He adds: "We recognized that we need to give folks a mechanism to help practice what they had learned.” 

It was clear to Musser and others going down the energy-based safety road that relying on lagging indicators of a total recordable incident rate would not help.

How to integrate energy-related work safety with a tracking and measurement system not based on the total recordable incident rate, long the standard measure for federal and countless other safety programs, was the focus of a recent Construction Safety Research Alliance online community practice discussion. 

That discussion featured insights from three construction safety professionals from Exelon, major energy provider Tennessee Valley Authority and contractor Skanska. They shared how they refocus and retrain large numbers of staff to understand and use the energy-based safety model.

A priority is incorporating the Energy Wheel, a construct that trains people to recognize potential hazards based on “high energy” triggers such as gravity, electricity and mechanical movement. 

These components are often overlooked because they don't automatically alert workers and supervisors to potential serious danger.

Matthew R. Hallowell, CSRA's research group founder and executive director, says tools used in past decades successfully reduced minor injuries but have not delivered the same results for serious injuries and fatalities, signaling that these "arise from different conditions and require a distinct approach.”

In a new book, Energy-Based Safety (CRC Press, September 2025), he notes that association researchers analyzed about 3.2 trillion worker-hours of data and found that total recordable incident rate data is not statistically meaningful nor suited for focus on serious injuries and fatalities.

“This metric that we have been using was not predictive of future performance. It didn't predict fatalities and it was statistically mostly random.” said Elif Erkal, safety group associate director of research and strategy and community practice discussion host.

Other construction employers, such as Granite Construction and Centuri, have embraced an energy-based approach as part of their safety programs.

Construction Safety Research Alliance panelists share experiences with energy-based safety programs started at their companies. Image: Screenshot from CSRA webinar

At Exelon, Musser said he and his colleagues began with the basics of how to define a serious injury and fatality and energy-based safety. “How do you classify events?” he asked. “That was the spearhead to starting our revised safety journey or changing how we think differently about safety.”

Exelon's training also instructed team members in what to look for. “We introduced something called an energy-based observation tool” operated on electronic devices, “which is what we use to capture and track data,” Musser said.

He emphasized that the better the safety metric system shows how each team member is responsible for the information, the faster their behaviors can change.

Musser’s experience was echoed by Brian Karas, Skanska national environmental health and safety program director for building.

“When performance metrics about who is actually doing [pre-task plans], who is completing them, who’s reviewing them, was kind of hidden … we didn’t really get the same sort of turnover improvement,” he said. "But when that information was kind of littered all over the place where they log in, it’s visible who’s doing what—we saw very dramatic changes in performance just by putting the right information in the right place.”

The panel agreed: one information dashboard rarely serves two masters. 

“When we first built our [safety] dashboards they were what I call traditional [and based on] fiscal year to date [for] business planning," noted Bob Spencer. senior Tennessee Valley Authority program manager.  "That is not what works for half the company,” 

TVA's Business Plan and 'Wrench-Turner' Sides

Spencer envisioned TVA’s two key groups as a business plan side and what he calls the “wrench-turner” side that wants to know what's going on and it doesn't reset.” To create an operational database or dashboard, he said, “we actually brought in craft [workers] and frontline supervisors to learn what they want to see.”

He continued, “When we drive the injuries down to very low, what do you look at? That's what we're starting to do now."

With TVA in its typical outage season now, the safety dashboard had been set up based on energy "reports out" each morning to management, frontline supervisors and craft workers. 

"We are trying to feed them real time-data," said Spencer, "mostly on observations, good catches, near-misses." 

Skanska's Karas indicated that he understood Spencer's point about supplying data metrics to all levels of personnel.

“As a veteran of someone who's created and made a dashboard that no one has looked at," Karas joked that he is "realizing there really are different audiences for data, and if you can cater your information to those different audiences, you're going to get better buy-in."

The most satisfying employees to reach with data creation are those in the field, he says. "If you can have the data actually mean something to them to inform a decision they're going to make that day, you're not going to have a lot of problems with people using it.”

Exelon's Musser emphasized coaching and subcontractor integration, including a formal two-day onboarding process for any identified safety staffer or supervisor who is field-facing with direct safety responsibilities. Day one  is for general field supervisor training; day two is now the energy-based safety training for all staff.

Erkal noted that as far as implementing energy-based safety, “There is no silver bullet.”