With customer satisfaction, speed of service, and order accuracy strongly correlated with staff tenure, restaurants should continually evaluate and prioritize the key determinants of employee satisfaction.
To assess who is winning the war for talent, William Blair’s Sharon Zackfia, CFA, partner and group head of the consumer sector, published the fourth longitudinal analysis of employee ratings of major restaurant chains on Glassdoor, which encompasses 11 years of data based on more than 530,000 reviews for nearly 90 restaurant concepts.
While wages have risen dramatically, the correlation between compensation/benefits and employee satisfaction is the lowest of six measured attributes (others are culture/values, career opportunities, work/life balance, senior management, and diversity/inclusion), marking a consistent trend since 2022. Notably, however, compensation/benefits and work/life balance were the only two attributes with rising correlations to employee satisfaction over the past year. On an absolute basis, our analysts believe restaurants need to reexamine ways to highlight or alter the less tangible parts of their businesses to better align with the softer (and stickier) attributes that lead to higher employee satisfaction.
Over the decade of our analysis, employee satisfaction has markedly improved in the restaurant industry across all subsectors, although all except quick-service peaked in 2021. For the second straight year, casual dining led in overall employee satisfaction and all measured attributes, with specialty in second place and quick-service and fast casual lagging. In addition, hourly crew pay increases moderated for the second straight year following strong gains in 2022 and 2023. Average hourly pay for quick-service, fast casual, and specialty has risen by more than 75% since 2015, led by an approximate doubling in specialty wages, while average hourly pay for casual dining has more than tripled.
In addition, when companies get the foundational intangibles right, the reward often manifests in multiple years of top-ranked net promoter scores (NPSs), as defined by how many employees would recommend their job to a friend. As a result, 70% of the top 10 NPSs in 2025 were repeats of 2024, 60% of 2024’s list were repeats of 2023, 60% of 2023’s list were repeats of 2022, 60% of 2022’s list were repeats of 2021, 40% of 2021’s list were repeats of 2020, and 50% of 2020’s list were repeats of 2019.
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Listen to the William Blair Thinking podcast episode: What Keeps Employees Happy: Lessons From 11 Years of Restaurant Industry Data