FROID NR-1 / How it works
The corporate product organizes information about working conditions. It does not use clinical voice and face analysis to classify workers.
Describe the structure, activities, units, departments and headcount. Name those responsible for the project and for the technical assessment. Decide which breakdowns would be useful, without presuming that all of them can be disclosed.
Document the purpose of the campaign, the conditions of participation and the support channel for workers. Review the criteria and the risk matrix with the technical managers. Transparency must come before collection.
The questionnaire addresses working conditions. It must be contextualized with observation of the actual activity, dialogue, document analysis and other relevant sources. A survey on its own does not replace the whole assessment.
Access to aggregated results depends on the rules for closing, participation and protection of groups. “It was not possible to conclude” is different from “there is no risk”. Insufficient data must be recorded.
Gather the characterization of the work, hazards, exposed groups, criteria and assessment. The plan must identify what will be done, by whom, by when and how it will be followed up. The inventory and the AEP (ergonomic work analysis) documentation must reflect the technical assessment, not just the output of a form.
The organization carries out the measures and records evidence. Like a logbook, the history must make it possible to understand decisions and changes — not merely display the final result.
Comparisons between moments use consistent criteria and take uncertainty into account. An inconclusive result does not prove the absence of an effect; an observed difference, by itself, does not prove causality. The technical manager evaluates the need to correct the measures.
| The same for everyone | Changes at each company |
|---|---|
| The 13 dimensions and the items of the instrument | The structure of sites and departments |
| The minimum respondent floor | The support channel, which belongs to the employer |
| Nothing comes out while collection is open | The context of the questions by economic sector |
| The nine fields of the inventory | The grading matrix, if you already use one |
The instrument never changes between clients, and that is deliberate. If each company had its own, nothing would be comparable over time or between cohorts — and the proof of effectiveness, which depends on measuring the same thing twice, would cease to exist.
The employer measured, found risk, changed processes, measured again — and the index is still bad. It is the situation that frightens buyers most, and the one that produces the wrong question most often: “how do I make the number improve?”
The rule already answers. And the answer is not to explain it away: it is to correct the measure.
“Prevention measures must be corrected when the data obtained in monitoring indicates ineffectiveness in their performance.”
Brazilian rule NR-1, clause 1.5.5.3.2.1 — translated from the Portuguese originalThat clause is not isolated — it sits inside a mechanism the rule closes completely:
| Clause | What it determines | Effect when the second assessment fails |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5.4.4.5.3 | Probability must take into account the demands of the activity and the effectiveness of the prevention measures implemented. | The risk does not drop. It would only drop if the measure had worked — and it did not. The grading stays high. |
| 1.5.5.3.2 | The performance of the measures must be monitored in a planned way. | Monitoring is mandatory. It is what revealed the ineffectiveness — the second assessment is the rule working, not the opposite. |
| 1.5.5.3.2.1 | A measure whose monitoring indicates ineffectiveness must be corrected. | A new obligation is born: correct it. Repeating the same measure under another name does not correct anything. |
| 1.4.1, “g” | Hierarchy of controls: eliminate the risk factor; collective protection measures; administrative or work-organisation measures; and, last, personal protection. | Correcting normally means moving up one step. If a training course failed (administrative), the expected answer is not another training course — it is changing the organisation of work or eliminating the factor. |
| 1.5.5.2.2 | Measures must have a schedule, owners, forms of monitoring and verification of results. | The corrected measure enters a new action plan, with a deadline and a named owner. |
| 1.5.5.2.1.1 | The number of workers possibly affected raises the priority of the action. | A risk that resisted the first intervention and reaches many people moves up the queue, not down. |
| 1.5.4.4.6 “a” and “c” | Assessment is a continuous process, reviewed every two years — or sooner, among other triggers, after implementing measures (residual risks) and when inadequacies, insufficiencies or ineffectiveness are identified. | Failure brings the mandatory review forward. You cannot wait out the two-year cycle. |
| 1.5.7.3.2 and 1.5.7.3.3.1 | Risk inventory with the nine fields, and history kept for 20 years. | The measure that failed and the correction adopted stay on the record. That is memory, and memory is what inspectors and courts read. |
In practical order, when the second assessment fails:
FROID handles this in the calculation engine, not in the wording of the report: a measure classified as ineffective grants no reduction of probability in the grading. It cannot lower the risk on paper while it fails in practice. And the direction of an effect is only declared after it survives the noise of its own cohort, at a 95% confidence interval — so that “improved” means improved, and not sampling variation.
The clauses above are cited from the text of the Brazilian rule NR-1 as amended by Ministerial Order MTE no. 1,419/2024, and translated from the Portuguese; the wording that carries legal weight is the Portuguese one. This page describes the procedure set out in that rule and does not constitute legal advice: analysis of the specific case belongs to the organisation's counsel.
The two gates that decide it — anonymity and representativeness — are explained in full in When the data is not enough, including what happens to a breakdown that does not clear them.
A result is only released above a respondent floor, which is why small companies sometimes cannot get a result by department. It is worth finding out before signing, not after.
In Brazil, exemption from preparing a PGR depends on the conditions of NR-1, not company size alone. Confirm eligibility with your occupational safety adviser. The FROID ergonomic assessment workflow is independent of questionnaire result publication.
Check my company's readiness Ask a question about the rule
This is the first question any CIPA (workplace accident prevention committee), any union and any worker about to report harassment will ask. The answer is not a promise of conduct — it is a property of the architecture, and it fits into four verifiable facts.
To dispatch the invitations, your company receives the pairing between payroll number and link. FROID does not keep that pairing. On our side there is only a pseudonym, derived from the payroll number by HMAC-SHA256 with a key held on the server — without it, nobody can rebuild the table from a payroll list they already hold. Alone, neither party can link person to answer.
The answer tables carry no read policy, and the database role the application uses has had every privilege over them revoked. It can write an answer and it can request an aggregate — it cannot read one back. The only way out is a function that sums the results and applies the cohort floor inside the SQL itself, so the guarantee survives even a programming error in the layer above.
During collection a link exists between the invitation and the answer — it is what prevents the same link from being used twice. The moment the campaign is closed, and in the same commit, that link is erased from the database. From then on the data that would allow the pairing ceases to exist: there is nothing to recover, not even under a court order, because there is nothing to hand over. Every closing records in the audit trail how many links were severed.
No breakdown is published below the cohort floor, and insufficient breakdowns are declared insufficient rather than disappearing from the screen — suppressing hides, declaring documents. Results are also not released during collection, because the difference between two moments would reveal the answer of whoever came in between.
The Guide to information on Work-Related Psychosocial Risk Factors provides this listing of hazards and their possible consequences. It is indicative and not exhaustive: inspection assesses the coherence of the identification process, not literal adherence to the list. Your company may add hazards specific to its sector and set aside those that do not apply, provided it documents the technical justification.
| Hazard (psychosocial risk factor) | Possible injury or health condition |
|---|---|
| Work management and organization | |
| Poor management of organizational change | Mental disorder; WMSD |
| Low role/function clarity | Mental disorder |
| Low rewards and recognition | Mental disorder |
| Lack of support/assistance at work | Mental disorder |
| Low control at work / lack of autonomy | Mental disorder; WMSD |
| Low organizational justice | Mental disorder |
| Workload and demand | |
| Excessive work demands (overload) | Mental disorder; WMSD |
| Low work demand (underload) | Mental disorder |
| Relationships and violence | |
| Harassment of any kind at work | Mental disorder |
| Violent or traumatic events | Mental disorder |
| Poor relationships in the workplace | Mental disorder |
| Environment and work arrangement | |
| Remote and isolated work | Mental disorder; fatigue |
| Work under conditions of difficult communication | Mental disorder |
Remote, hybrid and teleworking arrangements are part of the assessment. The company adapts its strategy to the context — it does not exclude these workers.
