Reducing Burnout & Turnover Through Resilience & Stronger Frontline Support
A client-facing public-sector organization providing essential community services began noticing growing signs of burnout and compassion fatigue within its frontline team. Over the previous two years, staff turnover and sick leave had steadily increased, prompting leadership to prioritize employee wellbeing, resilience skill development, and long-term retention.
The organization initially engaged Breakthrough to deliver four identical three-hour workshops to support the entire department. Participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many describing the sessions as highly relevant and immediately applicable. In response to this strong impact, leadership immediately expanded the engagement to a full-year training partnership. This included a dedicated session for directors and supervisors, a repeat of the original session to onboard new staff, and advanced sessions for those who had attended the original training.
Client Context
The organization provides essential social services to individuals experiencing acute crises related to mental health and addiction, unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. Many clients reached out at moments of extreme vulnerability, urgently seeking support and access to limited resources. Prolonged waitlists and complex systemic barriers often heightened client frustration, which at times resulted in verbal aggression toward staff.
Frontline employees deeply desired to help, but often found that red tape frequently led to moral injury. Repeated exposure to clients’ difficult stories led to vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue. Over time, this cumulative emotional load contributed to rising burnout and increasing staff turnover.
The Challenge
Although staff were deeply committed to their roles, signs of compassion fatigue, burnout, and emotional exhaustion were escalating. Leadership recognized that traditional awareness-based training would not be sufficient. They were seeking workshops that would meaningfully support staff well-being and strengthen long-term sustainability.
They wanted training that incorporated:
Resilience and stress management strategies that tangibly improved employee mental well-being and morale.
Accessible training to understand burnout, compassion fatigue and moral injury and learn actionable mitigation solutions.
Equip employees with realistic rhythms and routines they could use during the workday and after hours to decompress and recover.
Reignite employees’ passion and sense of purpose and align their work with organizational values.
The Approach
Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development first delivered four 3-hour workshops for frontline employees on stress management and resilience strategies. Following exceptional feedback, we facilitated a leader-focused workshop on how to effectively support their teams, onboarded new staff with the original session, and held a follow-up workshop on advanced workplace resilience strategies.
The series was designed to:
Train supervisors to support frontline staff who respond to crisis situations and experience vicarious trauma and moral injury on a daily basis.
Facilitate supervisor collaboration to create healthy boundaries while supporting employees in a hybrid work environment.
Demonstrate an understanding of the complex challenges employees face and acknowledge their base of self-care knowledge.
Engage staff in a repeatable, interactive resilience debrief designed to unpack challenges, acknowledge coping mechanisms and learn evidence-based resilience strategies.
Help staff understand fight-or-flight stress responses and effectively stop the stress spiral once it begins.
Mitigate the effects of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue using practical, evidence-based strategies.
Train frontline workers how to process difficult client interactions to prevent stress injuries and reduce the time managers spend providing support.
Connect employees’ passion and dedication to organizational values for greater client support.
The Impact
Staff left their workshops feeling recharged and more equipped to manage stress and support one another. Supervisors worked together to design support strategies that felt fair and consistent across the department.
Frontline staff gained practical resilience tools to sustain performance in demanding roles, and reduced the support requests they made to their managers.
Participants described the experience:
“We just went through a two-day training on compassion fatigue, but your workshop was far more valuable in just 3 hours. What you trained is actually applicable to my job.”
“We now have a simple but effective strategy that we co-created to support our staff.”
“I now know how to deal with my own stress and how to support my co-workers when they are stressed. Now we feel like a team.”
Client Reflection
“Bonita committed to learning the roles of our staff and what challenges they were facing; this allowed her to deliver relevant content in a safe and meaningful way.”
“Our staff raved about her passionate and empathetic facilitation skills and left the training with practical skills to implement into their work and personal spaces.”
Why This Matters
This case demonstrates the power of customized workshops that:
Address the actual challenges frontline staff face on a daily basis.
Improve employees’ ability to manage stress and build resilience in client-facing crisis situations.
Help supervisors collaboratively create meaningful strategies to support employees in a hybrid work environment.
Strengthen organizational values and peer support among teams.
Equip staff to process difficult client interactions to prevent stress injuries, burnout and turnover rates.
When organizations invest in cohesive training across all levels, they achieve measurable improvements in employee health, engagement, long-term sustainability and support.
Ready to Support Your Team?
Breakthrough partners with organizations across Canada and the U.S. to deliver practical, evidence-based workshops and training that build resilience, peer support and a healthier workplace culture.
Confidentiality Disclaimer
To protect client privacy, identifying details such as organization names, locations, and specific circumstances have been removed or altered. The insights shared reflect real experiences, while respecting the confidentiality of our clients and their teams.