Nominations are now open for the SCSA Awards. Nominate your safety professional or company today.
Nominations are now open for the SCSA Awards. Nominate your safety professional or company today.
You have a well-established safety program that includes training, policies, procedures and regular audits. You’re checking all the boxes and doing all you think can be done to prevent incidents. Yet serious injuries and fatalities can still occur.
To strengthen your efforts and create safer worksites, you need to take a different approach. That approach focuses on identifying and controlling the hazards with the greatest potential to cause serious harm.
It isn’t about doing more, it’s about bringing a different focus to your efforts. Are you thinking about hazards in the right way?
Energy-based safety defines all hazards as sources of energy with the potential to cause harm if people come into contact with them. Rather than looking only at the task or hazard, it asks you to see, prioritize and control the energy behind it.
Think of moving equipment, suspended loads, electricity, pressure, temperature, gravity and mechanical energy. All have the potential to cause serious harm.
The Energy Wheel is a practical tool that prompts you to recognize energy sources you might otherwise overlook. It’s a visual aid that illustrates ten major types of energy that may be present on your site. According to Safety Function, it can boost hazard recognition by up to 30 per cent.
This goes beyond asking what hazards are present. It makes you see what energy could seriously hurt someone and ask how do you control it.
Here is where you can advance from hazard recognition to prevention of serious injuries and fatalities (SIF). Energy-based safety looks at construction environments through a lens to consistently identify all sources of energy that can potentially harm workers.
Educator and researcher Dr. Steven Ayer says, “Energy-based safety leverages scientific principles to help people identify all potential hazards, including those that are often missed through traditional safety planning efforts. It is laser-focused on SIF prevention through the identification of high-energy hazards and controls.”
He adds that the approach helps leaders to not only identify hazards, but also prioritize those that are high-energy and have a high likelihood of causing a serious injury or fatality.
Naming a hazard isn’t the same as truly understanding the consequences it can have. Understanding isn’t the same as having an effective control in place to stop people from being seriously harmed.
Your safety management system may reduce incidents, but still leave your sites at risk for causing serious injuries. By concentrating on where the greatest potential for serious harm exists, you can direct your strongest attention to ensuring those hazards are controlled.
“We all make mistakes. The question is not if, it is when these mistakes will occur,” Ayer says. “If high-energy hazards miss controls to prevent or hinder this transfer of energy to workers, when mistakes happen, the impacts are likely to be far more severe.”
Ayer acknowledges that high energy is often required for work to get done. “While eliminating high-energy hazards would be ideal, it’s not often practical.” That’s why you need to identify those hazards and prioritize controlling them to keep your workers safe.
The value of energy-based safety isn’t in being familiar with the concept. It’s in changing what happens when work is planned and performed on your sites.
For example, a supervisor doesn’t simply identify a suspended load as a hazard. They consider the energy involved, the potential consequence if it’s released, who could be exposed, whether the work can be planned to eliminate exposure and which critical controls are actually in place to protect people from harm.
Ayer shares three questions for construction leaders to ask on every site:
This is a mindset shift from “did we follow procedures” to “are workers actually protected from hazardous energy?”
When you are already doing a lot around safety, but serious injuries still happen, energy-based safety offers a different focus. Looking at the energy sources on your sites, prioritizing the most serious forms and ensuring effective controls are in place helps to minimize the most serious risks.
Ayer works with construction professionals to explore how energy-based safety research and tools like High Energy Control Assessments (HECA) can inform practical decisions on their sites and change the entire conversation around serious injury prevention.
On September 17, 2026 he joins the Saskatchewan Construction Safety Association in Regina to lead a workshop for safety professionals, supervisors and auditors to experience this approach in a hands-on session. He highlights the kinds of things that people generally miss during traditional hazard assessments and illustrates the practical application of HECA in real-world situations.
Saskatchewan construction owners, executives, senior operational leaders and industry partners also have a special opportunity to attend a leadership dinner that evening. Ayer’s keynote presentation explores how energy-based thinking can be applied to construction and truly make a difference in shaping the future of serious injury prevention.
To learn more and register, see Leadership Events