How Fair Wear's learning team turns HRDD into action
For many companies, the challenge around human rights due diligence (HRDD) is no longer defining policies, but embedding them into everyday business decisions across teams and supply chains. As expectations increase through legislation and stakeholder pressure, organisations are looking for ways to translate complex frameworks into consistent, practical action.
At Fair Wear, the Learning Team focuses on this gap: turning HRDD from a conceptual framework into something companies can understand, apply, and continuously improve in practice.
Moving from frameworks to informed decision-making
HRDD is grounded in internationally recognised standards such as the OECD Guidelines and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. While these frameworks provide a clear structure, many companies face a common challenge: understanding how they translate into day-to-day decisions across different functions.
In practice, this often means moving beyond policy documents and developing a shared understanding of how business activities, from sourcing decisions to supplier engagement, can influence human rights outcomes.
The Learning Team supports this shift by designing learning programmes that connect these frameworks to real business challenges. Rather than approaching HRDD as a one-off compliance exercise, learning is structured to support ongoing reflection and improvement, helping participants build the confidence to apply HRDD in context.
Designing learning programmes that reflect real-world challenges
A core part of the Learning Team’s work is developing and delivering learning programmes for brands, including self-paced modules, webinars, workshops, and cohort-based trainings.
These programmes are grounded in a key principle: HRDD cannot be applied effectively in isolation from real-world conditions. Content therefore draws on Fair Wear’s broader work, including insights from country-level engagement, grievance mechanisms, and direct experience with brands and suppliers.
A recurring challenge for companies is not a lack of available information, but how to interpret and prioritise risks in a way that is both credible and actionable. Learning programmes are designed to address this by helping participants:
Understand how risks vary across contexts
Recognise how internal business practices can influence those risks
Develop a more structured, risk-based approach to decision-making
Content is continuously adapted to reflect evolving legislation, emerging risks, and new insights from practice.
Creating space for peer learning and shared understanding
Embedding HRDD is not only a technical challenge — it is also an organisational one. Many companies struggle with internal alignment, while also navigating an industry landscape where approaches and expectations can differ.
To address this, the Learning Team integrates peer learning into many of its programmes. By bringing brands together around shared challenges, learning becomes a space for exchange as well as knowledge-building.
These peer-based formats help companies:
Test and refine their approaches in discussion with others
Build a more common understanding of what effective HRDD looks like in practice, and reduce the sense of working in isolation on complex issues
Over time, this kind of alignment can support more consistent implementation across the industry.
Extending access through the HRDD Academy
The Learning Team also contributes to the development and coordination of the HRDD Academy, which aims to make structured, practice-oriented HRDD learning accessible to a broader group of companies beyond Fair Wear’s membership.
Through the Academy, learning builds on Fair Wear’s existing methodologies and experience, while creating a shared foundation for companies at different stages of their HRDD journey. Although rooted in the garment and footwear sector, many of the principles and tools are relevant across industries facing similar challenges.
This broader accessibility supports a key objective: strengthening consistency in how HRDD is understood and applied, beyond individual organisations.
Connecting learning to practice on the ground
To remain relevant, learning must reflect the realities of supply chains. The Learning Team works closely with thematic experts, local teams, and external partners to ensure that content is grounded in practical experience.
This includes linking learning to other forms of capacity building, such as country-level training for workers and suppliers. In some cases, these connections help reinforce a more coherent approach, where learning, facilitation, and implementation are not separate activities, but part of a continuous process.
Learning as a driver of long-term change
As HRDD becomes more embedded in regulatory frameworks and business expectations, the ability to translate complexity into informed action will increasingly define which companies can implement it credibly and at scale.
The role of learning in this process is not only to transfer knowledge, but to build shared understanding, strengthen decision-making, and support more aligned approaches across teams and organisations.
By focusing on practical application and peer exchange, Fair Wear’s Learning Team contributes to making HRDD clearer, more actionable, and better integrated into how companies operate — supporting progress towards more responsible and resilient supply chains.