SSince 2022, utility giant Exelon has been using energy-based safety metrics to fundamentally transform the way it thinks and acts to protect workers.
But Mark Musser, Exelon’s senior director of performance evaluation, says his team faced a key challenge after launching the new ideas to encourage implementation. “One of the challenges we had was, ‘How are we going to practice what we launched? What tools will we arm our business with to strengthen the new security path we are taking?’ “
He adds: “We recognized that we needed to give people 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 was not going to help.
How to integrate energy-related workplace safety with a monitoring and measurement system that is 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 Association Community Practices online discussion held in Boulder, Colorado.
This discussion featured insights from three construction safety professionals from Entergy, major energy supplier Tennessee Valley Authority, and contractor Skanska, who shared how they are refocusing and retraining large numbers of personnel to understand and use the energy-based safety model.
A priority is to incorporate the Energy Wheel, a construct that empowers people to recognize potential dangers based on “high energy” triggers such as gravity, electricity and mechanical movement.
These components are often overlooked because they do not automatically alert workers and supervisors to a potentially serious hazard.
Matthew R. Hallowell, the research group’s founder and executive director, says that tools used in recent decades have successfully reduced minor injuries, but have not yielded the same results for serious injuries and fatalities, indicating that these “arise from different conditions and require a different approach.”
In a new book, Energy-Based Safety (CRC Press, September 2025), he notes that association researchers analyzed about 3.2 billion work hours and found that total recordable incident rate data is neither statistically significant nor adequate to focus on serious injuries and fatalities.
“This metric that we have been using was not predictive of future performance. It did not predict fatalities and statistically it was mostly random.” said Elif Oguz Erkal., Associate Director of Research and Strategy Security Group and Community Practices Discussion Host.
More construction employers, such as Granite Construction and Centuri, have adopted an energy-based approach as part of their safety programs.
Panelists from the Construction Safety Research Association share experiences with energy-based safety programs initiated at their companies. Image: Screenshot from the CSRA webinar
At Exelon, Musser said he and his colleagues started with the basics of how to define serious injury and death and energy-based safety. “How do you classify events?” he asked “This was the spearhead to start our revised security journey or change how we think differently about security.”
Exelon’s training also told team members what to look for. “We introduced something called an energy-based observation tool” that works with electronic devices, “which is what we use to capture and track data,” Musser said.
He emphasized that the better the security metric system shows how each team member is responsible for information, the faster they can change their behaviors.
Musser’s experience was echoed by Brian Karas, Skanska’s national environmental health and safety program director for construction.
“When the performance metrics about who is actually doing it [pre-task plans]”who’s completing them, who’s reviewing them, it was kind of hidden … we didn’t really get the same kind of improvement in billing,” he said. “But when that information was kind of scattered all over 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 group agreed: one dashboard rarely serves two masters.
“When we first built ours [safety] dashboards were what I call traditional [and based on] fiscal year to date [for] business planning,” noted Bob Spencer, senior program director for the Tennessee Valley Authority. “That’s not what works for half the business.”
TVA business plan and sides ‘Key puller’
Spencer envisioned TVA’s two key groups as part of the business plan and what he calls the “wrench-turner” side that wants to know what’s going on and doesn’t reset. To create an operational dashboard or database, he said, “we actually brought in boats [workers] and frontline supervisors to learn what they want to see.”
He continued: “When we get 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, the safety dashboard had been created based on the energy “reports” issued each morning to management, front-line supervisors and craft workers.
“We’re trying to feed them real-time data,” Spencer said, “primarily sightings, good catches, near misses.”
Skanska’s Karas indicated that he understood Spencer’s point about providing data metrics to all staff levels.
“As a veteran of someone who’s created and made a dashboard that nobody’s looked at,” Karas joked, he’s “realizing that there really are different audiences for data, and if you can cater your information to those different audiences, you’re going to get better uptake.”
The most satisfying employees to reach with data creation are those in the field, he says. “If you can make the data mean something to them to inform a decision they’re going to make that day, you’re not going to have a lot of trouble with people using it.”
Exelon’s Musser emphasized subcontractor training and onboarding, including a two-day formal onboarding process for any identified safety personnel or supervisors facing the field with direct safety responsibilities. The first day is for field supervisor general training; the second day is now energy based safety training for all staff.
Erkal noted that when it comes to implementing energy-based security, “There is no silver bullet.”
