What changed in NR-1?

NR-1 is the Brazilian regulatory standard that sets general provisions and occupational risk management rules for every employer with staff hired under the country's labor code (CLT). Ordinance MTE No. 1,419 of August 27, 2024 rewrote chapter 1.5, which covers Occupational Risk Management (known in Brazil as GRO). The new text explicitly lists work-related psychosocial risk factors among the hazards the organization must identify, assess and control.

The change was due to take effect in May 2025. Ordinance MTE No. 765 of May 15, 2025 postponed the start to May 25, 2026, and the requirement applied from the following day. In the meantime, the Ministry of Labor and Employment published a guide on psychosocial risk factors for employers, workers and occupational health and safety professionals.

The practical consequence is easy to state and hard to deliver. Psychosocial risk is now an item in the risk inventory, with a control measure, an owner and a deadline.

What are work-related psychosocial risk factors?

They are features of how work is organized, managed and experienced that can harm people's mental and physical health. They sit in the work itself: in targets, working hours, relationships, role clarity and management style.

Some examples that appear often in official guidance and in the literature:

The list is not exhaustive. Each organization needs to look at its own reality, and the same factor can weigh differently in a retail store, a factory or an offshore platform.

How do you include psychosocial risks in the risk management program?

Psychosocial factors follow the same logic as other hazards under NR-1: identify hazards, assess risks, define preventive measures, implement them, monitor them and record everything in the Risk Management Program (known as PGR), which combines the risk inventory and the action plan.

1. Prepare the identification with the right people

The occupational health and safety team leads the process but cannot do it alone. HR, line managers and worker representatives need to take part, because they know the real routine. The standard requires organizations to consult workers about how they perceive risks, and psychosocial risks rarely show up in a spreadsheet.

2. Gather evidence from more than one source

Surveys help but are not enough. Combine structured listening (interviews and group sessions by area), observation of the work and data the company already has, such as sick leave, turnover, absenteeism, overtime and reports from the whistleblowing channel.

3. Assess and prioritize

Every factor needs a risk assessment that considers the possible severity and the likelihood. A department with unreachable targets, long hours and a history of mental health leave comes before a department with a single complaint.

4. Build an action plan that changes how work is organized

This is where most companies go wrong. Measures aimed only at individuals, such as a talk on stress or a meditation app, rarely control a risk that comes from how work is organized. The plan needs to include adjustments to workload and targets, clear roles, communication rules, safe reporting channels and leadership development.

5. Monitor and record

The risk management program is a living document. The indicators chosen during identification show whether the measures are working, and the program needs a review whenever something changes: a restructuring, a new manager, new targets, a merger.

Why do leaders weigh so heavily on psychosocial risks?

Because most of the factors above land on the manager's desk. Managers distribute work, set priorities, accept or push back on deadlines, mediate conflict, give or withhold feedback and decide whether a problem raised by the team gets dealt with or ignored.

The World Health Organization's 2022 guidelines on mental health at work recommend training managers to protect and promote their teams' mental health. The international standard ISO 45003:2021 also includes leadership and management aspects among the sources of psychosocial risk.

A common pattern in companies of every size is the manager promoted for being an excellent specialist, never prepared for difficult conversations, who passes pressure down exactly as it came from above. When that manager learns to distribute work, give feedback without humiliating anyone and listen before a problem turns into sick leave, several risk factors drop at once. That is why leadership development is often one of the most far-reaching measures in the action plan.

What are the most common compliance mistakes?

The first is treating the standard as paperwork: a program with one generic paragraph about "stress" neither identifies nor controls anything. Another is confusing an engagement survey with a risk assessment. The survey is a good data source, but it does not say what the risk is, where it sits or what will be done about it.

Companies also tend to put all the responsibility on the worker. Offering psychological support is positive and does not replace changes to how work is organized. Some leave managers out of the process, which keeps the measures from reaching daily routines, and others run the assessment once and forget it. Restructurings, new managers and new targets change the risks, and the inventory has to keep up.

Where to start

A good first step is to bring occupational health and safety, HR and a few managers together to answer three questions: where are people getting sick or leaving, what has recently changed in how work is organized, and which conflicts keep coming back. The answers usually point to the first areas for a detailed assessment.

If the company's culture treats constant pressure as a sign of commitment, the work goes beyond the risk program. Culture mapping helps to see those patterns, and our article on psychological safety in teams shows what leaders can change day to day. For shift-based operations, see also communication at shift handover.

What is organizational culture?

Organizational culture is the set of shared habits, beliefs and values that guides how people think, decide and behave in a company. It works like an unwritten agreement about "how things are done around here".

Psychologist Edgar Schein, one of the main references on the subject, describes culture in three layers:

1. Artifacts: what you can see and hear, such as office layout, rituals, dress code and internal jargon.
2. Espoused values: what the company says it values, in documents, speeches and campaigns.
3. Basic assumptions: beliefs people hold without noticing, which actually guide behavior.

An assessment is needed because the third layer is invisible from the inside. Leaders are often surprised by what comes up.

Why run a culture assessment?

Because the gap between declared and lived culture is expensive. It shows up as strategy that never leaves the page, conflict between departments, good people leaving, and training programs that change nothing.

Some moments make it more urgent: fast growth, mergers and acquisitions, changes in senior leadership, a new strategy, or the same problems returning after several attempts to fix them. It is also worth doing before investing in a leadership program, to know where to focus.

How to run an organizational culture assessment in 5 steps

1. Define the business question

An assessment without a question becomes a generic survey. Start with the problem: "why isn't our innovation strategy moving?", "why don't departments collaborate?", "why does safety slip when production is under pressure?". The question guides who you listen to, what you observe and how the results will be used.

2. Translate the desired culture into behaviors

Values such as "collaboration" or "respect" are too abstract to measure. For each value, leaders need to answer: what behaviors would show that this value is alive? And which would show the opposite?

If one of the values is "safety first", for example, one expected behavior is stopping work when conditions are unsafe without fear of punishment, even when the deadline is tight. That translation becomes the yardstick for the assessment.

3. Collect evidence of the lived culture

Use more than one source, because each has blind spots:

In Walking the Talk, Carolyn Taylor points out that people learn a culture by watching what leaders do, the company's symbols and its management systems, such as targets, bonuses and promotion criteria. Look at all three.

4. Analyze gaps and patterns

With the evidence on the table, the analysis looks for two kinds of findings. Gaps are the differences between expected and observed behavior. Patterns are behaviors that repeat across the company and reveal a hidden assumption, such as "whoever brings a problem becomes the problem" or "hitting the target justifies any shortcut".

Not every finding is negative. The assessment also shows what the culture does well and should be protected during a change.

5. Share the findings and prioritize with leaders

An assessment only creates value when it turns into decisions. The debrief starts with leaders, because they are the main carriers of culture, and ends in a few concrete priorities: which behaviors to change first, which systems to adjust and how to measure whether change is happening.

A Gallup study found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement across teams. That is why, at Ativme, the findings of a culture mapping usually shape the Leadership School: it is the shortest path from assessment to daily routine.

Which mistakes should you avoid?

The most common one is confusing a culture assessment with an engagement or climate survey. A climate survey measures how people feel at a given moment and answers questions like "are you satisfied?". A culture assessment looks for the beliefs that explain behavior and answers "why do people act like this here?".

Another frequent mistake is relying only on questionnaires. They show trends but rarely reveal hidden assumptions, which come out in stories and examples. A lack of confidentiality also gets in the way: if people think they will be identified, they tell the official version.

Finally, some assessments end in a report instead of action. When people take part, say what they think and nothing changes, trust drops, and the next assessment will be even harder.

How does culture relate to psychosocial risks?

Many of the psychosocial risk factors that Brazil's NR-1 now requires in occupational risk management, such as excessive targets, conflict and lack of support, are expressions of culture. A good culture assessment helps explain why those risks exist and where they concentrate. See our guide on NR-1 and psychosocial risks and our article on psychological safety in teams.

Why invest in developing leaders?

Because leaders translate strategy and culture into their team's daily work. A Gallup study of thousands of teams found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement across business units. The same company can have highly engaged teams and demotivated ones, and the main difference between them is who leads.

There is also a regulatory reason in Brazil. Since the update to NR-1, factors such as overload, conflict and lack of support are part of occupational risk management, and many of them depend on how people are led. The World Health Organization recommends training managers as one of the measures to protect mental health at work. Read more in NR-1 and psychosocial risks.

Why do so many leadership programs fail?

The reasons repeat from company to company:

• The program is a one- or two-day event, and learning has no time to become habit.
• The content is generic and does not speak to the company's real challenges.
• There is no practice between sessions.
• The participant's manager does not know what is being covered and does not support the change.
• The company measures only whether people liked the training.
• Company systems (targets, bonuses, promotions) keep rewarding the old behavior.

The last point deserves attention. If leaders learn to give feedback and develop people but are still assessed only on short-term results, they will do what the assessment asks.

What are the elements of a leadership program that works?

1. A diagnosis before the content

The program needs to answer one question: what kind of leadership do the company's strategy and culture require, and where are the biggest gaps? A culture assessment, interviews with executives and behavioral assessment tools help set priorities.

2. A path in stages

Leadership develops in layers. It makes little sense to teach feedback techniques to someone who does not yet understand how their own style affects others. Ativme's Leadership School is a 40-hour path in four stages:

3. Practice between sessions

The 70-20-10 model, popularized by the Center for Creative Leadership, suggests that most of a leader's development comes from challenging experiences at work, some from relationships (feedback, mentoring, watching other leaders) and a smaller share from formal courses. The numbers are a reference and not an exact rule, but the message is useful: formal sessions prepare people for practice and help them make sense of it.

Each stage of the path should end with a concrete commitment to apply before the next session, such as holding a feedback conversation, reorganizing how work is distributed or running an alignment meeting. The next session starts with what happened.

4. The leader's own manager involved

When the participant's manager knows the program, they can reinforce new behaviors and make room for them. A short alignment conversation before the start and another at the end already make a difference.

5. Measuring what changed

The Kirkpatrick model, widely used to evaluate training, proposes four levels: reaction (did participants like it?), learning (did they learn?), behavior (do they act differently at work?) and results (did it affect company indicators?). Most companies stop at level one. For a leadership program, level three is the most revealing. It can be measured with team feedback before and after, observations from the manager and follow-up on practice commitments.

How do you fit the program into the company's routine?

A leadership program competes with operations for people's time, so the schedule has to be flexible. At the Leadership School, sessions can run on weekdays, weekends, afternoons or full days, depending on how each company works. In shift-based operations, such as oil, gas and energy, the design has to account for rosters and offshore rotations.

What matters most is that leaders finish each stage confident enough to put the tools into practice.

Why does shift handover concentrate so much risk?

Because it is when responsibility for a task changes hands. The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines the goal of handover as the accurate, reliable communication of task-relevant information across shift changes, so that safe work continues. When that communication fails, the incoming crew makes decisions with an incomplete picture of the plant.

Some factors make the change even more fragile: fatigue at the end of a shift, the rush to leave, maintenance that runs across shifts, vague written logs ("all normal") and rigid hierarchies in which the incoming crew is reluctant to ask questions.

What have accidents taught about shift handover?

The HSE notes that many accidents have been caused by communication failures at shift handover, most of them involving planned maintenance work. Two cases come up often:

• In the 1983 Sellafield beach incident in the UK, highly radioactive waste liquor was discharged to sea because of a communication failure between shifts.
• The Cullen Report on the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster concluded that the failure to pass on information at shift handover was one of the factors behind the accident, which killed 167 people. The inquiry also pointed to weaknesses in the permit-to-work system.

In both cases, the way crews exchanged information did not guarantee that critical details reached the next shift intact.

How do you run a safe shift handover?

The HSE describes three elements of an effective handover:

1. Preparation by the outgoing person: reviewing what happened during the shift and organizing the information before the conversation.
2. The handover itself: outgoing and incoming personnel talk to exchange the relevant information.
3. Cross-checking by the incoming person: before taking responsibility, they check the information on the plant and in the records.

It also sets out principles for the conversation. It should be face to face and two-way, with both people jointly responsible for the outcome, combine verbal and written communication and be given the time and resources it needs. Its content should come from an analysis of what the incoming crew needs to know.

What a handover must cover

Simple techniques help a lot. Read-back, in which the receiver repeats critical information in their own words, reduces misunderstandings. Standard checklists prevent omissions. Walking the critical points of the plant together, when possible, leaves little room for assumptions.

What is the supervisor's role in shift handover?

Supervisors set the standard. If they treat handover as a formality, so will the crew. If they set aside time, ask questions, check the records and do not accept "all normal" as an answer, the crew learns that the moment matters.

Supervisors are also responsible for identifying higher-risk handovers, such as changes during maintenance, start-ups and shutdowns, or when the incoming crew is less familiar with the area. The HSE recommends planning maintenance work so it can be completed within a single shift whenever possible.

There is a less visible dimension too: psychological safety. A handover in which the newest operator does not feel comfortable saying "I didn't get that, please explain again" is an unsafe handover, even with the best checklist. Our article on psychological safety in teams goes deeper into this.

How do you train crews for better critical communication?

Written procedures are necessary, and behavior only changes with practice. Critical communication training uses real situations from the operation, handover simulations and debriefs on what was clear and what got lost. The oil and gas industry has also adopted crew resource management practices from aviation, which work on communication, situational awareness and group decision-making, as described in IOGP Report 501.

At Ativme, the CCI-O&G program works on shift handovers and interaction between teams, and LEAD-O&G prepares leaders to decide under pressure. See our programs for oil, gas and energy. In operations with large crews, it is worth combining this with team development.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a belief shared by the members of a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks there. An interpersonal risk is anything that might make a person look ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive: asking a basic question, admitting a mistake, asking for help, disagreeing or bringing bad news.

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, defined the concept in a study published in 1999 with teams from a manufacturing company. She found that teams with more psychological safety showed more learning behaviors, such as seeking feedback, discussing errors and looking for information, and that this was linked to better performance.

The topic became popular after Google shared the results of Project Aristotle, an internal study of what makes teams effective. According to The New York Times coverage of the project, psychological safety emerged as the most important of the factors analyzed.

What is psychological safety not?

Three misunderstandings come up often.

Psychological safety does not mean being nice or avoiding conflict. It is what allows frank disagreement without anyone taking it personally. Teams in which everyone agrees with everything tend to have little psychological safety.

It does not mean lowering standards either. Edmondson describes four combinations of psychological safety and performance standards. High safety with low standards puts a team in the comfort zone. High standards with low safety put it in the anxiety zone. The learning zone, where high-performing teams are, combines both at a high level.

And psychological safety is not a personality trait. It is a group climate, which can vary a lot between teams in the same company, depending mostly on who leads them.

How can you tell whether your team has psychological safety?

A few signs help with a quick diagnosis:

In high-risk environments such as oil and gas operations, a lack of psychological safety has direct consequences: the operator who doesn't ask questions at shift handover, or who doesn't stop an unsafe task for fear of the supervisor's reaction.

How do leaders build psychological safety?

Leader behavior matters most, because the team is always watching what happens to people who speak up. Edmondson suggests three places to start.

Frame the work as a learning problem

When leaders make clear that the work involves uncertainty and that everyone's input is needed, speaking up becomes part of the job. A line such as "we've never done it this way, I need you to tell me what you're seeing" changes the tone of a meeting.

Acknowledge your own fallibility

A leader who says "I might be wrong" or "I got that decision wrong" gives others permission to do the same. Leaders who never admit mistakes teach their teams to hide theirs.

Be genuinely curious

Asking real questions, and listening to the answers, shows that the team's view matters. This is especially true of the reaction to the first piece of bad news: if the messenger is punished, nobody brings the second one.

Other practices that help

• Thank whoever raises a problem before discussing the solution.
• Keep the analysis of a mistake separate from the search for someone to blame.
• Make sure everyone speaks in meetings, not only the most outgoing people.
• Agree with the team on how disagreements will be handled.
• Give feedback often, in private and respectful conversations.

How does psychological safety relate to Brazil's NR-1?

The update to NR-1 requires psychosocial risk factors such as conflict, harassment, lack of support and poor communication to be part of occupational risk management. A team with psychological safety tends to identify and report these problems earlier. See our guide on NR-1 and psychosocial risks.

How do you develop psychological safety in practice?

Teams go through stages before they mature. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described a sequence in 1965 that became known as forming, storming, norming and performing. Psychological safety is what lets a team get through the storming stage without breaking apart.

At Ativme, cohesion and trust are the first pillar of team development, and nonviolent, assertive and caring communication is one of the stages of the Leadership School.

What is DISC?

DISC is a model that describes people's observable behavior in four styles: dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance, which some versions call conscientiousness.

Its theoretical basis is the book Emotions of Normal People, published in 1928 by American psychologist William Moulton Marston. Marston did not create a questionnaire. DISC assessment instruments were developed later by other authors and companies, and many versions exist today, with different methods and levels of validation.

DISC looks at behavior through two questions: does the person tend to act in a more direct or a more reserved way? And do they focus more on tasks or on people? The combination of answers gives the four styles.

How does each DISC style tend to communicate?

Everyone has a bit of each style, and behavior changes with context. A profile shows tendencies, and the most common ones are summarized here:

In practice, the most common team conflicts happen between opposite styles: people who want to decide fast and people who want more analysis, people who want to talk and people who only want the information.

How do you use DISC in a team?

DISC is most useful when the whole team knows its own profiles and each other's and uses that to agree on ways of working together. Some uses tend to work well.

In a leader's self-knowledge

Leaders understand how they react under pressure and how the team perceives them. A leader with a more dominant style, for example, may realize that the short replies meant to save time come across as indifference to part of the team. This is one of the stages of Ativme's Leadership School.

In communication agreements

Once people know the profiles, the team can agree on simple rules: how decisions will be communicated, how much detail each kind of information needs and which channel to use for what. This cuts much of the noise people call "a communication problem".

In feedback and difficult conversations

Adapting how feedback is delivered to the person's style makes it more likely the message will be heard. The content of the feedback stays the same; the way the conversation is run changes.

In project staffing

A team made only of similar profiles tends to have blind spots. Knowing the styles helps build groups that complement each other, with people who speed things up and people who double-check.

What are the most common mistakes with DISC?

The first is turning a profile into a label. Lines like "that's just how he is" close the conversation the tool is meant to open. A profile describes behavioral tendencies, and people adapt, learn and change.

Another mistake is using DISC as the only criterion to hire, promote or dismiss. Behavioral profiles do not measure technical skill or potential, and using them that way is unfair and risky. DISC is also not a clinical or in-depth personality test.

Then there is the assessment with no debrief. Sending a report by email with no conversation wastes the instrument. The value lies in a well-run debrief that helps people recognize their own pattern and decide what to do with it. That is why Ativme works with professionals certified in running assessments and debriefs.

DISC or Facet5: what's the difference?

Facet5 is another assessment tool used in people development, based on the Big Five model of personality. It describes personality in five factors called Will, Energy, Affection, Control and Emotionality. DISC is more direct and easier to remember, while Facet5 offers a more detailed reading of personality.

The two tools can coexist: DISC works very well as a shared language for the team, and Facet5 deepens leaders' self-knowledge. The Ativme team is certified in both.

How does DISC help build better teams?

When people understand that a colleague is acting from a different style instead of being difficult, many conflicts lose their force. That understanding makes room for trust and for psychological safety, which are the foundation of team development. For leaders, the next step is turning self-knowledge into practice, as we explain in our article on how to structure a leadership development program.