My book came out this week. I was still staring at the cover on my screen when I saw the news: Brazil’s NR-1 the country’s foundational workplace health and safety regulation — just entered into force with inspections and fines. The same day.
I sat with that for a while.
It’s not marketing to say the timing matters. It’s that these two things happening together say something about where Brazil is arriving in a conversation that should have started a long time ago.
Have you ever driven home after a long day and had no idea what to say when someone asked how it went? Not because you were tired. Because of that kind of exhaustion that doesn’t have an easy name.
Have you ever watched someone good and dedicated, slowly disappear, and no one quite knew what to do about it, including you?
Those moments have stayed with me for years. They’re why I wrote the book. And they’re exactly the kind of situation that the NR-1 is trying to address — perhaps in a way that surprises anyone who still thinks labor law is only about wages and benefits.
What the NR-1 changed and why it matters beyond the fine
Brazil’s Regulatory Norm No. 1 has existed since 1978. In August 2024, it was updated to include something that had never carried this kind of legal weight in Brazilian labor law: psychosocial risks — now formally required in every company’s Risk Management Program as of May 26, 2026.
Burnout. Moral harassment. That kind of overload that doesn’t appear in any contract but that anyone who’s ever worked somewhere toxic knows intimately.
These factors are now legally in the same category as physical accident risk, chemical exposure, and biological hazard. Companies had a year of educational oversight — from May 2025 until now. Starting May 26, 2026, enforcement becomes punitive. No extensions.
In practice, every company with formal employees must map these risks, include them in their Risk Management Program, create an action plan with owners and timelines, and monitor continuously. This isn’t a checklist you fill out once and file away.
The numbers that made this law inevitable
You can’t talk about the NR-1 without talking about what made it necessary:
472,000 mental health-related workplace absences in 2024 — 68% more than the previous year, the highest number on record. Source: Brazil’s Ministry of Social Security / INSS
96% growth in burnout cases in Brazil over ten years. Source: Treml et al., Brazilian Journal of Occupational Medicine, 2025
R$ 282 billion in estimated annual economic losses due to psychological health issues. Source: Fiemg, 2023
But the number I can’t stop thinking about 86% of Brazilian leaders say they recognize the importance of mental health for performance. And yet 63% of those who received a burnout diagnosis never told their own manager. Source: The School of Life Brasil / Robert Half, 7th edition, 2025 — 774 leaders
It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t feel safe enough to speak. That distinction matters enormously.
What the law is actually saying
The part that strikes me most about the NR-1 isn’t the fine. It’s the focus.
The norm requires companies to look at how work is organized — not just at the worker. For too long, the corporate response to suffering was individual: meditation apps, free snacks, therapy sessions, meeting-free Fridays. All of that can have value. But none of it fixes a manager who humiliates, a target built with no connection to reality, a culture where admitting difficulty is read as weakness.
The NR-1 asks what I ask in every training I facilitate: how is work organized here? Do people have real autonomy? Is a mistake treated as learning or as proof of incompetence?
Where to start without romanticizing it
There’s no shortcut. But there is an order.
First, listen. Really listen. With genuine psychological safety — which means people need to believe that speaking up won’t cost them anything. Anonymous surveys help. One-on-ones help more. And your absenteeism and turnover data is already telling you something worth reading before you do anything else.
Second, look at the system, not the person. The question isn’t who is suffering. It’s what in the environment is causing the suffering. Those are different questions with very different answers.
Third, develop your leaders. I’ve worked with extraordinary managers who had never received any training for the human side of leading teams. Not out of negligence — because no one had ever told them it was part of their job. It is. And it’s something that can be learned, practiced, built into daily habits.
Fourth, build listening channels that actually work. Not climate surveys that end up in a drawer. Mechanisms with visible consequences, where people can see that speaking up changed something.
Fifth, document. Your Risk Management Program needs to reflect reality, not a decorative version of it. That protects you legally. And more importantly, it creates a foundation that doesn’t depend on one person who will eventually leave.
What I learned at Microsoft, P&G, Avon, and Mondelez — across very different leadership styles and cultures — is that none of this comes naturally to most organizations. Not because people are bad. Because the system was built to optimize delivery, productivity, and perfect scorecards. Not health.
The NR-1 sets the floor. The ceiling is built from something else: from a leader who decided that the people around them would go home whole. That a hard conversation today is worth more than an ignored problem that explodes six months from now.
That’s hard. And it’s worth it.
I wrote The Power of Compassion in the Workplace for those who want to understand how to do this in practice — not as a concept, but as a leadership habit. With real cases, updated data, and a framework I’ve applied across very different contexts.
Available on Amazon Brazil O Poder da Compaixão no Ambiente de Trabalho https://a.co/d/0evBY2FX
