Working Yourself to Exhaustion? Why Overtime Culture Is a Human Rights Due Diligence Issue

Working Yourself to Exhaustion? Why Overtime Culture Is a Human Rights Due Diligence Issue
Coming home late every night with barely enough time to sleep before getting up for work again has become routine in many organizations. What most people do not realize is that this is not just a workplace culture problem or an ordinary HR issue. It is one of the areas that HRDD is specifically designed to catch.

How Working Hours Connect to HRDD
HRDD, or Human Rights Due Diligence, is the process organizations use to check whether their business operations are affecting anyone's human rights. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, working hours is treated as one of the core issues HRDD must assess, on par with fair wages and non-discrimination. Unilever itself names this directly in its own human rights reporting, listing bullying and working conditions among its salient human rights issues that require active management.

Why HRDD Pays Close Attention to Working Hours
Allowing employees to work unlimited, continuous overtime does not only affect their physical and mental health. It also raises the risk of workplace accidents, chronic fatigue, and a declining quality of life, all of which are exactly what HRDD is designed to catch early, before they grow into problems that are far harder to fix.

What Happens If You Skip HRDD on Working Hours
Organizations that have never examined this through an HRDD process usually discover the problem only once it is too late to fix easily. The most common risks include
•     Becoming a target for scrutiny from international customers who set HRDD as a contract or renewal condition
•     Losing business opportunities when a trading partner chooses a supplier with a stronger HRDD system instead
•     Reputational damage if news or complaints about working conditions become public
•     Losing skilled employees who eventually resign after being unable to sustain the heavy workload

How HRDD Helps Organizations Fix This
An HRDD process does not stop at identifying the problem. It helps an organization pinpoint its highest-risk areas first, put preventive measures in place, monitor results continuously, and open a grievance channel employees can genuinely access. This turns working-hours risk into something managed systematically, rather than something fixed only after it has already become a crisis.

How to Start HRDD on Working Hours the Right Way
The most accurate starting point is an HRDD Assessment that surveys actual working hours data across every level of staff, benchmarked against Thai labor law and international standards, before designing measures suited to that specific organization. Copying a policy wholesale from another company rarely works, because every organization carries a different risk profile.


How ESG PRO Can Help With HRDD
ESG PRO offers end-to-end HRDD consulting, from assessing human rights risks including working hours, to developing policies and preventive measures, through to building an ongoing monitoring system. If your organization has never examined this seriously, this is the right place to start, before it becomes a far harder risk to fix. The ESG PRO team is ready to help.