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TaskUs Executive Interview

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In this conversation, Sheri Greenhaus, Managing Partner of CrmXchange, speaks with Rachel Lutz Guevara, a licensed mental health professional and Division Vice President of Trust + Safety at TaskUs. They explore the growing importance of mental health in customer experience roles, the proactive strategies TaskUs has developed to support frontline workers, and how emotional resilience training is becoming a key business performance driver. Rachel shares how TaskUs integrates psychological wellness into its operations, offering a unique approach that balances employee well-being with business outcomes.

Sheri Greenhaus: We’ve recently seen a lot of interest in mental health issues through our webinars. Many people in customer service and call centers are dealing with mental health challenges, but this was the first time it really came up on one of our webinars. Suddenly, it opened the floodgates and everyone started sharing their stories. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.

Rachel Guevara: Absolutely. This is right in my wheelhouse, so I’m happy to talk and hopefully provide your readers with some good insights.

Sheri Greenhaus: Tell me about your background.

Rachel Guevara: Sure! Like many people, I kind of stumbled into this field. I'm a licensed clinical social worker with about 18 years of experience leading mental health programs in a range of environments—clinical, academic, and now tech.

My background is in trauma recovery, working with vulnerable populations like returning veterans, victims of human trafficking, police officers, and others dealing with major mental health challenges or systemic inequities. I’ve carried that perspective into my current work.

I joined TaskUs seven years ago, where I’ve been building and scaling global wellness and resiliency programs designed to be preventative. Over the last seven years, I’ve been focused on creating psychological health and safety programs for frontline digital workers, those in high-stakes roles like content moderation, as well as customer experience employees.

My role is really about translating clinical insights into operational strategies—creating systems that not only protect people but also safeguard productivity and business outcomes. I lead a team of about 200 professionals focused on psychological health, safety, and trust and safety initiatives. Our goal is to ensure that frontline workers stay safe, healthy, and well, while also protecting the users of our clients' platforms from harmful content or bad actors. That’s the work I do today.

Sheri Greenhaus: Is TaskUs one of the only companies doing this? I don’t often hear about these kinds of programs elsewhere.

Rachel Guevara: That’s a great question. Honestly, when I entered this industry, there was almost nothing like this. It felt like I was speaking a foreign language. Fortunately, our CEO and president were very forward-thinking and empathetic. They trusted me to build what was needed to support our teams.

We started with trust and safety work, where employees deal with highly sensitive or disturbing content. Over the past few years, other BPOs have started to create similar wellness programs, mostly for their trust and safety teams.

What I haven’t seen as much, at least not yet, is companies applying this approach to other parts of the business, the way we have. We've proven that these programs benefit everyone, not just those in high-risk roles. We’ve seen measurable improvements not just in well-being—but also in business metrics like reduced attrition, lower absenteeism, and better KPIs overall.

That’s led our company to expand these programs beyond trust and safety. We know that customer service, for example, is also a high-stress environment. Agents deal with frustrated, angry customers on a daily basis. If we don’t give them the tools to manage their own mental health, they can’t deliver great customer service. We need to equip them with both technical skills and emotional resilience.

Sheri Greenhaus: That makes sense. Two things come to mind. First, are you seeing more issues now because customers are already frustrated by the time they reach an agent, especially with self-service and AI systems acting as gatekeepers? By the time they get to a human, they’re already at their breaking point.

And second, how do you recommend companies help their agents build resilience?

Rachel Guevara: Great questions. It’s definitely a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation. On the one hand, yes, many customers face barriers upfront because of complex, layered systems. By the time they get to an agent, they’re often more frustrated or angry.

On the other hand, people usually contact customer service because there’s already an issue. Whether AI makes that better or worse is still up for debate. We’re in the early stages of understanding its full impact on the customer experience.

But regardless of the cause, we’re still dealing with customers who need something from us. Traditionally, customer service training has focused on scripts, workflows, and service level agreements (SLAs), “if this, then that.” What’s often missing is the human element: compassion, empathy, and emotional regulation.

At TaskUs, we approach this the same way a personal trainer would approach physical fitness. The brain is a muscle; it can be trained. With repeated practice, we can create new neural pathways that support resilience, compassion, and adaptability.

Here’s how we do it: every week, we take agents out of production for dedicated wellness sessions. These sessions are led by clinically trained staff and focus on skill-building around monthly themes.

For example, one month we might focus on self-compassion; another month we might focus on cognitive flexibility or emotional regulation. These sessions aren’t just lectures; we incorporate experiential learning with hands-on activities, role-playing, and practice. That’s how we promote neuroplasticity, helping employees build new mental habits and coping strategies.

When we do this consistently, we see agents start to default to healthier ways of handling stress. Instead of burning out or losing empathy, they’re better able to regulate themselves and offer compassionate, effective service to customers. That’s the goal.

Sheri Greenhaus: It sounds a bit like what happens when someone goes to a therapist to learn coping skills, but you’ve adapted those skills for the workplace. Instead of someone snapping at their partner, they’re learning how to apply those same skills to customer interactions. It’s still a relationship, even if they don’t know the customer personally.

Rachel Guevara: Exactly. The key difference is that we’re meeting employees while they’re well, before there’s a crisis with their coping skills. From day one, we make sure there’s transparency around job stress. We clearly outline what to expect during the recruitment process and onboarding training, even before they interact with customers.

We explain the resources available, what participation in wellness programs looks like, and provide baseline skills to help them get started. Then, once they’re in production, we treat wellness training like any other essential job training. Just like there are mandatory certifications for most jobs, we approach this as mandatory skills training to help them succeed.

To be clear, this isn’t therapy. We’re not delivering psychotherapy or individualized counseling. What we’re offering is skills-based training designed to improve emotional safety in the workplace. And honestly, I’d argue that this proactive approach to emotional well-being can have an even greater business impact than many traditional upskilling programs.

Sheri Greenhaus: Do you find that during onboarding there are just some people who aren’t cut out for this kind of work?

Rachel Guevara: Yes, and that’s where proper candidate screening is crucial. It starts with transparency; people should never walk into a job without fully understanding both the positives and the challenges. Of course, most companies focus on highlighting the benefits during recruitment, but there’s value in also being upfront about the risks and stresses of the role.

I often compare it to safety protocols in a factory. If you’re working on the factory floor, we wouldn’t say, “Yeah, there’s some risk, wear a hard hat if you want.” No, we’d explain the risks clearly, require proper safety gear, and provide additional protection. We take that same approach with psychological safety.

First, we ensure candidates fully understand the risks. They need to give informed consent to accept those risks, and we show them all the ways we’ll support them.

Second, we screen for certain personality traits that correlate with resilience. Again, this isn’t about disqualifying people based on mental health diagnoses or conditions. Instead, we look at traits like grit, emotional regulation, and flexibility versus traits like high neuroticism, which might make some roles more difficult.

We’re transparent about this with the candidates. If a screening suggests a role may not be the best fit, we recommend other positions that better match their strengths. One advantage we have at TaskUs is the variety of business lines. If someone isn’t suited for a high-stress role, we can often find them a better fit elsewhere in the company.

Ultimately, it comes down to consent, transparency, and helping people make informed choices based on their own traits and capacities.

Sheri Greenhaus: I know our audience would be very interested in how you convince upper management that mental health training is just as important as other skills training?

Rachel Guevara: That’s such a great question, and honestly, it’s not easy. Many leaders have misconceptions about what psychological health and safety really mean. Even the word “wellness” can be misunderstood. People may wonder, “Are we talking about fitness? Mental health? Financial health? Yoga classes?”

A big part of my job has been educating leadership, explaining what psychological health and safety actually is, why it’s essential to integrate it across the business, and what tangible outcomes they can expect.

What’s worked best for us is showing clear business results. We’ve been able to demonstrate that teams participating in our wellness programs have significantly better outcomes than those that don’t. For example, over the last three years, teams with preventative wellness programs saw a 50% reduction in attrition compared to teams without wellness support. That’s a major cost saving—and it’s easy to calculate ROI on that.

We also saw a threefold improvement in performance metrics among teams that participated in wellness programs. So, it’s not just about measuring compassion or burnout; we pair those wellness scores with hard business KPIs, and that’s been the key to expanding and accelerating these programs throughout the company.

Sheri Greenhaus: Did you only study this within TaskUs teams, or did you look at other companies too?

Rachel Guevara: At first, this wasn’t something we set out to study systematically. The initial focus was on high-stress roles like trust and safety teams, those handling content moderation and reviewing difficult or harmful material. Everyone understood there was an inherent psychological risk in those jobs.

But to your earlier point, customer service roles have been around so long that people often overlook the emotional toll they carry. It’s just not as obvious.

When we started implementing these programs in trust and safety, leaders from other areas began to take notice. They’d say, “I used to work on a trust and safety campaign where we had wellness support, and it really helped. Now I’m leading a customer service campaign, and we’re seeing high attrition, burnout, and turnover, do you think this could work here too?”

That opened the door for pilots in other parts of the business—financial services, traditional customer service, and beyond. And we quickly saw the same positive results.

In a way, we ended up with a natural experiment, without even planning it, because of how we rolled this out. Now we’re working to expand these programs across many different business lines, because the impact has been clear across the board.

Sheri Greenhaus: Is there also the risk of having too much compassion? For example, if an agent is working in healthcare or financial services, they hear really difficult, emotional stories all day long. I imagine that could take a huge toll.

Is there a way for agents to still care and help customers, but also protect themselves emotionally—especially when they’re constantly hearing those kinds of stories?

Rachel Guevara: Absolutely. It’s definitely about finding balance. On one side, you have compassion; on the other, you have indifference or detachment; emotional distancing, basically. In customer experience, we’ve often seen more of the detachment side, largely because agents are trained to stick to a script. To the customer, that can feel cold or indifferent.

The key is to help agents find that middle ground where they can be empathetic without burning out. Yes, there are some people who may struggle with setting emotional boundaries, and those individuals can exhaust themselves emotionally over time. But in most cases, we’re really focused on resilience, helping people not just feel emotions, but effectively regulate them.

That’s why we assess for emotional regulation skills early on. Some people naturally struggle with this.  They are either too detached, or they become overwhelmed. We help employees build emotional “ceilings and floors,” meaning they can stay within a healthy emotional range.

Think of it like a bell curve; we don’t want people falling too far outside that curve in either direction. Our goal is to help them build skills that let them stay balanced and return to that center, even after difficult interactions. That’s really what resilience is about.

Sheri Greenhaus: And I assume, since TaskUs is a large organization, if someone isn’t a great fit for one type of role, they might be a better fit for something else—and could move between different programs?

Rachel Guevara: Exactly. That’s one of the benefits of being part of a company with more than 60,000 employees. There’s so much variety in the work we do.

If someone isn’t thriving in a customer-facing role, we may find they’re a better fit elsewhere; maybe in data, compliance, analytics, or another area. Those roles are just as critical to supporting the customer experience, but they don’t require the same level of direct interaction. We’re always looking to align people with the right fit.

Sheri Greenhaus: Is TaskUs a BPO?

Rachel Guevara: Yes, TaskUs is a BPO, but I’d say our niche is working with high-growth technology companies. We focus on delivering digitally enabled customer experience, AI operations, back-office services, trust and safety, things like that.

All BPOs are a little different in terms of their expertise. Ours is really centered around high-growth tech, social media, and e-commerce. If you have a social media app on your phone, chances are pretty good it’s connected to a TaskUs client.

Sheri Greenhaus: Pretty much every webinar we host these days revolves around AI. One thing I keep hearing from agents is fear. They worry AI will take over their jobs completely.

We try to balance that with input from analysts who say, “That’s not really happening; AI is creating new roles, not just replacing old ones.” What are you seeing?

Rachel Guevara: Some of what we call “tier one” tasks, basic, repetitive work has been automated. That’s expected; jobs evolve over time. My first job was in telemarketing at 15, but nobody does that work the same way today.

At TaskUs, we haven’t seen mass job loss from AI automation. Instead, we’ve seen job creation, but for different kinds of roles. Many of these are more specialized tier-two jobs, requiring human oversight for complex, nuanced issues that AI just can’t handle.

I really believe there’s always going to be a need for human connection. While AI will continue to change job functions, I don’t think it will eliminate these roles altogether. It’ll simply evolve what the jobs look like.

We’re also starting to see AI being applied in wellness itself, not just in customer engagement. For example, we’ve been testing AI-powered wellness tools, and we’ve done some research into their effectiveness. That’s another area where there’s growing interest, and it could be worth exploring further.

Sheri Greenhaus: Before we wrap up, if you could leave our audience with one key message, what would it be?

Rachel Guevara: As simple as it sounds…people are your product.

The ability of your agents to stay calm, stay present, and remain focused directly impacts your customer outcomes. Burned-out agents can’t offer high-empathy service, and that leads to higher attrition—not just among employees, but among customers too.

If your customers are having bad experiences because your agents are overwhelmed or disengaged, that instability gets passed along. Brands are finally starting to realize that employee well-being and customer protection aren’t separate; they’re deeply connected. Wellness isn’t just a nice perk anymore; it should be seen as a performance strategy.