Grill'd Reviews

I complete regret accepting the offer to work at Grill'd. Toxic workplace on all levels. You are overworked and under rewarded with impossibly high expectations. You are expected to master stations with barely any training - and if you ask for clarification management get frustrated. The introduction of the membership system made mystery shops impossible to pass, especially in high traffic, touristic areas. Was on a Trainee contract which is pretty much as scam for them to underpay and overwork you. You were expected to complete the training in your own time. Managers/Team leaders obviously pick favourites and give them preferential treatment while singling others out for the same behaviours. Management (obviously had issues) and took out their frustration with the demanding nature of the restaurant on the new employees frequently. Instead of addressing problems head on, they often make comments behind your back (which is counterproductive for your growth as an employee). Due to the high turnover rate there is barley any employee culture. Long-term employees barely talk to the newer employees (less than a year) making you feel completely alone on 8 hour shifts. I hope the chain flops xx.

Pretty much everything. When I started I was 18 and got $13 an hour. There is no overtime, no public holiday rates and no weekend rate. I worked every single public holiday in my first year, including Christmas Eve where I was rostered on until midnight, but had to stay back because we ran behind, so technically worked Christmas Day on $13 an hour. Grill’d was taken to court in my second year of employment and my pay went up to $14. The reason they get away with low pay is because they hire you as an apprentice and say that they’ll train you in your Cert 3 in Hospitality. That never happens, and everyone in my store asked numerous times to get certified but the manager kept putting it off. Also made it hard to get qualified as the company doing the “training” went bankrupt. The founder and CEO of Grill’d, Simon Crowe, once described the apprenticeship as being a course on the “art of burger making”, yet the majority of the team leaders never completed the course either. It’s just a scam to pay staff less and they rely on a frequent turn over of employees. Whenever anyone had complaints about the way the store was being run (bullying from manager, homophobia from assistant manager, dirty store etc.), complaints were never progressed by HR. It made it especially hard to complain about a managers behaviour when often the area manager or state manager would just pass the information back to the person that had a complaint made about them. One time when I was working, the store caught on fire because the vents above the open grill were never cleaned. A month prior to this, a store just a suburb away had completely burned down from the same issue. After the team working evacuated all the customers, we put out the fire and called the manager. He drove from the other side of the city drunk and offered us all a free drink from the fridge to thank us for our hard work. The next day, I had an open shift and had to sit there for two hours, refusing to work, because the manager hadn’t installed new fire extinguishers and hadn’t had the vents changed. To clarify, this wasn’t just my store. In fact, my store was better than others because it was company owned and not a franchise. To give you an idea of the franchises, once an assistant manager from the Yarraville store tried to sell me heroin that he’d stashed up his bum at New Guernica, and then told me that my pay per hour was much better than what he was paying his staff.