Canberra Southern Cross Club
How Canberra Southern Cross Club turned low trust and a mostly casual workforce into strong EAP engagement and board-ready psychosocial reporting.
Canberra Southern Cross Club is a hospitality organisation with about 500 staff across four venues. Around 75% are casual and rarely at a desk.
The problem
The Club’s previous EAP was “okay”, but it worked alone. It had no link to the psychosocial risk work the new legislation required, and no way to report to the board.
The bigger issue was trust. Staff saw the EAP as part of the organisation, so their doubts about the organisation carried over to the service.
“There was a low level of trust with the organisation in this space, and by extension the previous provider.”
Libby Keefe, General Manager – People and Culture
Reaching staff was hard too. Casual employees come in for a shift and go home, so they’re unlikely to log in to several work systems.
How Foremind helped
The Club started on a basic pay-as-you-go counselling plan. It then grew into Foremind’s full psychosocial suite, including a hazard survey that asks staff directly how they’re going.
Keeping everything on one platform was key for a casual workforce:
“The fewer platforms our staff have to interact with, the better the outcomes. If our psychosocial tools were somewhere else, that’s just another place staff have to go.”
Foremind worked closely with People & Culture throughout. The Club built the service into everyday work, with Foremind’s details on business cards, in newsletters, in performance letters and on staff room walls.
“Foremind provides a good product and good support, and the feedback from staff has been excellent. Keeping it all in one place was a natural progression.”
The impact
- Strong reach: more than 1 in 5 staff are registered, and staff at all four venues have booked sessions.
- Deeper care: close to 100 counselling sessions so far, with an average of more than five per person.
- Filling a real gap: for 57% of staff who used counselling, Foremind is their only source of support.
- Staff speaking up: more people are reporting unacceptable behaviour or raising concerns with People & Culture.
- A reassured board: for the first time, the Club has clear reporting on psychosocial risk.
“Instead of one or two sessions, people are doing their six or eight. They’re getting more care, and that’s exactly what we want to see.”
“It gives the board reassurance that we’re taking the psychosocial piece seriously, and that we have the systems and reporting in place.”
The lesson
Results took 6 to 12 months of steady trust-building, and they came from making the EAP part of a wider system rather than a standalone service.
“If you launch and forget, it won’t work. It can’t just be ‘we’ve got an EAP’. It has to be part of everything you do.”
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Answers to the frequently asked questions.
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No. An EAP is a control measure, and a valuable one, but it only addresses harm after it has occurred. It doesn't identify hazards, assess risk, or evidence that controls are working.
Australian WHS law requires you to identify psychosocial hazards, assess the risk, control it so far as is reasonably practicable, and review whether those controls are working — with documented evidence at each step. Offering counselling on its own leaves three of those four steps undocumented.
Foremind covers both in one platform. See how the compliance side works in our product tour.
Yes. Psychosocial risk obligations apply regardless of organisation or business size, and Foremind is built to make compliance simple without enterprise-level complexity.
Not counselling — making sure people are safe, communicating honestly, connecting staff to support, and monitoring the team over following weeks. Managers are affected too, and are often overlooked in the response.
Nothing that could identify anyone. All counselling is completely confidential and all reporting is anonymous - you'll never see who booked, when, or what was discussed.
What you do see is the aggregated picture: how many people are using it, what psychosocial risks are prevalent in the business, and which teams are under pressure. Enough to know the investment is working and where to act, never enough to identify a person. Reporting thresholds mean small teams can't be reverse-engineered from the data.