Reducing Burnout and Compassion Fatigue in a Frontline Support Team

Reducing Burnout & Compassion Fatigue in a Frontline Support Team

Frontline teams doing high-impact work often carry more than their job descriptions suggest, including heavy caseloads, emotionally charged interactions, and, at times, exposure to hostility or verbal aggression. In this team, staff were deeply committed, yet the cumulative weight of the work was taking a toll on employee health and retention. 

Leadership recognized that their team didn’t need another awareness-based session; they needed relevant evidence-based learning that provided practical individual, team and organizational strategies.

The client originally engaged us for a full-day workshop, and after receiving excellent feedback from attending leadership, immediately contacted us to provide a second full-day session.

Client Context

A department within a public-sector organization providing frontline support services to vulnerable internal employees navigating physical and mental health challenges. Leadership prioritized professional development that would meaningfully support employees’ ability to manage heavy workloads, emotionally intense client interactions, and build sustainable resilience.

The team had already built a strong foundation through training with respected providers such as CTRI and CMHA. Despite this foundation, leaders recognized a growing need to address burnout and compassion fatigue more directly with effective tools employees could use daily.

The Challenge

Staff were navigating emotionally demanding work on a daily basis. While they had a strong work ethic, passion and ethical frameworks, leadership observed:

• Increasing signs of emotional fatigue and strain.

• The cumulative impact of supporting others in crisis.

• The effects of vicarious trauma, emotional labour and moral injury.

• A desire for training that was practical, relevant, and grounded in real workplace case studies.

• The need for strategies that could be applied immediately and used for long-term employee health.

The leadership team sought a facilitator who could meet staff where they were, honour the complexity of their work, and offer practical tools that would meaningfully support both staff and the people they serve.

The Approach

Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development delivered two full-day Burnout & Compassion Fatigue training sessions. The sessions were designed to:

• Help employees understand the root causes and symptoms of burnout, compassion fatigue and moral injury within high-impact helping roles.

• Translate complex evidence-based concepts into practical, day-to-day strategies.

• Connect staff experiences directly with research-based methods to reduce stress, mitigate compassion fatigue and build resilience among individuals and peer support.

• Create a psychologically safe space for problem-solving, team collaboration and discussion

The workshops were tailored to address real-life challenges with a transformative approach.

The Impact

The training was highly anticipated and exceeded expectations.

Participants described the session as the most relevant and practical training they had received on burnout and compassion fatigue. Staff reported feeling seen, understood, and supported in ways that previous trainings had not fully addressed.

Key outcomes included:

• Strong engagement and participation throughout the sessions.

• Increased awareness of burnout and compassion fatigue symptoms.

• Practical strategies staff could immediately apply in their roles and progressively build upon.

• Skills to manage the effects of difficult and sometimes verbally-abusive client interactions.

• Reflection on how organizational changes could impact employee health long-term.

• Meaningful collaboration on how the team could better support one another’s well-being.

Client Reflection

“(We) searched out the best training we could find for our staff to help them be more resilient and trauma-informed. My boss has been extra pumped about getting this “rockstar” coach in. He was right! It was the best course I’ve had on the subject and I was super impressed with how relevant and practical the facilitator made it to what our staff do and deal with day to day.”

Why This Matters

This case study highlights the importance of moving beyond awareness-only training and investing in learning experiences that:

• Honour the education, experience, and emotional labour of frontline workers.

• Provide collaborative activities for team members to problem-solve and create strategies they believe in.

• Balance individual resilience with organizational culture improvements.

• Are grounded evidence-based applications to address employees’ challenging work.

• Support day-to-day resilience with simple but effective burnout and compassion fatigue prevention.

Ready to Support Your Team?

Breakthrough partners with organizations across Canada and the U.S. to deliver practical, evidence-based learning experiences that build resilience, well-being, 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.

Strengthening Resilience in a High-Demand Community Services Organization

Strong Teams Start with a Strong Culture

Building Resilience in a High-Demand Community Services Organization

Supporting others in complex, emotionally demanding roles takes heart, skill, and strength. This team was deeply committed — but the pace, emotional weight, and ongoing pressures were starting to take a toll.

Leaders knew that real, lasting support couldn’t come from self-care alone. To protect well-being and sustain impact, they needed something deeper: a shift in workplace culture.

The client originally engaged us to provide a workshop for leaders and staff supervisors and four workshops for frontline workers. After receiving exceptional feedback, they invited us back to train a session in a full staff team conference. 

Client Context

This community-based organization delivers essential support services in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment. Staff regularly hold deep emotional and relational responsibilities as part of their daily work.

Leadership saw that while their team was highly skilled and deeply committed, the demands of the work were intense and sustainable support was needed to protect well-being, resilience, and long-term capacity.

Rather than waiting for burnout and turnover to escalate, they chose a proactive path: investing in their people by creating space for reflection, collaboration, and supportive soft-skill learning.

The Challenge

Supporting others every day takes more than skill — it takes emotional presence, steady energy, and deep resilience. Leadership recognized that to truly support their team, they needed to address several key challenges:

• Helping staff manage ongoing stress and emotional load.

• Strengthening resilience without placing responsibility solely on individuals.

• Providing manager and supervisor training designed to equip them to support their staff’s realities.

• Reinforcing a psychologically safe environment for staff to pause, grow and reflect.

• Supporting a healthier, more balanced mindset and skillset at work.

• Creating a culture of connection and peer support within the team.

The organization wanted a learning experience that felt meaningful, practical, and affirming, with tools that would make a lasting impact.

The Approach

Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development delivered a Manager Workshop to build confidence in supporting frontline staff, a 4-part Self-Care and Resilience Workshop Series for staff, and wrapped it up with a collaborative workshop for all staff teams.

The series was designed to:

• Equip managers to have psychologically safe conversations with direct reports that demonstrate support in order to reduce burnout and turnover, while increasing retention.

• Provide practical, accessible strategies for managing stress and building resilience on the job.

• Normalize and process the emotional realities of high-demand support roles.

• Encourage individual and collaborative reflection without judgment or pressure.

• Build stronger peer support and team connection in ways that reflect company values and support lasting well-being, on and off the job.

The multi-session format made space for progressive and meaningful learning,  allowing participants to absorb and apply new ideas at a sustainable pace, within the real demands of community service work.

The Impact

The workshop series sparked a noticeable shift in how staff related to their work, themselves, and one another.

Participants described the experience:

• “I can feel the culture shifting. It's real. You've brought real change. I didn't want anything fake, and you delivered.”

• “It was tailored to our company, our people, and our challenges. You met us where we were at every time.”

• “Starting with managers and leadership was key. They were equipped to support staff through key challenges, and they were equipped to support staff as they were trained.”

• “You asked questions that allowed the team to problem-solve and make it work for them in their situations. This created trust, collaboration and ownership.’

“Perhaps most importantly, staff felt genuinely supported — not just encouraged to ‘cope better,' but invited to care for themselves in ways that honoured the demands of their roles.”

Client Reflection

“Supporting others every day takes heart, energy, and resilience. That’s why we took time to pause, reflect, and care for ourselves too.

These sessions helped our staff recharge, reflect, and strengthen their ability to thrive in high-demand environments. It was a meaningful and engaging experience, and our team showed up with heart and commitment to their own well-being.”

Why This Matters

This case demonstrates the power of intentional, well-structured wellbeing initiatives that:

• Help supervisors and managers better support the well-being and success of client-facing staff in both hybrid and in-person roles.

• Improve employees’ ability to manage stress and build resilience in high-pressure environments.

• Strengthen connection and mutual support within teams and across the organization.

• Create opportunities for employees to collaborate on solving problems and developing solutions for long-term buy-in.

• Create space for reflection, renewal, and skill-building to strengthen resilience in meaningful ways.

• Support long-term sustainability in caring professions, without minimizing the real impact of systemic pressures.

When organizations invest in their people, teams grow stronger and are better prepared to deliver high-quality, compassionate service even in challenging times.

Ready to Support Your Team?

Breakthrough partners with organizations across Canada and the U.S. to deliver practical, evidence-based learning experiences that build resilience, well-being, 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.

Reducing Burnout and Turnover Through Resilience and Stronger Frontline Support

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.