How Unilever LATAM Kept Safety Coherent Across 19 Countries in 2 Years

During Andreza Araujo's Unilever LATAM tenure, the operating scope covered 19 countries, 30,000 employees, 34 factories, and more than 60 distribution centers. That scale matters because a safety rule that looks clear in a regional deck can fracture in the field, where one site treats it as a form and another treats it as a decision.

The case is simple to state and hard to execute. The region did not need one local template for every country. It needed a common way to decide, which is different from asking every site to sound the same.

Each month without a shared decision system gives local exception handling more room to drift, while the regional team gets cleaner reports, not safer work.

Initial scenario: a region that looked aligned on paper

As Andreza Araujo argues in Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice, culture appears in repeated choices, not in the slogans that sit on a wall. In a 19-country region, that matters because repetition is what survives a shift change, a country change, or a new plant leader.

In A Ilusão da Conformidade, Andreza Araujo warns that a polished report can coexist with weak field control, which is exactly the trap that appears when each country reports under one brand but executes with different thresholds for action.

The starting problem was not language alone. It was decision drift, where the same risk produced different responses depending on who was present, whose plant it was, and how much production pressure sat on the shift. A region can look aligned in a monthly review and still be fragmented where the work actually happens.

Decision: what had to become non-negotiable

The regional team decided that five things could not vary: the question asked at the point of risk, the evidence required before closing an issue, the person who could accept the residual exposure, the cadence of review, and the rule for escalation.

Across 25+ years leading EHS at multinationals, Andreza Araujo has seen that scale fails when leaders confuse flexibility with exception, because local adaptation belongs in the form, while the threshold for action must stay fixed. That distinction matters, which is why Make The Difference: Be a Leader in Health & Safety fits this case better than a generic management book.

Execution: how the regional cadence worked

The weekly cadence asked the same questions everywhere, even though each site used local language and local examples. A plant in Mexico could answer in Spanish, a site in Colombia could answer in its own wording, and the region could still compare the underlying decision because the evidence and threshold stayed constant.

A site could describe the issue in its own terms, but it had to answer the same five questions: what changed, which control weakened, who owns the fix, when it is due, and what stops the work if the fix does not happen. That structure created a common operating language whose purpose was decision quality, not document volume.

The weekly meeting also worked because it separated local adaptation from local permission. A country could choose the form of the check, but it could not choose a lighter standard for escalation, which is where many regional programs lose control.

Measured result: what changed in practice

The measurable result was coherence at scale, which means the region could hold one safety logic across 19 countries, 30,000 employees, 34 factories, and 60+ distribution centers without pretending that every local condition was the same. That is a real operational result because it changes how leaders decide, how sites escalate, and how exceptions are reviewed.

The case study block captures the operating size, because the point is not a single accident number. The point is that the regional team could now see safety as one decision system rather than 19 unrelated stories. The comparison article on survey, maturity, and field evidence shows why that distinction matters.

Three lessons leaders can reuse

Those lessons are consistent with Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice, because the book treats culture as a sequence of repeated choices. They also fit A Ilusão da Conformidade, which argues that compliance can look complete while the workplace still depends on weak habits and quiet exceptions.

What to apply in your operation

If you lead a multi-site operation, start with one decision family, such as critical control verification or contractor authorization. Do not begin with a broad corporate rewrite, because the first test should be small enough to learn from and strict enough to matter.

1. Choose one family of decisions that creates real field exposure.
2. Write the three to five questions that must be answered before work continues.
3. Define one field evidence for each question, then make it visible.
4. Test the same decision line in two sites for 30 days.
5. Review the exceptions, close the gaps, and keep the threshold stable.

For a starting point, compare your current state with Safety Culture Diagnosis: 250-Company Case, which separates perception from field evidence. If you need a cleaner read on the line between survey data and field proof, the article on survey, maturity, and field evidence is the right companion.

Conclusion

Unilever LATAM is a useful case because it shows that regional scale does not force cultural dilution. It forces discipline about what can vary and what cannot, which is the difference between local adaptation and drift.

If your region has grown faster than its decision system, start with a safety culture diagnosis and use Safety Culture: From Theory to Practice and Make The Difference: Be a Leader in Health & Safety as the baseline reading. You can begin at Andreza Araujo's store or Andreza Araujo's site.