THE LAW HAS ARRIVED. WHAT YOU DO WITH IT IS ANOTHER STORY.

You arrived at work today. Perhaps already tired before the day even began. Perhaps with that tightness in your chest that became routine without you noticing when it started. Perhaps you looked at your schedule and felt something you would rather not name — because naming it hurts, and you still have too much to deliver.

Now a law has arrived saying that all of this — the exhaustion that became background noise, the pressure you normalized, the silence you learned to keep — is no longer solely your problem. That the company bears responsibility for what happens to your mind inside that environment.

And the first reaction, honestly, for most people is: so what?

Not out of cynicism. Out of experience. Because they have seen many regulations arrive and very little change. Because they have participated in climate surveys that went unanswered, in listening channels that no one consulted, in wellness programs launched exactly when the workload was at its peak. Because they learned, in practice, that between what is written and what happens there is a gap — and that gap tends to be inhabited by the silence of those who know but prefer not to risk.

So let us have a frank conversation. No protocol, no euphemism, none of that report language that sounds good and says nothing. A conversation with the employee, with the leader, and with HR — because all three have a part in this story, and none of them will leave this reading exactly as they entered.

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For You, Employee: The Law Has Arrived — And That Matters

The update to Brazil’s NR-1 workplace safety standard, in effect since late May 2025, does something that seems simple but carries real weight: it makes it mandatory for companies to identify, prevent, and reduce psychosocial risks in the workplace. Psychosocial risks is not technical jargon meant to impress — it is the formal name for what you probably know very well in practice.

It is the target that cannot be met within the available time yet still must be reached. It is the workday that spills beyond the boundaries of your contract without anyone asking how you are doing. It is the manager who humiliates people in front of others and calls it accountability. It is the overload that grew slowly, meeting by meeting, until you no longer know where your limit is — because it has been moved so many times that you stopped looking for it.

The regulation says this has an owner. That the company is responsible for mapping where these factors exist, for creating conditions to reduce them, for listening to employees in a real way — not performatively — when defining working conditions. It also opens formal channels for you to report: the Labor Inspection complaint line, official government platforms, regional labor offices, the Labor Prosecutor’s Office. All available. All with the option of anonymity.

This is real. This is new. This matters.

But the law cannot take the step that only you can take: recognizing what is actually happening to you. Not what should be happening. Not what you tell others is happening. What is genuinely happening.

The real problem is not that people are unaware of their rights. It is that many have reached the point where they no longer recognize their own state. The environment taught them for years that feeling tired is weakness, that asking for help is risky, that saying no is professional suicide. And when someone spends enough time in an environment that teaches that, they start to believe it. They start calling exhaustion a work rhythm. They start justifying anxiety as temperament. They start normalizing what should be a warning signal.

So what concretely changes for you:

Document. If you experience situations that cause suffering — harassment, systematic overload, impossible targets, veiled or explicit humiliation — keep a record. Date, time, what happened, who was present. Documentation transforms what seems subjective into evidence. And evidence is what supports a complaint, a grievance, a negotiation.

Name what you are feeling — for yourself. Chronic fatigue is not personality. Recurring insomnia before Monday is not dramatics. Anxiety before certain meetings is not excessive sensitivity. These are signals. And signals exist to be read, not swallowed.

Seek support before you collapse. The law creates conditions to reduce what makes people sick. But your current state is also in your own hands. A mental health professional, a doctor, someone you trust outside the work environment — do not wait until you reach your limit to seek help. The limit, when it finally arrives, rarely gives advance warning.

Use the channels when necessary. They exist, they have legal backing, they can be anonymous. This is not weakness. It is the exercise of a right that, until very recently, was not guaranteed with this clarity.

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For You, Leader: Pretty Words Without Attitude Behind Them Are Not Communication — They Are Disguise

Now the most uncomfortable conversation. Because if you lead people, this regulation speaks directly to you — to what you do or fail to do, to what you allow or normalize, to the distance between what you say you value and what your daily decisions reveal.

So what do you do with this?

The easiest answer — and the most common — is to invest in communication. Hire a structured feedback consultancy. Take a nonviolent communication course. Learn the right formulas for giving feedback without hurting, for holding people accountable without pressuring them, for correcting without humiliating. The market sells this enthusiastically, and many leaders buy it with relief — because it is more comfortable to train your words than to examine your attitudes.

But here is what nobody says in those workshops: language that does not emerge from a genuine shift in posture is nothing more than a more sophisticated layer of veneer over the same problem.

The leader who learns to say ‘I need your help understanding this’ while maintaining sarcasm in their tone of voice, the look of contempt when someone makes a mistake, the impatience that runs through every pause — that leader has not learned nonviolent communication. They have learned to appear as though they practice nonviolent communication. And the people who work with them know the difference. They feel it before they process it intellectually. The body registers what the sentence tries to conceal.

Communication is not only what you say. It is the pace at which you respond when someone brings a problem. It is what your silence communicates when someone asks for help and you look at your screen. It is the microexpression of impatience before you remember to smile. It is the way you talk about someone when that person is not in the room — and everyone in the room knows you do the same when they are not there.

Arrogance does not need words to take hold in an environment. It communicates itself through who gets heard and who gets ignored. Through the quality of attention you offer depending on who is speaking. Through how you react when challenged — whether you welcome disagreement or punish those who push back, even subtly, even through a coldness that appears in no HR report.

The sarcasm that destroys cultures rarely shows up as cruelty. It shows up as humor. As clever irony. As a joke that everyone laughs at — including the person who was targeted, because laughing is safer than reacting. And the leader who uses this as a control tool often does not even realize they use it, because they were promoted in an environment where this was accepted as a strong management style.

The updated regulation prohibits workplace harassment. But the most frequent form of harassment inside organizations has no witness, no record, no shape that any form can capture. It exists in the accumulation of small gestures that seem insignificant in isolation and together build an environment where people learn to diminish themselves before the leader does it for them.

So what concretely changes — or needs to change — for you, leader:

Examine what is behind your words. Not what you say — what you feel while you say it. If you are communicating with patience on the surface and contempt on the inside, the people around you already know. You are the last one to find out.

Look at what your mannerisms communicate. The way you enter a room. How you react when interrupted. What your body does when it receives bad news. Leadership does not happen only in formal meetings — it happens all the time, in every micro-interaction, and the people who depend on you are reading every signal.

Review how work is organized — not the intention, the reality. Are the targets achievable? Are the working hours within human range? Is there space for someone to flag a problem before they collapse? If the answer is no, the problem is not with the people. It is with the structure — and structure is what leaders change.

Accept the discomfort of being confronted. If someone on your team comes to you with a limit and your internal reaction is irritation, judgment, ‘that is their problem’ — you have not yet arrived where the regulation, and the bare minimum of leadership awareness, is asking you to arrive.

No workshop delivers this. No conscious leadership certification resolves what only honest self-examination resolves. You can have impeccable vocabulary and be one of the most destructive people in your environment — and with this regulation now in force, that has ceased to be merely an ethical question and has become a legal one as well.

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For You, HR: You Are the Heart — But a Heart Needs Strength to Beat

And here we arrive at the conversation that is perhaps the most necessary of all — and the one most rarely held with honesty.

HR knows. Almost always knows.

It knows who the problematic managers are — because the turnover rates in their teams speak before any formal complaint does. It knows which areas have recurring absenteeism, which teams show the highest rates of mental health-related leave, which leaders appear repeatedly in exit conversations when someone finally feels safe enough to speak.

And it also knows that, in most cases, that knowledge stayed filed away. Sometimes for lack of structure to act. Sometimes for lack of support from senior leadership. Sometimes because the person causing harm is someone who delivers results — and results, in an organization that still confuses performance with health, protect.

This needs to be said without euphemism: when HR knows and stays silent, it stops being part of the solution and becomes part of the architecture of the problem. Not out of malice — often because of a lack of real autonomy, of structure, of being positioned in a way that makes it dependent on the approval of those it should be holding accountable. It is an institutional trap. And the updated regulation has just made it visible in a way that can no longer be ignored.

The regulation changes the game for HR in a structural way: the responsibility to identify and prevent psychosocial risks is now explicitly assigned to the organization — and HR is the internal actor most directly implicated in that process. This means that silence has ceased to be a neutral position. It has ceased to mean ‘I am not involved.’ It has become omission with consequence.

But before the legal consequence, there is a prior question worth asking with honesty: who does HR actually work for?

If the practical answer — not the declared one, the practical one — is ‘to protect the company from risk,’ then HR was born with a structural conflict of interest in relation to the employee. Because protecting the company from the risks that employees represent is a radically different function from protecting employees from the risks that the environment represents. And for a long time, in the organizations that became most deeply sick, it was the first function that prevailed.

The HR team that runs a climate survey and files the results because the data is inconvenient. The one that creates a listening channel but lacks the structure — or the courage — to take what it hears to those who need to act. The one that hires wellness consultancies in response to a problem that has a name inside the organization, but that name is untouchable. The one that knows about the harassment, documents it internally, and closes the process with a confidential settlement that protects the aggressor and silences the victim.

That is not people management. That is image management.

And here is the point organizations need to face seriously: a weak HR function is not neutral. An HR team without real autonomy, without direct access to senior leadership, without adequate resources, without professionals trained to handle the complexity of human behavior in organizations — that HR team does not merely fail to protect. It becomes, involuntarily, the instrument that gives the appearance of care to environments that continue to make people sick.

HR needs to be the heart of the organization. Not in a poetic sense — in a functional one. The heart does not ask permission to beat. It beats because life depends on it. In the same way, an HR function that truly works does not wait for authorization to name what is wrong. It has the structure to act, the autonomy to confront, the training to understand the human dimension of what the data reveals, and the institutional standing to be heard when what it says is inconvenient.

This requires real investment from organizations — not in yet another people management software, not in yet another engagement dashboard. It requires HR to be composed of professionals with deep training in human behavior, in group dynamics, in organizational mental health. Professionals who understand that turnover numbers are symptoms, not causes — and who know how to go beyond the surface of the data to find the causes.

It also requires organizations to stop treating HR as an operational support function and start treating it as a strategic function for protecting what is human within them. HR needs a real seat at decision-making tables — not just to execute what has been decided, but to say, before the decision is made, what it will cost the people who carry the organization on their backs.

With the updated regulation now in force, HR has legal backing it did not have before with this clarity. The question is whether it will use it. Whether it will occupy the space the regulation opened — or fill out another form, create another committee, hire another talk on self-care, and call that prevention.

The difference between those two choices is not technical. It is courage. And courage, like everything human, is not built in a workshop. It is built — or not built — in the willingness to sustain what is true even when the context pressures you toward the opposite.

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What the Law Cannot Do for Anyone

A regulation is a floor. It defines the minimum below which one cannot go without legal consequence. But the floor is not the ceiling — and confusing the two is what turns good intentions into structured mediocrity.

The updated regulation is necessary. It names responsibilities that were diffuse, creates protective mechanisms that did not exist with this clarity before, gives legal backing to those who needed somewhere to stand. For the most vulnerable employee, for those without a voice inside their own environment, for those who needed a concrete instrument — this matters enormously.

But the law does not create awareness. It does not change the culture of an environment. It does not transform a leader who has never questioned their own impact into someone capable of leading people with responsibility for what is human. It does not make an HR team that learned to protect the company spontaneously begin to protect the employee. It does not make the employee recognize their own state if they spent years learning that their state does not matter.

And it does not resolve the most silent problem of all: that many organizations will continue applying the regulation as performance. They will create the document, fill out the form, hire the nonviolent communication workshop, update the code of conduct — and the next day the manager who humiliates will remain in their position, HR will continue filing what it knows, and the employee will continue swallowing what they feel because the real culture has not changed.

What transforms is not the regulation. It is the honest willingness — in each of the three places in this conversation — to ask what is actually being built. What kind of environment we are creating. What our silence is teaching. What our attitudes, regardless of the words we choose to cover them, are producing in the people around us.

That question has no article of law. No implementation deadline. No quarterly audit. It has only consequences — for those who work, for those who lead, for those who care, and for the kind of place that each organization decides, consciously or not, to be.

The law has arrived. It opened a door that was closed.

Walking through it — with everything that entails — is still a choice. And choice, unlike regulation, carries no fine if you do not make it.

It has only what you build — or what you allow to continue being destroyed, slowly, while calling it something else.

If this text touched something you had not yet named — an unease, a recognition, a desire to go deeper into what happens inside you and in the environments where you live and work — I invite you to explore my blog. There I maintain hundreds of publications on human and organizational cognitive behavioral development, on healthy human relationships, and on the invisible architecture that shapes who we are — inside and outside of work. Visit marcellodesouza.com.br. There is much more waiting for you there.

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Marcello de Souza | Coaching & Você

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