Financial stress is rising—CCS' HR team is training for emotional endurance.
Canada’s cost-of-living pressures have sparked a rising tide of financial stress – and the HR team at Credit Counselling Society (CCS) is meeting the challenge by rethinking how they support the people behind the mission.
According to a 2024 Angus Reid Institute study, 54% of Canadians say financial stress is negatively impacting their mental health – a reality CCS staff encounter daily.
Stephanie Hallett, director of people and culture at CCS, joined the organization in 2018 as its first HR manager. By 2020, she had moved into a senior leadership role – a shift that signalled the growing importance CCS places on its people infrastructure.
“COVID had a significant impact on people that I don't know that we as a society really got to recover from,” Hallett said. “There’s just been a series of things over the last number of years that have had an impact on the resilience of each one of us as individuals.”
That recognition led to the creation of a behavioural model known as PAIR – problem solving, accountability, interpersonal awareness, and resilience – now used across hiring, training, and development.
“We chose the name PAIR not only to acknowledge the different behaviours included,” Hallett said, “but also to acknowledge that success comes as a result of the pairing of what we do with how we do it.”
CCS’s PAIR model (below) guides hiring and training around key behaviours: problem solving, accountability, interpersonal awareness and resilience.
New hires are screened for experience navigating emotionally charged environments and asked about their self-care practices. “It can be challenging work,” she said. “So, it isn’t a fit for everybody.”
Once inside the organization, structured support kicks in. “We have a really supportive onboarding program,” Hallett said. “The trainers are people who have done the roles that they are training for, so they've got a lot of lived experience.”
That lived experience is critical when staff face high-stakes conversations with anxious or emotionally elevated clients. CCS provides real-time backup through an emergency support chat. “If a person is on a call with a client [and it's] emotionally elevated, the team member can reach out,” she said.
CCS’s investment in staff wellbeing goes beyond standard HR training. Employees have access to workshops on de-escalation, boundary setting, influencing skills, and stress management.
The organization also recently launched an internal learning management system (LMS) to build financial literacy and workplace skills. “We’ve got six courses that have been developed by our People and Culture Generalist, including things like respect and equity in the workplace,” Hallett said.
To stay competitive amid economic instability, CCS is also conducting a compensation review in partnership with Mercer Canada. “We know that for our team, supporting people with their financial well-being, they also want to feel confident that they're being compensated fairly,” she said.
On the front lines, CCS counsellors engage with clients in distress – from fear and avoidance to depression or anger. Staff are trained in motivational interviewing to support clients in taking steps toward financial health.
“Sometimes it's recognizing that we aren't going to be able to get that person to action in that first conversation,” Hallett said. “Maybe our goal is to help them open the window to even thinking about the idea of taking action.”
With client volumes rising and economic indicators worsening, CCS’s HR strategy remains focused on maintaining emotional bandwidth and preventing burnout.
“We really encourage debrief,” Hallett said. “It's such an important part of preventing burnout. Processing the event after it's happened can help to reduce a lot of the emotional charge.”
For Hallett, this is more than operational policy – it’s about building systems that support people doing emotionally demanding work.
“It's important to us that when clients are working with CCS, they are receiving non-judgmental, empathetic support,” she said. That same ethos shapes internal HR practices – prioritising structure and compassion to sustain performance in high-empathy roles.
