134: SIF Prevention and High Energy Control Assessments

Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded November 19th, 2025. My name is Jill James, HS i's Chief Safety Officer, and my guest today is Dr. Elif Al. She is the Associate Director of research and Strategy at the Construction Safety Research Alliance at the University of Colorado Boulder. She leads collaborative multidisciplinary research and drives the dissemination of knowledge to advance serious injury and fatality or sifts, as we call them, prevention. With a background in civil engineering, consulting, construction management, and academic research, Dr. Elif specializes in safety, performance measurement, predictive analytics, and project risk management. Her work centers on translating research into practical strategies that strengthen safety performance, particularly within the construction and utility sectors. I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Elif present some of her work at the 2025 National Safety Congress and Expo in Colorado, which is where I learned about her work. Dr. Elie joins us today from Colorado. Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to be here.

Elif Erkal:

Of course. Thank you.

Jill James:

So you're a civil engineer, I think. Do you have two PhDs? You have?

Elif Erkal:

Oh, I only have one

Jill James:

Og. Okay. It would be way too much. Okay. Alright. Civil engineer, and somehow you found your way into safety. What is your origin story? How did you make your way here?

Elif Erkal:

It has been a weird, I think, journey that is not very typical. I'm actually coming from construction industry and from site basically. I was trained as a civil engineer, started as a structural engineer all the way back in Turkey. My entire family is construction people, so I'm no stranger to heavy civil work. You grew up in it? Yeah, I basically grew up in it. My first big job was as a contracts manager in an oil and gas refinery. It was really large project. I stayed there for about three years, and then at the end I was a little bit worried about construction because we were doing the same things over and over again expecting different results and especially safety. Everybody talked about it whenever there was a problem. So nobody really liked safety because their existence meant there's a problem and then they weren't there when everything is going well and everybody's getting paid in great bonuses and stuff. So really didn't think about safety much then. But I wanted to improve construction systems. We had all of this technology. There's Toyotas of the world, there's Teslas of the world, there's so much going on. And then I was thinking construction is kind of archaic. We've been doing things the same way for forever. So I figured I'd go and do something more analytical, more systems, risk-based research. So I went to Carnegie Mellon, actually originally did a lot with organizational learning network analytics, really getting to the core of how we do business in construction, how do we organize ourselves. And then in the meantime, they kind of poached me into University of Colorado Boulder, Keith Molinar. I've had a call with him in a construction container one day, and then he mainly specializes in risk. And right now he's a dean of our school, so he's amazing. He introduced me to Matthew Hollowell, who was my research advisor, PhD advisor, and then kind of got me into this safety world and really gave me the opportunity to, did do something related to both risk data and really will have an impact on people's lives because we focus on serious injury and fatality elimination. So I think he did change my life there. He taught me that safety professionals don't only come in when there's something wrong, and he told me, you're a civil engineer. If you cannot prevent this before it happens, you failed. This is not, there's a lot of luck based thinking. There's a lot of culture, but that's not what I focused on. I was a through and through civil engineer, I believed in risk and that we can control risk. So that's kind of the opportunity I got with my PhD and continue to work. So that's my origin story.

Jill James:

That's good. That's good. For anyone who's listening who's maybe not familiar with the Construction Safety Research Alliance at Boulder, can you give a big picture of what you all do there?

Elif Erkal:

Oh my. Yes, absolutely. How did I miss that? In my origin story, that's why Tion Construction Safety Research Alliance, CSRA, is such a unique organization that I have the opportunity and privilege to be a part of. Still, we are housed in the University of Colorado Boulder, but we do research that is very much embedded in practice. So we perform like a research lab. We do have PhDs who lead research projects, but for every single research project we do, that lasts about two years. We build a team of 30 industry professionals, and then these industry professionals come to Boulder four times a year to do the research side by side with the academics. So it's a true collaboration between academia and industry. Industry brings in the how are we going to use it? Is it going to have an impact on serious injury and fatality prevention part? And then academics bring that rigor of data collection and empirical data design so that whatever we're saying, it is grounded in peer reviewed research. And right now we have about 120 members over there that they are sending their volunteering actually their time to be able to do this very impactful work. So we're quite unique as an organization, I would say.

Jill James:

Yeah, you really are. And you have a reoccurring group that gets together. Is it monthly? I know there's an online setting that

Elif Erkal:

Yes. Can you talk about that? Yeah, talk about that too. Of course. Oh, I'm glad that you know about it.

Jill James:

I'm signed up for it.

Elif Erkal:

That's amazing. So we have an open, free to attend call, like a webinar every month. It lasts about an hour and every year we change our theme this year always about research, of course. So the main purpose is research communication to the broader audience of the world. So we have a lot of international listeners as well. But this year we brought practitioners that are like three or four and built some panels. And then for every research topic we discussed, we discussed about how it can be implemented, what are the challenges and what are the next steps? And for people who didn't know about this research, how can they get up to speed just by examples from practice, from practitioner to practitioner, and then researchers behave as more like facilitators.

Jill James:

Wonderful.

Elif Erkal:

Very interesting. You can sign up on our website. Actually, shameless plug here.

Jill James:

No, absolutely. I was just going to ask that. And we'll have Emily, our producer, put a link. I mean, you have a really beautiful landing page that has so much of the research with all of the different topics that you're researching on it. And so we'll make sure we get that landing page in the show notes. And then from the landing page, you can sign up for the monthly webinars. Is that, I think that's how I

Elif Erkal:

Phrase it. Yeah. There's a community of practices tab. And the other thing, actually recently, we had our safety summit in Boulder, and I really hope, Jill, that you can come, maybe one of these,

Jill James:

Oh, I'd love it

Elif Erkal:

Times. But every year in November, we have this really big report out that is also virtually shared, but in person event. And in that event, we recently announced that, well, our new initiatives for research to practice efforts. So now we have an associate director, Luke Bley, if he's around listening is a shout out. He has this onerous job of turning our research into digestible bits and a flow that will make sense for the practitioner so that we can communicate and disseminate knowledge better. So we recognize that our research had a lot of impact and we keep producing it, but the industry is not able to digest it as fast as we can produce. So we're now really focusing on, okay, how do we dig deeper and how do we actually make it easier, more relevant for the practitioner?

Jill James:

Yeah, that makes sense. I believe I first learned about the research alliance at NSC conference, I think it was a couple of years ago. And one of the focus areas that I heard from one of your colleagues, I believe, was on suicide prevention in the construction trades.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah, probably Sid.

Jill James:

Yes, it was Sid Superstar. It was Sid. Yeah, it was. And so for those of you who are listening know that the alliance is doing research on so many different topics that impact the construction and the utilities industries. It's just really beautiful work that you're doing

Elif Erkal:

There. And honestly, we're not that big of a team. There's maha, there's Sid Bandari, there's Luke Boley, and there's our beautiful operations manager, Eileen. And that's about it. We are a small team.

Jill James:

Wow. But you have all of these people that are, as you said, volunteering their time to contribute.

Elif Erkal:

Yes. And more importantly, we have our graduate students. Graduate students are the main engine behind our research because they do the research. They're the ones who collect the data, write the papers. We're acting as advisors, but they deserve all the credit. And of course, our collaborators both in the United States and over there in Australia, we have RMIT as a collaborator, for example, and bunch of very established academics who also contribute to our research. So it is truly a team effort, I would say.

Jill James:

Wonderful, wonderful. Well, I know one of the things that you wanted to talk about today and focus on is risk prevention and hazard identification and what your beliefs are around that, what the research is telling you, what can be done, what needs to change. I don't know where to start with that, but I'm just setting that, I'm setting that on the table for you to run with as the expert in the room.

Elif Erkal:

Of course. So as you know, CSRA does a lot of different kinds of research. We have research on mental health culture change. And honestly, as a civil engineer, I don't know much about culture. I'm one of those analytical minds. If it's not in numbers, I'm a little confused.

Jill James:

Fair.

Elif Erkal:

Most of my research is based in hazard recognition. How do we measure safety? And when I started working with Matt Hollowell, he was already doing this research related to invalidity of TRIR. And then that was kind of life-changing for me because you see, I'm coming from a construction management background, and then my schedule is in numbers, my budget is in numbers, even my quality is in numbers and safety's kind of there. Also, there's a number, and I was one of those people who thought, okay, injury rates are the safety numbers. They are, they show us how safe we are.

Jill James:

Nobody

Elif Erkal:

Didn't think about it twice.

Jill James:

Yeah. And I just want to back up for a second to repeat what you said it was that you had learned someone was working on the non validity of TIR. Sorry, I'm badly cold and I can't get Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm having a hard time with my words and battling a stuffy nose today. Yes. So, okay. Yes. Continue. In case anyone did hear that piece, like what? Invalid? Yes. Okay. Please keep going.

Elif Erkal:

Yes. I cannot say it anymore. I'll say it one more.

Elif Erkal:

So

Elif Erkal:

In validity of TAR, go to Google, write it down. There's a paper free to access peer reviewed on A SSP journal, I believe PSJ. And it is truly, you got to stop and think about this. So there's a lot of, you may be a CEO board member, safety director, safety manager, safety person, practitioner, whoever you are, the metrics you were using for the 50 years from boardroom to lunchroom, total recordable injury rates are invalid,

Jill James:

Say, more.

Elif Erkal:

They analyze 3.2 trillion data points. It's like 3.2 trillion man hours of data. And then they looked at the statistical relationships and they've seen that past TRIR doesn't predict future TRIR. Most importantly, they saw TRIR doesn't predict fatalities, which is our purpose, eliminating SIFs. And it is almost completely random. So this statistical randomness issue is big, big problem. My PhD is in predictive analytics, and the first task I was given is that, okay, build a predictive analytics framework. So then my question was, what am I going to predict?

Elif Erkal:

The answer from the general environment was TRIR. And then MEWELL comes with this paper saying that, nope, nope, it actually does not predict future performance.

Jill James:

Dang.

Elif Erkal:

So as you can imagine, a leaf is pretty sad at this point.

Jill James:

What am I doing here?

Elif Erkal:

But it does make sense because TIR is very limited,

Elif Erkal:

And

Elif Erkal:

Not only because it's statistically unstable over short periods of time, but it is also not very contextual. You can imagine two inch cut to the finger is weighted equally as a fatality. So you are looking at a TIR of 0.5, but you don't know if they are all medical cases or they're all serious injuries. So no contextuality captured not very useful for CIF prevention, and of course very reactive, but whatever you captured last month, stayed in last month. This month is a whole new month. And safety systems don't change that fast. I understand that, but it's really not related to the present. What is our safety performance today. That question was not answered. So going back to,

Jill James:

Oh yeah, go ahead. Yes, please. No, no, I was just going to, I am probably jumping ahead. So right. So how do you bring it to the future? And I have a feeling that's what you're going to talk

Elif Erkal:

About. Yeah, that's what I was going for. We need to bring it back to the present tense and how do we do it? Well, the one idea was leading indicators, but leading indicators, as you know, there are things like safety practices. How many pre-job meetings did you have?

Jill James:

How many

Elif Erkal:

Drug tests? You had, metrics that are related to the safety performance, the things that you do in the name of safety. But I was thinking it's a little bit too much into the future because they are the things that you do, but they don't have that sense of urgency. It doesn't really tell you what your safety performance today is. It's just telling you what you do for safety. And the assumption is that if you do these things well, you're going to improve your safety performance. It is indirectly related, but it's not exactly what I was looking for. So then the idea come about this new definition of safety, we thought, okay, safety was defined as absence of injuries. So we designed these injury metrics and we counted the injuries. And that's kind of how we thought about safety before. Now, safety to whole nego will tell you

Elif Erkal:

That

Elif Erkal:

Safety is presence of safeguards. Now, if safety is presence of safeguards, we can actually measure the presence of safeguards and we don't.

Jill James:

Okay. Okay. That makes sense.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah. And then this idea of high energy control assessments came up as it is being told these days. It caught like wildfire. And the reason being is it is a systematic observation program, not like a hundred page observation program, but a simple task of going out there and looking at what is going to kill me, stuff that kills me, high energy hazards as we call them, and looking for controls that will counter those hazards if something were to go wrong. And a systematic review of this in real time gave us tons of data about the safety system and operational interface itself. It included hazard recognition, it included risk identification, it included aggregate results of what direct controls are good and what direct controls are missing and why. Well, the why part is still in work, but the monitoring capacity and the answer we can get to, okay, how much risk are we accepting on a daily basis was there, and I would tell you that direct control is very high bar control. It's a control that will counter a high energy hazard, a life threatening hazard. And I don't want to go too much into literature.

Jill James:

Describe what high control means. Oh, direct control. Direct control. I'm sorry. Direct control.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah. Yeah. A direct control is a control that will counter a left threatening hazard if it's installed, verified, and used properly. And it is not vulnerable to human error. So things like cones, alerts, they will not be direct control simply because people make mistakes like human, A human performance tells us that people make mistakes. So any control that is dependent on human intervention is also vulnerable to this. So a direct control is a type of engineering control that will stop the release of the left threatening hazard onto a worker. That is what a direct control is.

Jill James:

And so

Elif Erkal:

A

Jill James:

Would a really simple example be like AGFCI?

Elif Erkal:

No, tell more.

Jill James:

Oh, sorry. Sorry. Ground fault circuit interrupter in an outlet. So it's been engineered to trip out and cut off the electricity when a particular fault occurs so that people can't be electrocuted.

Elif Erkal:

Yes.

Jill James:

Would that be a direct control type of engineering control? Okay.

Elif Erkal:

That would be a direct control that will counter an electrical hazard if it's automated. No human needed. Yeah, absolutely. It's such a good example. The classic example we give is, for example, a fall from height hazard. The full arrest systems, or for strange systems would be a direct control because if it's worn properly and it's there, even though there's a mistake or someone passes out, it will protect the worker's life.

Jill James:

Got it. Okay, good.

Elif Erkal:

And don't want to get too much into it, but we have this whole literature that backs this up that starts from energy based safety, energy, contact with energy, like the physical high school energy, genetic energy, potential energy hurts people more energy means more hurt. So that's why we call these things. High energy and direct controls are the controls that will counter these high energies. And the literature includes, for example, incident investigations from the lagging side, safety classification learning model from Edison Electric Institute. Recommend taking a look at it. It's a very strong model. And then this is kind of the next step of that hea

Jill James:

And say again what HECA stands for

Elif Erkal:

A high energy control assessments. It's a systematic present tense review of high energy hazards and direct controls as they existed. It's more of an observation program.

Jill James:

And how are people being taught? For anyone who's listening is like, this is a new, I mean, this is fantastic, Dr. Ali, when people are thinking like, well, how do I teach people to observe? This feels like it's more than observations. This feels like a new way to identify and think about risks and hazards. How do you teach people or more people to be able to identify risks and hazards in using this method?

Elif Erkal:

That is such a good question. And this is not a sprint by any means. There's, for a safety management system to be ready to ingest heca, they unfortunately would need to build a lot of groundwork. And I would start simply with an energy wheel. The energy wheel. Right Joe? It's pretty popular.

Jill James:

Yeah. And I saw you present it at NSC.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah, yeah. It's super popular. It has been there before I was born probably, I think it started in Chevron, but it is simply a hazard recognition tool that encourages people to look for energy that they wouldn't normally see. And honestly, its performance in improving the hazard recognition is quite impressive. So I would start there.

Elif Erkal:

If

Elif Erkal:

I'm brand new to all of this and it's really impactful, gets implemented on site quite easily, people put it on their trucks, on their hard hats. And it is a reminder for us humans that some of those energy hazards are very easy to see full from height. The monkey brain, the amygdala is like, oh, I'm going to die. This is dangerous. We know those intrinsically, but some of them are not as easy to see, such as electrical hazards, radiation, biological temperature, anything you cannot see or feel is going to be harder to remember. So that's kind of where I would start. The next step is the prioritization. Like our priority is serious injury and fatality prevention. So what are those life-threatening hazards across all of these hazards that we paid attention forever? So energy wheel includes everything, high energy hazards, those icons, the 13 icons that I talked about earlier are the hazards that will kill you.

Elif Erkal:

So

Elif Erkal:

I'll start with that. What is sticky? They call it, can we swear on this podcast be my guest? Alright, I'm going to be nice. You guys fill in the blanks. They call it sticky hazards. So they are stuff that Tilia and the site likes it because it also could be said in other ways.

Elif Erkal:

Got it. Okay. And then I would start there. A sticky program is really impactful because it changes the conversation. The conversations used to be like, hello, good morning everybody while we're drinking our energy drinks in the morning, wear your sunscreen, drink water, watch for slip trips and falls and enjoy your day. The conversation with sticky changes the prioritization, right? They start with what is sticky today? And that means on this site, while we are doing this work, what can kill you today?

Jill James:

And

Elif Erkal:

That is arguably way more important than a simple slip trip and fall. Now, I do not ever say that a slip trip and fall is not important. We shouldn't pay attention to them. But we ask executives, how many slip, trip and fall events you are willing to record in your TRIR in exchange for one life saved? And the answer to that question, all of them, there is no comparison between a life versus a rolled ankle or something.

Jill James:

Yep, yep. Yeah, I really love that framing. I mean, it may be morose for some. This is also how my mind works as a health and safety professional and always has what can kill you, what can kill you. Or as my son used to say when I was raising him, mom, all you talk about is the way that you can get killed doing any job. I'm like,

Elif Erkal:

Right, absolutely. And that's such a fun line to walk because when you get creative, literally anything can kill you,

Jill James:

Right?

Elif Erkal:

You can die from a slip trip and fall.

Jill James:

Sure, sure, sure.

Elif Erkal:

Yes, yes. But those icons are showing you the most likely ones

Jill James:

That

Elif Erkal:

Are statistically may kill you. The most likely scenario is a serious injury and fatality. So there is research behind this one and the paper hollowell wrote with his collaborators where they found a threshold at 1,500 jewels. So anything more than that threshold, well, the most likely result is a sif. So that is kind of how the distinction is made. It's not an arbitrary distinction. When I say high energy hazards

Jill James:

Makes

Elif Erkal:

Sense. So it definitely helps there. So that would be the second step. In the meantime, the safety experts in your organization will need to get used to using sticky and direct controls. So you can start with incident investigations. That will be a very good start looking back, what kinds of high energy hazards you've seen, what kind of direct control you've seen. And then once this terminology is there and you know it, your people knows it,

Elif Erkal:

Then

Elif Erkal:

Maybe it's a good time to start introducing high energy control assessments. Hecka, I would say this is like a five-year journey, so it will take time. And it is a whole different risk-based program that requires some prep work. It is easy, but it takes time to learn and digest.

Jill James:

And this is also knowledge and systems that, I'm just making an assumption here, gets into the minds and hands and hearts of every single worker. This isn't just something for leaders. Yes,

Elif Erkal:

Correct. But with a twist.

Jill James:

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Explain please.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah. So the HEA as a metric is not really useful for workers because it only makes sense at mass scale, right? It's an aggregate observation that you do over and over and over so that the safety management can get an understanding of their risk profile. So it is more for the safety management there. However, the sticky and the conversations on direct controls are for the workers also with the energy wheel, therefore the workers as well. And now the big question out there is that what is for executives? Because executives in ESG, environmental, social reporting, governance, reporting, they have been looking at TRIR forever and now they're asking the question, okay, you said TRIR is invalid. Cool. What are we going to look at? And that is kind of the question that's out there. So I think we're pretty set on workers. So for whatever we design for workers, they are sit focused, sticky focused, control focused. And that's kind of it, right? That is where hazard recognition is really important for safety management. There is HEAs other metrics, there's severity based lagging indicators. For example, I'll just throw it out there if you're interested, go look it up. But there are all kinds of different metrics, but right now, I think the real question that we're facing in our research is, okay, what is up there for executives? Because they demand a replacement for TRAR,

Jill James:

Right? I mean, this is the age old question, especially when the comfortable old shoe has always been that metric.

Elif Erkal:

And honestly, they ask me, is heca going to be the next TRIR

Jill James:

And what's your answer?

Elif Erkal:

My answer is be careful. Because heca is an observation based metric. Your people are going to go look at high energy hazards, look at direct controls, and they will report back which ones are there, which ones are not there.

Elif Erkal:

And

Elif Erkal:

On average, when we do this analysis, we find that 40% of the direct controls are not there. So every day we kind of accept this 40% exposure, and we depend on our training, we depend on our alternative controls, but I mean, if there's a minor mistake, somebody could actually get hurt significantly. So we know our risk portfolio. Imagine that turning into a benchmarking metric.

Elif Erkal:

People will not report back anything. You'll get a hundred percent HEAs every day. So you'll not learn

Jill James:

Anything.

Elif Erkal:

It will become irrelevant, honestly, very, very quickly. So that's why we're trying to protect HEA and how it is defined and how it is reported and how it is used. And I do not see it become a replacement for TRIR.

Jill James:

Go

Elif Erkal:

Ahead. Oh no, go ahead.

Jill James:

I am thinking about what you said about using heca for present like today on the job site, and it feels like there still has to be quite a bit of prevention work done because the today on the job site and what you discover and learn doesn't always mean that you can put in some sort of prevention strategy, especially if it requires engineering work. Yeah. Jill, you are so correct. Sorry, I'm absorbing and listening and I'm thinking this is going to work for some of the time, but it's not going to work for some of the big things.

Elif Erkal:

You are absolutely correct. We don't have direct controls for everything. I'll give you the easiest example.

Elif Erkal:

Sure.

Elif Erkal:

There's a high energy hazard workers working right next to traffic on foot, workers on foot next to traffic, and especially for utility work who are moving from location to location really fast, fast. Well, we have cones, but that's not going to stop anybody from going into your construction site. So that work zone management thing is a huge barrier. You would need a concrete barrier in between to be able to stop a vehicle driving into your work site,

Elif Erkal:

Right?

Elif Erkal:

Is it feasible? No.

Elif Erkal:

Is

Elif Erkal:

It easy? No. Is it expensive? Yes. So of course we don't use it all the time, and that is a risk we accept, but at least now we know how many times we accept it. We know when we know where, and then we have a lot of data to make the case that hey, the developer, hey, the engineer, hey, the industry. This is one of our biggest risks. If we're going to kill somebody on our work sites, it's probably because of this reason. Could you invent something that is lightweight, that is easy to put in place, that is going to protect our work sites?

Jill James:

Exactly.

Elif Erkal:

So yes. Yes, definitely. There are so many examples of this. There are cases where we thought we were really great at and we're not. Trenching is a high energy hazard. We're observing that we thought we were amazing.

Jill James:

That's exactly what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how many contractors actually have enough trench boxes for all of the places that they're digging holes or how many have enough knowledge and equipment on the soil typing and the space to do. Yes. Yes, please. Yeah, you're exploding my mind. I love this.

Elif Erkal:

And honestly, if you want to know more about the current industry data being collected, I would contact Edison Electric Institute because they're really at the forefront of this

Jill James:

Work. Say which institute again?

Elif Erkal:

Edison Electric Institute. They represent all of the investor owned utilities on North America. And what they have done is after my PhD was done, HECA was created for predictive analytics purposes. They took HEA and they really took it upon themselves to operationalize it. They created a rule book, they created data collection examples, all freely available on the internet power to prevent cif.com, and all of them is shared, but publicly open access. So they are right now collecting this data across utilities, and they actually have a lot of learnings to share from that data. And the examples I've shared are from that database that they're collecting. So yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of opportunity for innovation, and Heka has been a conduit for us to find out where those will be and how we can target. I mean, even Electric Power Research Institute, EPRI is working collaboratively with EEI to understand some of these gaps and actually do research, engineering research into some of these direct controls that seem to be missing, not feasible, can be improved.

Jill James:

I know that when you presented information on Heca at the NSC conference this year, a friend of mine, an EHS friend of mine, had his whole EHS staff in the room as you presented in that plenary session. And he called me a few days later and said, my team is so fired up. They want to institute and put in place everything that Dr. Elif talked about. I mean compliments to you. Congratulations. Thank you for coming up with something, you and your collaborators. If people are listening and they're like, how can I learn more about this? Do we go to the Alliance website at Boulder, the Construction Safety Research Alliance and find more information there?

Elif Erkal:

Yes. That's a way you can always go to power to preventive.com. EI resources are also very good in the operationalization side of things. I'll do another shameless plug. LOL just has a new book, energy Based Safety, that would be a really good resource to read, just to see everything in one place. But truly, all of this work is collaborative and open resource, and there's a lot of different companies who are implementing who are in the journey. I would recommend finding a friend first, reach out to the community, C-S-R-A-E-E-I-A-G-A, INGO Foundation, eri, whoever you are, closer to getting somewhat involved in the community, I think would be a first step because everybody's very open. All of this is produced by the community, and they would be the benchmarking support. They would be the shepherds of this work. So yes, we are like Ma hallel, myself, CSRA, we are there to support, we're there as resources, but there's a lot more out there. It's just unfortunately it will take some effort as I'm reaching out to get there. And again, I would not encourage anybody to try and implement HEA tomorrow. It is definitely a journey. It will take time to build up. And for safety change management is, I think we can talk for another three hours about that, but the first step is to find community and start really reading the resources. Google it honestly, and you'll find tons of stuff.

Jill James:

Thank you. Thank you for that. I don't know if this is the right time to ask this question or not, but where do you see AI artificial intelligence going? I mean, as it relates to what we've been talking about or in general for the EHS practice?

Elif Erkal:

That's also a very good question too. I have mixed feelings about artificial intelligence, And I don't think it is correct to talk about artificial intelligence as a kind of a blanket term because there are so many different kinds of ai, and honestly, I think all of them should be evaluated within their own impact and availability and use and feasibility and et cetera. For my field, again, I specialize in predictive analytics. So AI for me is data intelligence, machine learning, trying to find patterns in our safety data to show us reveal risks or intervention points. So that's where I am. And if you really want to, there is a machine learning paper I wrote a couple years back about a framework that connects business project and crew characteristics to heca values. So like serious injury in fatality risk,

Elif Erkal:

Is it feasible to make that kind of predictive analytics work? And the answer to that question is yes, but currently that was a state of the art academic work Industry. They do not have any database structures to support that kind of machine learning risk search algorithm because all of these systems live in different worlds, and we need to be able to stitch our data back together and relate that with serious injury and fatality risk observations that we do, and maybe for the future also link that to the injury rates we have long-term and then create models based on that kind of data and intelligence. Unfortunately, though, again, these data sets are not ready and they're not consistent. And unfortunately, again, they're not available. So for my metrics work, I don't feel very prepared for the next stage of ai.

Jill James:

I mean, it feels like as a subject matter expert, you would have to be unwinding so much to prove or disprove its validity when it's pulled many different sources. Yes,

Elif Erkal:

Definitely. And its meaning and its usefulness should also be tested because for example, for Heca, people got super excited and they said, okay, we're going to look at picture data and we will train the AI so that they can detect these high energy hazards before the workers and then point them out to the workers so that they can see them better. But what happened is that once that algorithm did that, workers didn't really bother to look for more, right? They said, okay, AI found these four. So submit and AI is not perfect. It definitely cannot see everything. I am absolutely sure right now it doesn't have the sensors of internet of things capacity to recognize pressure, electricity, et cetera, from a picture. So we basically ended up taking the workers kind of job there of hazard recognition, gave it to an AI who looks only at pictures and called it a day. Now, if that happens, it's absolutely not going to be meaningful or useful. It could hurt in the long run. So maybe a better use of it would be a training while you're training. Heck observers using it as an assistant tool or something like that would've been better.

Jill James:

Sure, that

Elif Erkal:

Makes sense. But again, so many questions about this.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. The human eye and our knowledge is so powerful, except it's only, yeah, I dunno. I'm just running through all of the fatalities I've ever investigated in my 32 year career. And when I worked as an investigator with OSHA and the things, the things that were predictable and the things that were unseen and all of that applied, and so much of it had to do with lack of knowledge on the part of the person who unfortunately lost their life.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah,

Jill James:

Yeah. I

Elif Erkal:

So agree. And people tell me, so you are telling me HEA is going to be the answer to everything, and that is so not true. What I'm saying is that this risk thinking, the systems thinking how operations work as a system and how risks happen because our decisions in these operations can be seen, we can actually analyze it. And honestly, what you're saying related to unpredicted risks fair, we cannot see everything. So heca will not capture everything, but these concepts can be embedded in prevention through design. We can start thinking about it very early on. We can embed them in our pre-job briefs, how we talk about the work before we start the work. We can include them in our risk assessments. How do we actually write our procedures and standards so that we point out life threats before they actually even go to the site? So I think it's an overhaul and a change of mindset for serious injury and fatality prevention and that prioritization of cifs.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. I, and you had said to me when we had a chat prior to the recording that we need to create systems so that people can make mistakes within them,

Elif Erkal:

And people will always make mistakes. I made 3, 4 30 mistakes since I started this podcast. Right. Okay. Well, that's true though. This is human nature and I think it is our engineer's pride to think that we can solve all of our problems looking at the system. So I don't think that is entirely true. I would call an engineer's bias.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah, sure.

Elif Erkal:

But there is so much work to be done on a systems level, on a risk level, on actually things that are happening level so that we can design our systems better, create some room for failure when people make mistakes, and then try to protect their lives as they're doing the good work and going back to their families. So I totally think that there's still a lot of room for research here and room for growth.

Jill James:

Well, it sounds like the work of a lifetime, and I'm so happy that you are part of it and doing this work. And it sounds like you've landed in the perfect place in Boulder

Elif Erkal:

For sure. And there's still a, for example, things we didn't talk about. So I'm mostly specialized on metrics and data systems, but recently CSRA released research on decluttering safety. One of my favorite topics say more. Yeah. Isn't it so interesting, and I'll probably butcher it, it's not my research, but we got to ask Yaku and Matt and all of those great researchers, what they have done with my words is safety builds layer over layer over time, like responding to incidents, contractors, subcontractors, clients having different requirements, different safety forms, and over time the safety management system becomes a clunky car who's barely moving but kind of going and everything's going okay, but you're really scared of taking anything away because the idea is that if you take a little one bolt out, it's just going to fall apart. They've done a systematic review of what these clutter pieces look like and how can a safety professional assess and identify clutter in their safety management systems and then take those away systematically or how to improve them. And it's not like this thing you're doing altogether in the industry is clutter. It doesn't say things like that because they say, what was it? One man's clutter is another men's gold. Different systems treat those differently. But I think this is a really good kind of advancement because again, the executives keep asking us about ROI return on investment, what is a safety return on investment? And it's an impossible task, right?

Jill James:

Thank you for saying that because I mean, it's written about constantly, it's spoken about constantly, and then everyone's like, well, but how do we measure it? What do we do? What are the data points?

Elif Erkal:

And I've only seen surface level evidence about it can be done. There's not enough data out there to create some generalizable results, but with this decluttering work, I think they are onto something because maybe we cannot calculate ROI of safety in general terms, but maybe we can calculate the effectiveness of safety programs in terms of risk mitigation,

Elif Erkal:

Then we're decluttering. We can take those programs away that are actually not impactful, for example. But again, a lot more work to be done there. And we still need to think about what ROI means for US safety folks, because again, I don't want to open that can of worms, but it is over said under done.

Jill James:

It's a hundred percent, a hundred percent. It is the bane of so many existence. Everybody wants the quick fix, and that's a culture problem. Yeah. That's not game to the culture problem. I know you said you didn't want to talk about culture,

Elif Erkal:

But I really want to talk about the executive sides of these metrics because RI ties to that invalidity of TRIR ties to that kind of like this structural governance issue that we're up against these days, and that is about how ESG reporting, how investors are evaluating safety in terms of injury rates still, even though there's a lot of evidence against it. So the problem is kind of exasperated by the subcontractor review process because TIR is the apple of all eyes when you're going into a prequalification package. So there is a real systematic governance issue about how our metrics are being used. And I had my good friend Brad McLean come up on the stage in our safety summit and said, okay, they say culture eats strategy for breakfast. Well, the governance will eat your strategy for dinner. So how these metrics align on the executive side of things and investor side of things and contract side of things are going to be very, very important. So my kind of broad call to this audience

Elif Erkal:

Is

Elif Erkal:

That if this is a problem, if this is a heartburn for you to really reach out to our community, CSRA and ourselves and your executives ask for resources, we have a ton to educate executives specifically to really get them away from these injury rates. Were not really helping our conversation or the case of serious injury infidelity prevention. Actually, there's a new report published on the CSRA website under resources called Safety in the Boardroom Report, and it is I think a 12 page summary of everything I talked about today to be kind of addressing the executive so it's very concise, not very technical,

Elif Erkal:

But

Elif Erkal:

Explains the problem really well and kind of puts questions in there so that they can ask their safety people better questions about their programs and so on.

Jill James:

Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. I've had astute leaders ask me, how do I measure safety? How do I even hire for it? It still remains true that the EHS profession is still this sort of unknown entity. What do they really do? How do they do their job? It's not as widely understood as say, accounting or nursing.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah, for sure.

Jill James:

As a profession, people don't get it. What do you guys do? How do you do it? That's beautiful. Safety in the boardroom report. Okay. That's something that we can put in the show notes as well.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah, it is open access, quite nice effort by the board of CSRA board of advisors because they felt like they're fighting an uphill battle with their boards about this conversations around TRIR around and especially heca because the boards the first thing they say, okay, I like hea. Let's put 75% HEA should be our target. And when the boards say that, what do you think that happens? The heca are a hundred percent. If you're going to have a target in a heca, you, you're going to basically break it. So kind of trying to educate boards and CEOs and asking more better questions and kind of adjusting their demands to what is empirically proven safety science versus what is tradition or just a good idea that somebody had but long got forgotten.

Jill James:

Beautiful. Beautiful. What else would you like to share today as we close out our time together?

Elif Erkal:

Honestly, I think my closing thoughts will be around community because safety science is really needed in this profession, and if you're an engineer, if you're a safety professional, if you're a manager, doesn't matter if you're from operations from quality or honestly from customer service of any kind. Everything we do is interconnected and it's a system of things, and safety cannot be standalone. So I really would encourage you to reach out these communities out there that are working on this and then getting involved in different aspects where you're interested in, and then help somehow, because academics are not going to solve all of these problems alone. Obviously, industry practitioners in their own companies cannot solve serious injury and fatality problem alone either. This needs to be an unprecedented collaboration between industry, academia, research organizations, operations and safety and management to kind of address this once and for all and finally be effective and try to break that serious injury and fatality injuries line that didn't budge for the past 15 years and finally see a reduction in CIF rates. Hopefully that that is the overall purpose.

Jill James:

What a beautiful call to action, and that's something that any one of us can do.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah, honestly, and reach out to us. We're always here as resources for

Jill James:

Sure. Yeah. And to be part of the community. I love it. Yeah. Wonderful. Dr. Elif, thank you so much for your time today, but more so your research. And how long have you been doing this research and working on at Boulder?

Elif Erkal:

Actually, not long. I finished my PhD in 2022, been a consultant for two years, so I've been here back to CSRA for a year now.

Jill James:

Wonderful, wonderful. It's so vitally important for you and all of the people who are your collaborators and colleagues at CSRA. Thank you so much for your work. I appreciate it. As does the community, I'm sure.

Elif Erkal:

Yeah. And thank you for helping us disseminate this great research. We couldn't have gotten this out if it wasn't for NSC for you, for all of our partners trying to get the research out there.

Jill James:

Well, I hope you come back or send your colleagues when you have things that you want to share with the community. I'm happy to always host you here. Thank you.

Elif Erkal:

Of course. For sure.

Jill James:

Yes, and thank you all for spending your time listening today, and more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good may our employees and those we influence know that our profession cares deeply about human wellbeing, which is the core of our practice. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. Or if you prefer, you can read the transcript and listen@hsi.com. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals like Dr. I. Special thanks to Emily Gould, our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.