the opposite reason: the knowledge exists, but only in the heads of your best people, and it walks out the door when they do. Either way, the new starter is left guessing. The chain's new hire guesses because the quiz didn't cover it. Yours guesses because nobody wrote it down.

The difference is that nobody's writing an Indeed review about your place. Your staff just leave, and you assume they weren't the right fit.

Two sides of the same counter

When an employee writes "hardly any training, I had gotten shouted at because the knowledge of the meals wasn't there - but how is anyone supposed to know without training?" and a customer at a different restaurant writes "the staff didn't know what gluten was" - that's the same failure described from opposite sides of the counter. The employee is explaining the cause. The customer is describing the symptom.

Between May 2024 and May 2025, the UK hospitality sector lost 124,376 payrolled employees - a 5.6% drop. That's a steady bleed of people who decided this industry wasn't worth the hassle. And when you read what they write on their way out, the picture is consistent: they wanted to do the job, they weren't given what they needed to do it well, and they left.

The gap between someone staying and someone leaving in their first twelve weeks is narrow, and what fills it is whether the new person felt set up to succeed or left to figure it out on their own.

The fix

The chains spent millions on generic modules and their staff still went on Indeed to say nobody trained them. The knowledge your team needs already exists - your best closer knows the close, your best barista knows the coffee machine - it just lives in their heads and disappears when they leave or aren't on shift.

Lattify lets you get that knowledge out of their heads and onto every new starter's phone. Your best person records how things are actually done, in your venue, with your equipment, and Lattify turns it into something the next hire can follow mid-shift. A two-minute video of someone walking through the kitchen would have saved that pot washer three shifts of being glared at for not knowing where the chopping boards were.

All employee quotes in this article are drawn from public reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor for major UK hospitality chains, collected between 2024 and 2026. Chains have been anonymised.