Monday, 6:40 p.m. An email from HR lands with a cheerful subject line: “We want to hear from you.” Inside, a link to a wellbeing survey, due Friday. You’re in the middle of a deliverable that was due yesterday, your phone buzzes with a message from your manager asking if you “could move that one up a bit,” and you open the link anyway, because saying no would also end up written down somewhere.

Question seven. “On a scale of 1 to 5, how often do you feel overloaded?”

You stop. The cursor blinks over the five. And the quiet arithmetic begins, the kind nobody teaches and everybody knows how to do: who’s going to read this? Is it really anonymous? On a team of six, how long before they figure out who picked five?

You pick three.

I know very few people who pick five. And a great many who have been living at five for years.

*

When the update to NR-1, Brazil’s regulation on occupational risk management, took effect on May 26, 2026, bringing psychosocial risks at work into the risk programs every company is required to keep, a strange idea started drifting through hallways: that the rule would force every employee to take a psychological test. It doesn’t. The regulation looks at working conditions and at how work is organized, at overload, harassment, lack of support. It looks at the design, not at the people inside it.

The mistake interests me more than the correction. A collective error of that size doesn’t come out of nowhere. It reveals where the eye goes first when something starts making people sick inside a company. And the eye goes, almost always, to the heads of the people doing the work.

There’s an apartment building with a crack running through a load-bearing wall. Residents start feeling dizzy, sleeping badly, snapping at each other without knowing why. The building manager, concerned, orders inner-ear exams for every tenant. The results come back: some have more sensitive balance, some less. He hosts a talk on equilibrium. Hands out a leaflet on breathing. Tapes a sign in the elevator reminding everyone that each person’s health is each person’s responsibility.

The wall is still cracked.

Nobody would call that manager caring. And yet that is roughly what many organizations do when they find out their people are getting sick: they test the tenants’ ears and leave the wall alone.

*

I’ve watched this happen so many times that I recognize the script before it starts.

A department has had three people in the same chair in two years. The first went on medical leave. The second resigned after crying in the restroom one afternoon, something everyone pretended not to notice. The third is there now, losing weight, answering emails at eleven at night, apologizing for taking so long to reply to messages sent at ten. When leadership meets to discuss the problem, the conclusion is usually some version of “we need to hire people who handle pressure better.”

Three different people. Different histories, different families, different temperaments. The same ending. And the hypothesis nobody raises is the most obvious one of all: the problem might be the chair.

The chair, meaning: the target set by someone who has never done the job, the scope that kept growing while nobody took anything away, the manager who shows up to demand and disappears when a decision is needed, the seven p.m. meeting that became a habit, the rule that changes every time someone upstairs changes their mind, the group chat that never sleeps. None of it shows up on a mood survey. All of it wears people down.

Funny how we accept the other logic almost everywhere else. If three cars skid off the same curve, nobody blames the drivers: someone calls the city to redesign the road. If three kids fall off the same piece of playground equipment, the school closes it off. Only at work does the badly designed curve stay exactly where it is, while the solution is to find more skillful drivers.

There’s a reason, and it isn’t a naive one, why the gaze keeps sliding toward the individual. Measuring the person is cheap and safe. The person can be trained, referred, replaced. They can take a course on managing emotions, get a subscription to a meditation app, be let go with a polite letter and a farewell cake in the break room. The structure can’t. Measuring the structure means asking who designed it. And that question tends to climb the stairs until it reaches rooms where nobody likes being asked anything.

I think there’s a quiet form of power at work here, one that rarely gets discussed: whoever decides what gets measured also decides where the blame will land. When the instrument points inward, into people, the organization stays, by definition, out of the picture. It appears only as the frame. Clean, neutral, innocent.

*

Then came the fine.

Or rather, the possibility of one. And the movement was remarkable to watch. Companies that had never asked anyone how heavy the work felt suddenly started hiring consultants, buying software, setting up committees with English names. Not because they had discovered something new about their people. Because they had discovered something new about their own financial exposure.

On June 25, Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended for ninety days the fines and other penalties tied to the regulation’s psychosocial provisions, to make room for clearer enforcement criteria. In August, the full court upheld that decision unanimously. And this week, with negotiations still underway, the suspension was extended for another ninety days. The rule’s requirements still stand, and so does the duty to prevent people from getting sick. Only the penalty remains on hold. And I saw, in more than one place, the committee slow down. The consulting project pushed into next year’s budget. The topic leave the agenda as quickly as it had arrived.

That says something. It says a lot, actually.

When care only shows up under threat, it stops being care and becomes something else, similar on the outside, hollow on the inside. Like a warning light coming on in the dashboard, and the driver who, instead of going to a mechanic, puts a strip of electrical tape over it. The light is still on. Only now nobody has to see it.

The survey attached to the risk program, filled out, filed away, with no action plan that changes anything at all, does exactly that job. It isn’t there to look. It’s there as proof that someone looked, precisely so that nobody has to. A certificate of attention signed by someone who wasn’t paying any.

And the people doing the work notice. They always notice. They watched the committee launch with fanfare, answered the survey with a sliver of hope, and then watched everything cool off on the very day the headlines mentioned the suspension of fines. The lesson that sticks is more corrosive than any overload: what happens to me only matters when it costs someone money. That discovery never makes it into a risk inventory. Even so, few things make people sicker than realizing their own suffering only reached the agenda as a line item.

*

In the middle of all this there’s a reversal almost nobody has noticed, and it has been nagging at me for weeks.

Look at why the penalties were suspended: the enforcement criteria weren’t clear. Companies complained, with some reason, that they didn’t know exactly what would be demanded of them, how it would be assessed, by whom, against what yardstick. They felt watched by an outside authority whose standards seemed murky. They felt the unease of being punishable without quite understanding what they would have done wrong.

Well.

Welcome to the daily life of a good share of the people who work for you.

The target that changes mid-quarter. The performance review based on “attitude” and “delivering value,” with nobody explaining what that means on a Tuesday morning. The manager who praises in January the same behavior he criticizes in July. The constant feeling of being watched by someone who can punish you, without knowing what the rules of the game actually are. What organizations felt for a few months under the new regulation is the air a lot of people have been breathing every day, for years, without any injunction.

I challenge any leadership team to sit with that comparison without looking away. The anxiety that earned the elegant name of legal uncertainty has another name inside the office. And there, nobody suspends the penalty for ninety days to clarify the criteria. Let alone twice.

*

There’s a kind of silence that engagement surveys don’t know how to read.

It’s the silence of someone who has already complained. Once, with courage. Again, carefully. A third time, almost apologizing. And all three times nothing changed, or things got worse, because now the person was seen as “difficult.” After that, they stop. Not because they’re fine. Because they learned that complaining moves nothing, burns energy, and leaves a mark on their record.

In the next survey, that person picks three. The department’s satisfaction score shows up as stable on the dashboard. Someone in the executive meeting remarks that engagement looks good.

The silence was read as health.

Have you ever been in a meeting where the manager finishes the presentation and asks, glancing at the clock, whether anyone has questions? And everyone, who had several, stays quiet? Nobody agreed to anything. Nobody had to. Each person glanced sideways at the others, saw they were quiet, and concluded the safest thing was to stay quiet too. That wordless pact, manufactured in seconds, is one of the toughest materials I know. No survey gets through it.

*

And the body?

The body doesn’t fill out surveys. It does something else.

When a person can’t confront what’s hurting them, because confronting it costs the job, and can’t leave either, because leaving costs the rent, the kid’s school, their mother’s health insurance, they stay. And staying, under those conditions, isn’t neutral. Tension that can’t become action has to go somewhere. It goes to the stomach, to the three a.m. insomnia, to the stiff neck, to that particular knot on Sunday night, when the show ends and the whole of Monday appears on the bedroom ceiling.

A lot of people treat these signs as weakness. I see an accurate reading. The body understood before the badge did. It grasped that there’s an ongoing threat you can’t run from and can’t fight, and it started responding through whatever channels were still open: sleep coming apart, tension that won’t let go, irritation with no obvious cause, a tiredness the weekend no longer repairs. Not every body responds this way, and not every sign has a single origin. When those signs persist, during office hours and after them, treating them as someone’s personal inability to handle pressure is choosing, once again, to examine the tenant and forget the wall.

That’s why it bothers me so much when the institutional answer is to offer people techniques to “cope better.” Cope better with what? With a cracked wall? Teaching someone to keep their balance on a tilted floor might help for a week. By the second week, a different question takes over: why is the floor still tilted?

*

It would be easy, at this point, to point the finger at the manager. It would also be unfair, or at least incomplete.

The middle manager is often the most squeezed person in the entire structure. They receive from above a target they didn’t negotiate, pass down a pressure they didn’t invent, and learn to become a pipe: water comes in one end, goes out the other, and they pretend they’re not getting wet. “I’m just passing it along,” they say, almost always with a fatigue that doesn’t fit on any scale from one to five.

That’s how the structure protects itself. It has no face. From the board down to the team lead, every link can say, with some honesty, that it only carried out what came from the link before. And the harm, which is real and has an address, ends up with no author. A crash with no driver.

A regulation that forces companies to look at how work is organized is trying to give that structure a face again. And that, I think, is why it’s so uncomfortable. Not because of the price of the software. Because of the price of recognizing yourself in the mirror.

*

I’d like to leave one question on the table of every newly formed committee, before the next alignment meeting.

What if, instead of asking “how is your mental health?”, the company asked “what task do you do every week that nobody here knows exists?” Or “which meeting would you cancel tomorrow if there were no consequences?” Or even “what have you stopped saying in the last six months out of fear of how it would be received?”

Questions like these don’t measure the person. They measure the work. They reveal the invisible weight, the stolen time, the fear that has moved in. And they come with an uncomfortable side effect: the answers can’t be fixed with a breathing app. They require someone to touch the process, the scope, the cadence, the way power moves between desks. They require someone to inspect the wall.

I don’t know if companies are ready for that. Some are. I know leaders who, reading the first honest answers from their teams, felt ashamed, and used that shame as fuel to redesign things that had been wrong for years. That exists. It’s rare, and it exists.

Most, I suspect, will wait to see what comes out of the negotiating table in Brasília. They’ll tweak the survey. Attach it to the program. Apply the electrical tape a little more neatly.

*

Meanwhile, next Monday, a new hire will start in that position. She’ll arrive early, in clothes picked out the night before, eager to prove herself. She’ll sit in the same chair three people sat in before.

The chair still wobbles a little. Nobody mentioned it.

Toward the end of the first week, at 6:40 p.m., an email arrives from HR. “We want to hear from you.”

She opens it. Reads question seven. The cursor stops over the five.

If this text shifted something in the chair you sit in, keep the conversation going on my blog, marcellodesouza.com.br, where you’ll find hundreds of articles on human and organizational cognitive-behavioral development and on healthy, evolving human relationships.

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