I hate to rain on your rant. but the reason your servants do nothing is because they are on their break.
If you had a staff room with beds, they'd go there and sleep.
Also, not having a bed to sleep in wrecks their mood, so fights will start unless you treat them with silk gloves and give them a regular thumbs up and bonus pay.
Also, you may have no clean dishes left, so put the dumb cook to use. Washing dishes is the only thing he's good for...
There are lots of issues I (and many others) have pointed out in the review of the game.

NO THEY ARE NOT ON THEIR BREAK.
Breaks are indicated by blue icons overhead.
There is a staff room and there are beds.
You can see them sleeping at the at the very START of the vid. The second they wake up they just stand around.
At the time of recording there were over a hundred of clean cups, and plates.

Sorry, I took those beds for adventurers to rest in.
I stopped playing this game after the first issues popped up, so I haven't the foggiest whether any have been fixed or not.
But I managed to put my very few servants to work (7-8 of them) in a larger inn at an effective speed. Kicked any lazy louts and smokers into action, breathed down the neck of the drunkards and snapped at every sip until I sent them packing with no pay. It was an annoying micromanagement thing having to babysit my employees all the time.

In my experience. the reasons some weren't doing their job and just sweeping was a rather simple one though.
Lack of certain ingredients for the food I was serving. And.. uh, that inn-counter doesn't seem to do the trick either.
No matter how much you beer you store, they STILL draw beer from the barrels. Game's total BS if you ask me.

Ah, good to know.
I will do some more testing with micro managment and see if i can get anykind of positive result (just saying that (micro managment) makes me want to play Starcraft II for some reason lol.)

Thanks for the info =)

Luckily my current staff doesn't really have any negative traits like drinking/stealing and what not. Much easier to test things that way. I think only two out of the eight have take a smoke break.

So after ample amounts of scalding my staff for doing things they shouldn't be doing, like cooking even though cooking is turned off, or just standing around, unfortunately, has made no difference.
Sometimes they would stop doing what it was they shouldn't be doing when scalded, but they would just resume the task shortly after.

Also seems like the game doesn't keep track of scalding in anyway so that the employee can progress through the thumbs up/down system that is in place. Seems like the mechanic (if we call it that) should removed entirely since it doesn't appear to actually do anything.
If the thumbs mechanic is there just to keep employees with negative traits on track, don't bother using it, and instead only higher employees with positive traits.

The best way to accomplish this is to higher two or three people just to gossip with customers so they can aquire ample Blue Scrolls to spend on viewing employee hidden traits, which can only be done in the hiring menu, not the staff menu.

Pretty sure the game is just broken AF man, was worth a try though.

I gave my smokers a one second break whenever they sat down... worked wonders.
Can't say if giving the employees lip does anything good, and they certainly don't learn, so I wonder why it's even there.
Just sours the mood, which is detrimental to their work. But I did it for my own satisfaction..
Negative traits shoudln't exist initally. Perhaps come as a result of mistreating employees, but then again..
Who listens?

Seems I owe you an apology..

Just started the campaign in version 2.2.2 and found both Martyn and my single servant stand there like idiots doing nothing.

Except smoke.

And sweep. Until there was nothing left to sweep.

4 full tables screaming for drink... which was the single thing there was on the menu.
And no one got anything. Yep, game's broken AF.

Thank you for this. I agree whole heartedly. This game is such a cool idea. But that is one of the few things that it has going for it. The idea. The mechanics are a smoke mirage that doesn't work, as you proved in your video. And your video doesn't even touch half the problems I have with the game. I've posted myself on a few (smoking being the most popular if you count people responding to it).

So yeah, I've noticed allot of updates, and was wondering if things had gotten any better. Looks like it is the same, and nothing has been fixed in all this time.

These were issues when it first came out, and are still issues today. That is insane.