Consultancies and internal Trust and Safety teams are entering a turning point. The sector is shifting away from tactical fixes aimed only at frontline staff and toward systemic approaches that stretch across leadership, managers, and agents alike. The consultancy trend of 2025 will be defined by who recognizes this shift and adapts and who falls behind.
The new landscape of Trust and Safety
Over the past year, the pressure on Trust and Safety has intensified. Layoffs have reduced headcount while workloads continue to climb. Teams contend with growing content volumes, persistent backlogs, and inefficient tooling, all while navigating volatile political climates and tightening regulation. Leaders are expected to maintain compliance and safeguard brand reputation, but they must do so with diminished resources and mounting risk. Stability is rare, and the expectation to perform under constant flux is now the norm.
The evolution of roles
The nature of work inside Trust and Safety is changing. A large portion of frontline moderation has shifted to outsourced vendors, which shields some employees from constant exposure to the most harmful material but transforms the in-house function. Internal roles now focus on complex investigations, sensitive escalations, and rapid interpretation of shifting policies. Managers sit in the middle, caught between executive expectations and teams already stretched beyond capacity. Leaders struggle to reconcile ambitious performance targets with the reality of what teams can deliver. This disconnect creates friction that undermines trust and accelerates attrition.
The hidden cost of burnout and attrition
Behind every metric lies a human cost. Employees describe working under relentless urgency, with little room for recovery or restoration. Many live in a state of constant hypervigilance, navigating ambiguous cases that test judgment and resilience. Burnout and attrition are not simply individual health concerns, they represent systemic risks. When experienced staff leave, organizations lose institutional knowledge and incur significant rehiring and training costs. Culture erodes, performance drops, and regulatory exposure increases. What appears as a productivity issue is often rooted in unaddressed organizational strain.
The consultancy shift
For years, generic wellbeing programs were seen as a sufficient safeguard. External helplines, one-off workshops, or awareness campaigns were positioned as solutions. Yet these approaches are often detached from daily workflows, reactive rather than preventative, and impossible to measure against business outcomes. They place the burden on individuals to seek help, when in reality the issue is systemic.
In 2025, the most relevant consultancies will be those that understand this. They will help organizations embed wellbeing into operations, not bolt it on as an afterthought. They will introduce interventions that are tailored to the pressures of specific roles, that are practical and evidence-based, and that can be measured in the same way as core KPIs like accuracy, handling time, and retention. In this model, wellbeing is not a soft add-on. It becomes a lever for resilience, compliance, and sustained performance.
What comes next
The coming year will draw a clear line between consultancies that deliver systemic, measurable impact and those that offer surface-level support. Demand will grow for data-backed interventions that prove their value through pre- and post-pulse surveys, psychosocial risk assessments, and visible improvements in workforce performance. Organizations that invest in this kind of embedded approach will safeguard both their people and their future. Those who continue to rely on generic, one-size-fits-all offerings risk falling behind as attrition, burnout, and compliance failures compound.
The prediction and the warning are the same. The wellbeing needs of Trust and Safety are systemic. In 2025, only consultancies that address the entire ecosystem, from executives to frontline teams, will define the future of the field.
