Are Your Queues A Reflection Of Staff Well-being?
We spend a significant amount of our lives waiting in queues. Supermarkets, banks, traffic jams, night clubs. That last one was from my youthful party days. The queue has become a symbol of our modern lives. All this waiting and years working in retail in customer-facing roles has given me time to develop a theory, especially with regard to retail outlets. If the queue is a symbol of our modern lives, the length and pace of that queue can be symptomatic of the environment in which staff are expected to work and their overall well-being.
Staff well-being is about more than just their pay cheque or making them feel like part of a “family”. Dry heave. Staff well-being encompasses investment in their training, pathways to advancing their career, clear operations, effective communication and a suitable environment to name just a few.
The National Workplace Wellness Policy for Barbados was launched in 2019. It was conceptualised by Professor Dwayne Devonish and overseen by the Ministry of Labour, Social Security, and Third Sector. The policy outlines the 9 Dimensions of Wellness Framework for organisations and stakeholders to implement for their staff. These include Physical, Mental/Psychological, Environmental, Social, Occupational, Financial, Intellectual, Spiritual and Cultural wellness.
The policy highlighted that Barbados has one of the highest rates of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and stroke and that the demands and pressures of the workplace “have translated into concerns about worker stress, workplace bullying, absenteeism, low productivity and depleted levels of worker health and well-being.” All of which, I suggest, are reflected in the dreaded queue.
Let's use the supermarket as an example for this theory. Without naming names, there are several supermarket chains here in Barbados that have significant variations in their queues. Even taking the size of the store into consideration, longer queues and slower-paced queues are often coupled with indicators of low staff well-being.
Staff training is an opportunity for a company to tell their staff about the company values, the products and what is expected of the staff when dealing with customers. Even the friendliest people need guidance on how they should or shouldn't interact with customers. However, although customer service is vital, it is something a company has to invest in, often before the staff member has even generated any revenue. It is a gamble to spend time training someone who might leave after 3 weeks but it could be a bigger gamble not to.
Customer service training sets the tone and reduces any ambiguity that could lead to disciplinary action, termination and high staff turnover rates. During my partying days, I worked as a Christmas temp at The Gap clothing store. Even though I was only employed for a few months, my training was rigorous and detailed. I had to learn the company history, how to fold and stack T-shirts in a certain way. We were required to greet customers verbally or with a smile within 30 seconds of them entering the store. Staff were encouraged not to use closed questions such as “Can I help you?” We had to escort customers to an item rather than pointing to it. Also, mystery shoppers were periodically sent into the store to evaluate our performance. This onboarding process was an investment designed to enable me to represent the company effectively and provided me with the tools to feel engaged and proficient. Looking back, it was also one of my first demonstrations of why the staff experience is a key component in the operational structure of an organisation.
I have had wonderful and woeful customer service in all stores. However, there is a pattern that does emerge. Stores with shorter and faster-paced queues are often the stores where you can see a model for customer service and staff training. This may include greeting customers, product knowledge and a good working environment. On sites such as Glassdoor, employee reviews from the higher performing stores often cite good pay, benefits, supportive management and friendly co-workers and some of the positives.
In the stores that tend to have longer, slower-paced queues, employee reviews are considerably lower than other supermarkets. In these reviews, ratings are consistently low across several areas including work/life balance, senior management, compensation and benefits, culture and values and career opportunities.
As the reviews show, staff well-being is not achieved by pay or training alone, it is also a result of effective operations within the company. The supermarket does provide useful examples of this but the banks do deserve an honourable mention here. Long queues at the bank are an expected chore and grievance in the Caribbean. Queues to see a teller can take at least an hour on a good day.
The tellers often receive the brunt of the customer’s impatience and frustration but I would argue that the problems lie with managerial operational issues that leave staff vulnerable to increased stress and burnout. In some cases, there don’t appear to be enough tellers for the number of customers who are waiting. This could be an issue with staff shortages, not allocating enough staff for peak periods of the day or other issues affecting the bank’s operating model.
Another thing that makes me clench my jaw is to see other members of staff walking behind the counters dealing with non-client-facing tasks. I am not saying what they are doing is not important but if there is a queue of more than 20 people, surely the priority should be reducing the queue - not just for customer satisfaction but to reduce the load on the tellers. An ex-banking employee shared with me that their colleagues who worked as tellers were experiencing burnout and often had a “glazed look in their eyes.” Forcing staff to sit for long-periods of time doing repetitive tasks without regular micro breaks may increase the risk of errors, Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSI) and cognitive fatigue.
From what I have observed, there are several operational strategies the banks could experiment with:
Triage the queues: find out why customers are waiting. Some customers can do their business at the ATM but may need assistance.
Implement queue triggers: once a queue reaches 15 people, non-client-facing staff temporarily assist with customer-facing tasks until the queue falls to an agreed level.
Stagger shifts so that some administrative tasks can be completed either before or after the bank opens, so more staff can be available to assist customers, when needed.
These are interventions that have to be designed and implemented by management, with guidance from staff. It needs to be clear who can authorise these interventions, how they should be implemented and when they should be activated. The aim of effective operations is to reduce the cognitive and physical workload. In recent years, we have seen how future generations are reshaping how well-being is being prioritised in the workplace. The Deloitte 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that Gen Z (born between 1995 to 2007) are not merely seeking flexibility and purpose, they are prioritising continuous learning to future-proof their careers, sustainable workloads and well-being as infrastructure. Embedding these values into the culture and structure of an organisation is no longer optional, it needs to be a strategic priority.
As we head into the last quarter and with the holiday season approaching, stores will experience their busiest times of the year with inevitable queues snaking around the stores and out the doors. Rather than waiting until the chaos is upon us, companies can use this lead up time to implement and pilot simple workplace wellness strategies. During busy periods they will be able to see their operational structures in real time and assess how they are helping or hindering their employees' well-being. There may not be time to wait.
References
Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A. and Tulbure, B.T. (2022) ‘“Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance’, PLOS ONE, 17(8), e0272460. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272460.
Deloitte (2026) 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey. Deloitte Global.
Government of Barbados (2019) The National Workplace Wellness Policy for Barbados. Barbados: Government of Barbados.
Jian Ai Yeow, Poh Kiat Ng, Khong Sin Tan, Tee Suan Chin and Wei Yin Lim, 2014. Effects of Stress, Repetition, Fatigue and Work Environment on Human Error in Manufacturing Industries. Journal of Applied Sciences, 14: 3464-3471.