In today's world, employee wellbeing has become a critical issue directly impacting work efficiency and organizational competitiveness. Financial stress in particular is a hidden cost that affects productivity, turnover rates, and overall business performance.
The Personnel Management Association of Thailand (PMAT), together with the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), organized a seminar titled "Employee Wellbeing for Sustainable Competitiveness: Where Employee Wellbeing Meets Business Value," featuring HR, finance, and organizational psychology experts, workshops, and case studies from over 200 organizations that can be applied immediately after the event.
Rongrak Panapawutikul, Deputy Manager and Head of Legal and Corporate Risk Management at the Stock Exchange of Thailand, said that the Thai capital market has consistently valued human capital, especially in the service sector where personnel drive success. Employee care is a key part of ESG business practices under the social dimension, covering quality of life, finances, and mental health. He emphasized that employee wellbeing is not a cost burden but an investment that helps retain staff and strengthens sustainable organizational growth.
Currently, many workers face a condition known as “The Burden Bearer” where they must shoulder heavy responsibilities caring for both elderly parents and children simultaneously, creating enormous pressure, especially financial problems, which are a national concern.
A survey by the Bank of Thailand found that 52.7% of the working-age population has debt, with a non-performing loan (NPL) ratio as high as 27%, highlighting the urgent need to address financial wellbeing.
Mental wellbeing is another critical factor. Bangkok ranks fifth among 100 cities worldwide where employees work the hardest. The stress from intense work leads to fatigue and burnout.
Reports indicate that 7 out of 10 Thai workers experience burnout. This stress directly affects concentration, skills, and damages organizational productivity. Therefore, managing employees’ financial and mental wellbeing is an urgent priority for organizations.
Meanwhile, in a special keynote titled “The State of Employee Wellbeing: Global Trends and Why It Matters to Business”, by Vorawat Suwakhonth, President of the Personnel Management Association of Thailand (PMAT) and Chief People Officer at Siam Commercial Bank Public Company Limited, he highlighted global employee wellbeing trends that Thai executives must consider. In an era where organizations rapidly invest in AI, automation, massive data, and workflow improvements to gain competitive advantages, one silent factor is undermining productivity and performance: human energy. It is a key operating system. Without human energy, strategies and technology investments worth billions cannot succeed.
Data from 2024 reveals a startling picture: only 1 in 5 employees worldwide (20%) feel engaged with their organizations. This means 4 out of 5 employees do not fully commit their potential. Moreover, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that lack of engagement causes a $10 trillion annual loss in global productivity,
and 12 billion working days are lost due to anxiety about life, debt, and mental health. Additionally, 40% of employees suffer from work-related stress.
In Thailand, the situation is even more challenging due to the full transition to an aging society, with elderly making up 25% of the population, leading to a continuous decline in working-age individuals alongside a shortage of future skills. Increasing workloads (working harder) to solve this is not the answer. Organizations and HR must modernize work methods, enabling smarter work by integrating technology and agility to reduce routine tasks, allowing employees to focus energy on higher-value work.
These challenges have made wellbeing no longer just an HR benefit or program but a business strategy on the top management agenda for CEOs, CFOs, and boards. Wellbeing is part of sustainable performance and must cover five dimensions:
A clear example is Thailand’s financial wellbeing issue, where household debt relative to GDP is very high. Internal data from a banking organization shows more than 2,000 employees out of 16,000 face heavy debt burdens, impacting concentration, mental health, morale, turnover risk, and fraud risk. Addressing this requires clear business goals, such as setting KPIs to reduce employees with debt problems to 1,000 or 500 within three years through education and support tools.
To achieve real wellbeing outcomes, organizations must change how they measure success, moving beyond participation numbers or satisfaction scores (NPS) to business outcomes such as talent retention rates, speed of innovation, and stress reduction. This fosters psychological safety—an environment where employees feel safe to speak honestly, challenge ideas, and share opinions. Employee silence or reluctance to voice concerns is a costly organizational risk.
Furthermore, management must empower managers and supervisors—those closest to employees—to take ownership of wellbeing. Leadership evaluation should not focus only on short-term annual performance but on creating environments where teams have wellbeing and energy to sustain performance, monitored annually via executive dashboards.
Amid AI-driven disruption eliminating jobs and rapidly changing roles, future winning organizations won’t be those with the largest AI investment but those capable of quickly building new capabilities, enabling fast learning and agility in skills-based workforce adjustments. These cannot happen without employee wellbeing across all five dimensions. Thus, prioritizing human wellbeing as a core business strategy is key to sustainable performance today.
This was followed by an in-depth session on the critical dimension: “Hidden costs of financial stress,” presented by Suraphol Opasathien, Assistance Executive at the National Credit Bureau (NCB). He highlighted the alarming reality of Thailand’s debt situation and its direct impact on human resource management in organizations. He began by examining organizational life and work perspectives, noting that KPI systems measure performance, but failure to meet targets in reality may result in "kill this person immediately"—meaning immediate dismissal.
Looking at Thailand’s economy, the country’s GDP is about 19 trillion baht but carries accumulated debt of 16 trillion baht, generating massive annual interest burdens. This crisis is not new but has accumulated since the major floods in 2011.
Economic stimulus policies such as first-car, first-home projects, and rice pledging programs have been introduced. International financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank have asked what future fears are greatest; the answer was the possibility of a second round of first-car projects. This is because many Thais take on debt driven by three main factors: tax exemption, easy borrowing, and low interest rates.
Regarding debt structure by occupation, savings cooperatives have extended loans totaling 2.55 trillion baht, with educators alone owing 800 billion baht. Including additional borrowing from other financial institutions amounting to 500 billion baht, educators’ total debt reaches 1.2 trillion baht.
Although household debt to GDP ratio appears to have fallen to 85.9%, this does not indicate improvement but results from changes in the denominator. Debt volume remains unchanged, but repayment capacity has declined.
Data recorded in the credit bureau system accounts for 13.6 trillion baht of the total 16.4 trillion baht household debt. The remaining approximately 2.8 trillion baht lies outside the bureau, mainly in savings cooperatives (2.2 trillion baht) and the Student Loan Fund (SLF), which has strict policies requiring HR in organizations to deduct loan repayments from employees' salaries.
Examining retail loan growth, housing loans grew only 2.4%, auto loans declined 7.4%, resulting in overall system loan growth of just 0.8% compared to the same period last year. This is due to the Bank of Thailand’s efforts to control debt-to-GDP ratio at 80%, slowing debt growth and accelerating GDP growth, making easy borrowing impossible. Conversely, nano finance loans grew sharply by 54%, despite high interest rates of 33%, posing high risks to borrowers.
Non-performing loans (NPLs), defined as payments overdue for 91 days or more (4th installment onward), have steadily risen since Q1 2022 after the COVID-19 crisis. If an individual has even one NPL account out of five, they are classified as a bad debtor. From an HR perspective, when employees seek debt help, it is crucial to ask pointed questions such as: “Where did this debt originate?” and “What was the money used for?” If the debt was incurred as a guarantor for someone else, serious questions about responsibility must be raised.
Furthermore, Suraphol added that personal loans have an NPL ratio as high as 11 accounts per 100, alongside the expansion of Buy Now Pay Later services promoting overconsumption.
High and ending installment loans show an NPL ratio of 18 per 100 accounts. Credit card debt includes 893,500 delinquent cards out of 24 million issued nationwide (many cards remained unused for two years). There have been proposals to tighten credit card advertising and warnings similar to cigarette packaging.
For car loans, 877,000 vehicles have been repossessed due to delinquency. Overall, bad debt in the credit bureau system amounts to 9,657,000 accounts valued at over 1.3 trillion baht, nearly 10% of total system debt.
Additionally, there are over 1.9 million accounts in arrears 1-3 installments, awaiting classification as bad debt. Among these, 430,000 vehicles await repossession, half being pickup trucks essential for livelihoods. Breaking down occupational vehicles, motorcycles have 2.5 million current payments, 192,000 at risk, and 965,000 delinquent. Pickups total 2.5 million, with only 180,000 current but 489,000 delinquent.
To address this crisis, the Bank of Thailand introduced Preventive Debt Restructuring (DR), requiring financial institutions to offer one debt extension or restructuring immediately after a borrower misses one installment. This acts as a "dam" to slow debt from escalating to litigation. DR volumes surged from 291 billion baht in Q2 2024 to 1.7 trillion baht currently. If this dam fails, all debt will flood into Thailand’s economy at once.
Not only employees or consumers but employers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as legal entities, face tough challenges. Of total loans worth 2.4 trillion baht, 10.9% are non-performing, with another 4.95% at risk, meaning 16% of SMEs struggle with debt. These warning signs are crucial for management and HR to recognize and prepare for the ongoing economic situation.
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