Marketing and Brand Manager
What Employees Say Works, What Doesn’t, and Where Employers Have an Opportunity to Improve
Written in collaboration with AllianceHCM
In hospitality, the employee experience is built in small moments:
Individually, these interactions may seem routine, but together they can shape how employees experience an entire organization.
A new national benchmark study commissioned by AllianceHCM asked 1,000 former restaurant employees with recent quick-service restaurant experience about those everyday moments — from hiring and onboarding through training, scheduling, payroll, workplace technology, communication, and eventually leaving the organization.
While the research focused specifically on quick-service restaurants, the findings raise important questions for hospitality employers more broadly, particularly those managing hourly, shift-based workforces across multiple managers or locations.
One theme stands out: the opportunity isn't always fixing something that's broken. Sometimes it's making something that works more consistent.
Most employees surveyed reported positive experiences across the workforce processes they were asked to evaluate, but that wasn't the whole story.
Across many of the measures, a meaningful share of employees stopped short of giving their experience a clearly positive rating.
Consider one of the first interactions between an employee and an employer: hiring paperwork. About 1 in 3 respondents did not give the hiring paperwork process a positive efficiency rating.
That doesn't necessarily mean the paperwork wasn't completed. It points to a more subtle distinction between completing an administrative process and creating an experience employees find clear and efficient.
For hospitality employers competing for hourly workers, that distinction can matter from the beginning.
The research found evidence of that challenge in training. Employees generally reported learning the tasks they needed to perform, but coordination between managers and trainers received weaker marks.
That’s an important distinction. The issue isn’t necessarily whether training exists, but whether employees receive a repeatable experience when the person, location, or system delivering it changes.
It’s a challenge that can become even more pronounced as restaurant organizations grow. Charlotte, Director of Human Resources at Munson Restaurant Group, described the complexity her team encountered while managing payroll across multiple entities:
“We were actually using two different payroll systems because of acquisitions, and it was difficult to get a grasp and process payroll across all of our entities. Our previous provider’s platform wasn’t growing as fast as we needed, and it didn’t always work as desired.”
For hospitality employers, consistency isn’t just about what happens between an employee and a manager. It also depends on whether the systems and processes behind those interactions can deliver a consistent experience as the organization grows.
Hospitality organizations have more workforce technology available to them than ever.
Scheduling platforms, payroll systems, HR, time clocks, onboarding tools, training platforms, and communication apps can make work significantly easier.
They can also create a different kind of complexity.
An employee doesn't necessarily care which department owns a system. They care whether they can accomplish what they came there to do:
The benchmark study suggests the quality of the digital employee experience depends on more than having technology available. Setup, access, communication, and the handoffs surrounding those systems matter too.
For hospitality employers, that may be an important place to look for hidden friction.
One of the strongest findings in the survey came from an area employees have little tolerance for getting wrong: their pay.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents rated payroll and timekeeping accuracy positively.
That's encouraging, but it also provides a useful contrast with other areas of the employee experience.
Employees gave less consistently positive feedback in areas involving communication and coordination. That suggests an important lesson for hospitality employers: employee experience isn't limited to engagement initiatives, workplace culture, or benefits.
It's also operational. Employees notice whether the everyday mechanics of work are reliable. They notice when schedules arrive consistently. When instructions are clear. When questions reach the right person. When systems are accessible. When managers communicate the same expectations.
These routine interactions can help answer one of the most important questions an employee has about an organization: Can I rely on this place?
Improving the employee experience doesn't necessarily require another program or initiative.
Sometimes the best place to start is by following one routine employee experience from beginning to end.
Take onboarding:
Then do the same with a schedule change, timecard correction, payroll question, training process, or employee departure.
The goal is to identify the moments where employees have to wait, repeat themselves, search for information, navigate conflicting instructions, or figure out who owns the next step.
Those handoffs may seem minor from inside individual departments.
From the employee's perspective, they're all part of the same experience.
The 2026 Employee Experience Insights Report examines employee perceptions across the workforce journey, including hiring and onboarding, training, scheduling, payroll and timekeeping, manager communication, workplace technology, administrative support, and offboarding.
More importantly, it identifies where employees were less likely to give their experience a clearly positive rating, and what operators can do about it.
For hospitality leaders managing complex, hourly workforces, the findings offer a useful opportunity to compare those benchmarks against their own employee experience.
