How a 19-Country Operation Cut 5 Decision Gaps in 90 Days

A regional safety system can look complete and still fail when one standard meets 19 different decision habits. During Andreza Araujo's Unilever LATAM tenure across 19 countries, 30,000 employees, 34 factories and more than 60 distribution centers, the hard task was not to write more rules. It was to keep one rule alive without flattening local reality.

That is the real test of safety leadership in a complex region. A headquarters memo can sound precise, yet the same rule can turn into five different actions once it reaches a country manager, a plant leader, a contractor interface, a shift handover and a production line that is already behind schedule. As Andreza Araujo argues in Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice, culture appears in repeated decisions, not in slogans or policy binders.

This article is for regional EHS leaders, plant directors, and executive teams that need one safety language across many sites. It also connects to leadership cadence, because a region only stays coherent when the review rhythm is strong enough to make the same risk visible in the same way, week after week.

Why one standard was not enough

The first problem in a multi-country operation is usually not a missing standard. Most multinational companies already have policies, audit tools, training modules, and incident systems. The problem is that the standard arrives in a world that is not standardized. Languages differ, labor models differ, contractor maturity differs, legal expectations differ, and the production pressure on each local leader is different enough to change the decision.

Across 25+ years leading EHS at multinationals, Andreza Araujo has seen that safety falls apart when leaders treat a regional rule as if it could execute itself. It cannot. The rule has to survive translation into planning, supervision, maintenance, escalation, and budget choices. If those choices are left to chance, the company gets paper consistency and field inconsistency, which is exactly how a region becomes hard to govern.

The useful question is therefore not, "Do we have the standard?" The useful question is, "Do local leaders make the same safety decision when the same risk appears?" That is the point at which regional governance stops being an administrative exercise and becomes a control system.

Decision gap 1: separate the non-negotiable from the adaptable

The first decision gap is the temptation to let every country interpret the standard freely. That sounds respectful, and sometimes it is, but the respect becomes dangerous when the region quietly allows each site to redefine what a critical control means. The better design separates the non-negotiable from the adaptable. The risk threshold, the required control, the escalation rule, the field evidence standard, and the leadership review rhythm stay fixed. Language, meeting format, training style, and local support can adapt.

This distinction matters because a safety standard is not a decoration. It is a decision boundary. If a country can decide that a fatality-potential exposure no longer needs the same verification that every other country uses, the region no longer has one safety system. It has a loose federation of habits.

Andreza Araujo's work in Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice is useful here because it treats culture as what people do repeatedly under pressure. When the pressure rises, the non-negotiable has to remain visible. If it disappears, the operating model was too vague from the start.

Decision gap 2: make escalation a rule, not a favor

The second decision gap appears when local leaders decide that escalation depends on judgment rather than on a trigger. That usually feels mature at first, because it seems to give managers autonomy. In practice, it gives them too much room to keep bad news local. A serious control failure should not travel upward because somebody feels comfortable. It should travel upward because the rule says it must.

This is where regional safety leadership becomes visible. If a critical control fails, if a high-severity near miss appears, or if a contractor refuses the required control, the issue should move by design, not by personal style. That principle connects directly to board safety oversight, because directors need a system that pushes serious risk upward before the event does it for them.

James Reason's latent failure logic helps explain why this matters. The event that finally shows up in the incident log is usually the last visible layer of a much longer chain. If escalation is delayed at the site level, the chain grows longer, the signal gets weaker, and the region learns too late. In more than 250 cultural-transformation projects supported by Andreza Araujo's team, this pattern repeats with frustrating consistency.

Decision gap 3: require field proof before acceptance

The third decision gap is the gap between the document and the work. A regional team can approve a closeout, mark an audit item green, and circulate a polished report while the control in the field is still weak, inaccessible, or not understood by the people who have to use it. That is why field proof has to sit above the file. A signed form is not enough if the worksite cannot show the control in action.

That discipline is the same one that drives Gemba walk safety. The walk is not a courtesy visit. It is a test of whether the declared control survived the real job. If the answer lives only in the report, the region is managing confidence, not risk.

During Andreza Araujo's PepsiCo South America tenure, the documented result was a 50 percent reduction in accident ratio in six months. The transferable lesson is not that every region will produce the same number on the same timeline. The transferable lesson is that leadership decisions became visible in the field, and that field visibility changed what could be accepted as good enough.

Decision gap 4: keep local variation inside guardrails

The fourth decision gap appears when leaders confuse empathy with dilution. Local reality does matter. A country may need a different training format, a different language, a different supplier path, or a different meeting cadence. What it should not need is a different control threshold. The region must help local teams reach the same result, not lower the result until the weakest site can meet it.

That is why support is not the same as exception. Translation, coaching, supplier development, supervisor training, and temporary expert review are all valid support moves. Lowering the standard is not. A region that lowers the standard for mature or immature sites alike eventually creates two classes of protection, and that is how governance loses trust.

Andreza Araujo's Safety Culture Diagnosis fits here because diagnosis asks what leaders reward, what supervisors tolerate, what workers believe will happen when they speak, and what evidence proves that the control survives pressure. A region that wants local adaptation without drift needs that diagnostic habit, not just a policy library.

Decision gap 5: use the same review questions everywhere

The fifth decision gap is the absence of one review language. If every country uses a different question set, the region cannot compare risk honestly. One site talks about training hours, another talks about audit scores, a third talks about incidents, and nobody asks the same five questions about the same high-risk work. The result is reporting without comparability.

The regional review should be boring in the best possible way. What is the risk. What is the required control. Who owns the decision. What field proof shows it works. What escalation happens if the control is missing. If a country leader cannot answer those questions in the same order as every other leader, the region does not yet have one operating language.

This is also where the board and the field need a shared lens. Safety culture diagnosis helps the region compare declared and lived practice, while the leadership review makes sure that comparison reaches the next decision, not just the next slide deck.

Measured result: coherence across 19 countries

The measurable fact in this case is scale. One regional EHS role had to work across 19 countries, 30,000 employees, 34 factories, and more than 60 distribution centers. That scale changes the problem. The goal is no longer to prove that a single site can improve. The goal is to make the same serious risk trigger the same seriousness everywhere.

The result, in practical terms, was coherence. The region did not need identical forms, and it did not need identical local practices. It needed the same safety decision when the same risk appeared. That is the real output of regional governance. When a contractor issue, a machine guarding gap, or a permit problem gets the same level of attention in every country, the region becomes easier to trust.

The comparison below shows the shift.

This kind of coherence is what later allowed the same leadership discipline to show up in other verified outcomes, including the PepsiCo South America result where accident ratio fell 50 percent in six months. The number matters, but the governance behind the number matters more.

What to apply in 30 days

Start with one high-risk decision that appears in every country, such as permit-to-work, contractor control, machine guarding, or critical action escalation. Write the non-negotiables on one page, then ask each country to show how the standard becomes a real field decision. The objective is not to make every site identical. The objective is to make every site comparable where risk is concerned.

Next, test three things. First, ask whether local leaders can name the control without reading a script. Second, ask whether field proof exists in the worksite, not only in the report. Third, ask whether escalation happens because the rule says so or because a leader felt like pushing it upward. That short test tells you whether the region has governance or only paperwork.

If the region needs a deeper route, start with Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice and Safety Culture Diagnosis. The first book explains why repeated decisions create culture. The second gives the diagnostic structure for finding where declared safety and lived safety diverge. For leaders ready to apply that at scale, Andreza Araujo's broader body of work and books and tools are the practical starting point.

FAQ

What is regional safety governance?

Regional safety governance is the system that decides which safety rules stay fixed across countries, how local sites adapt execution, who owns the decision, and when a serious risk must be escalated. It is stronger than a document distribution process because it tracks control, evidence, and authority.

Why does local adaptation become dangerous?

Local adaptation becomes dangerous when it changes the control instead of only changing the format. A country can translate the rule, change the meeting style, or adjust the support model, but it should not change the threshold that protects people from serious harm.

What should stay non-negotiable across a region?

The risk threshold, the required control, the escalation rule, the field evidence standard, and the leadership review rhythm should stay non-negotiable. Those five items keep the region from becoming a collection of personal interpretations.

Which Andreza Araujo resource fits a multi-country operation?

Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice fits because it explains how repeated decisions build culture. Safety Culture Diagnosis fits because it helps leaders compare declared systems with lived practice across sites, languages, and maturity levels.

What should a regional leader do first?

Pick one high-risk decision that exists in every country, write the non-negotiables on one page, test the field evidence in three sites, and define the escalation trigger. That gives the region one decision language before it tries to scale anything else.

If one country can reinterpret the control, the region does not yet have one safety system. It has one document and many decisions. The fix is to make the field proof, the escalation rule, and the control threshold the same everywhere that serious risk can appear.

Safety is about coming home, and a regional system only earns that promise when it protects people with the same seriousness in every country. If your team needs help turning one standard into one decision language, start with Andreza Araujo's books and tools and then move into a safety culture diagnostic with Andreza Araujo.