Managing Your Team's Mental Health Guide
A practical guide to supporting your team's mental health at work
What's in this guide?
A practical overview of the mental health landscape facing Australian business leaders in 2026 — covering the real cost of mental ill-health (spoiler: it's more than you think), your legal obligations under psychosocial hazard legislation, and three concrete starting points for getting it right.
Includes data on workers compensation claims, productivity loss, and retention costs, plus a plain-English breakdown of what an EAP actually is and what to look for in one.
Written for HR managers and business leaders who know mental health matters but aren't sure where their obligations start and end.
How to use this guide
Use it as a reset. If your current approach is a phone number on the staffroom wall and an annual reminder email, this guide will show you exactly what's missing — and what it's costing you.
Share it with your leadership team or board when you need to make the case for investment.
The cost data on pages 2 and 3 does that work for you. Use the three starting points at the end as a practical checklist for where to focus first.
Why managing your team's mental health matters
Most business leaders know poor mental health affects performance. Fewer understand the actual dollar figure sitting behind it.
Mental ill-health costs Australian businesses an estimated $5,260 per employee per year in lost productivity, absenteeism, and presenteeism.
For a team of 20, that's over $100,000 leaving your bottom line annually — before a single workers compensation claim is lodged.
When claims do come in, mental health incidents average $45,900 each. That's five times the cost of a physical injury claim, with a median time off of 27 weeks compared to 7 for a serious physical claim.
Mental health claims are forecast to make up half of all compensation costs within seven years.
Then there's the legislation. Psychosocial hazard regulations now apply in every state and territory. Directors and PCBUs are personally liable for the management of psychosocial risk.
This isn't optional wellness spend — it's a legal obligation with penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for businesses that can't demonstrate they're managing it.
The good news: businesses that get this right see measurable gains in retention, productivity, and claims reduction. The guide shows you how to start.
Hello 👋 I’m Joel the founder of Foremind.
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Answers to the frequently asked questions.
Email us at enquiries@foremind.com.au and we'll get back to you quickly with a response
Yes, we have culturally competent counsellors available, including those able to work with first nation and CALD employees.
Onshore on secure AWS Servers in Sydney Australia. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest and our entire team is located in Australia.
Employees can access our platform on any device (mobile, laptop, desktop, etc.) as long you have the website link - no need to download any app on devices. You wouldn’t need to enrol any of your staff individually.- When we do our onboarding, we ask for the first name, last name and email of all your employees, and send out an email invite to all them which will allow them to create their own individual account to access the platform. For new staff we can also invite them or provide you with a unique link to embed in your onboarding process, whichever is more convenient for you. We also kick things off with a launch webinar or video to make sure everyone is aware of Foremind and how to use it. We’ll also provide you with any collateral such as posters, QR codes, brochures etc. to help drive awareness and encourage people to create an account in the platform.
The support line is answered by our reception service 24/7. It is for urgent platform or session-related issues only (e.g. *“My counsellor didn’t show”*) or helping staff create an account.