“The training program had a very technical content. Like, this is how you do a latte, this is how you clean the steam wand. They didn’t teach me how to talk to the customer, how much talk is too much, I had to learn it by myself. I watched other people do it and I made my own mistakes. I wish there was more training that is about that bit. They never taught me soft or interpersonal skills in the training.”

Elias could produce a technically perfect cappuccino within a week. It took him considerably longer to work out how long a Canadian customer wants to be spoken to.

He read the handbook too. “There’s a policy about providing excellent customer service — but just what does that mean?”

The puzzle

Every workplace has two curricula. The first is written down: equipment, procedure, compliance. The second is never written down: how close to stand, how long to talk, when a joke lands, what tone to take with someone who is angry. Native-born employees absorb the second curriculum without noticing they are learning anything. For a newcomer, the second curriculum is the entire job — and no one has agreed to teach it.

The idea

Uncertainty avoidance describes how strongly people need clear rules and predictable structures to feel comfortable. It is one of Hofstede’s six dimensions and it is high across Arab societies. In service work it maps directly onto two of the five SERVQUAL dimensions, reliability and assurance — the promise that the same thing will happen the same way every time.

Expectation-Confirmation Theory adds the customer’s half of the equation: ambiguous expectations raise the likelihood of negative disconfirmation, which is the academic way of saying that when nobody knows what is supposed to happen, somebody ends up disappointed.

What the research found

One pattern ran through the interviews: training, where it existed, was inadequate — particularly on the interpersonal side of customer service. Orientation focused on technical skills such as equipment operation and procedural compliance, and skipped the soft skills and unwritten norms that actually govern customer interaction in the Canadian service workplace. Handbooks, where participants received them, were described as long and vague: elaborate on procedural policy, near-silent on human interaction.

So they built their own structures. Rachid, the Moroccan receptionist, developed his own systems as he went: “We value shortcuts. Me too, I always look for the quickest and most effective approach like summarizing information. I also like to break down and organize my tasks at work and in my personal life too.”

This is high uncertainty avoidance producing something genuinely useful — a worker who arrives at his own operating manual because the company never handed him one.

And when structure was provided, even minimal structure, the effect was immediate. Tarek was given four words for handling complaints:

“We had a specific training session on customer complaints. They gave us four simple steps: listen, apologize, fix, and thank. It sounds straightforward, but it helped me immensely because back home, my instinct was sometimes to argue. Now, I consciously follow those steps, and it makes handling every complaint much smoother.”

Listen, apologize, fix, thank. That is the whole intervention. It cost the employer nothing and it changed a worker’s experience of the hardest part of his job.

What it means

Uncertainty avoidance had a two-fold effect on the participants. Their appetite for structure caused distress, anxiety, confusion and frustration when formal instruction was thin or absent, and forced them to work out unwritten norms alone. The same aversion to ambiguity led them to build routines and systems that sometimes improved their efficiency and consistency, because they ended up with their own playbook.

The absence of formal guidance created real mental and emotional distress. Learning by trial and error — figuring it out by myself — intensified feelings of insecurity and lengthened the time it took to become good at the job.

The participants were not fighting against workplace norms in Canada. They needed someone to tell them what those norms were.

Why it matters

A gap exists between what training programs offer and what these workers actually need. Companies hiring immigrant workers should invest in onboarding that goes beyond technical job training to include straightforward instruction on cultural expectations, communication norms, and the invisible rules of the workplace — an orientation handbook that explains not only what to do, but how things are usually done in the Canadian service environment.

A second measure costs even less: pair new immigrant employees with experienced employees from a similar cultural background, so that guidance comes from a safe and familiar source during the critical first months.

Failing to do this is not only costly in employee dissatisfaction. It produces inconsistent service and dissatisfied customers, because the workers were left to invent the standard themselves.