Improving corporate safety memory with the CSRA

Article authored by the CSRA for the IPLOCA Newsletter

Dr Fred Sherratt

The Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) was delighted to be able to support IPLOCA at the HSE & CSR Workshop in Munich, Germany, in October 2023.

The CSRA is a community of industry leaders and academic experts who collaborate to undertake research in industry-academic teams to generate new safety knowledge. The CSRA’s vision is to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities in the construction industry through transformative research and defendable science.

Dr Fred Sherratt from the University of Colorado Boulder and Dr Logan Perry from the University of Nebraska Lincoln delivered on IPLOCA’s chosen theme for the event: Improving corporate safety memory. To tackle this challenge, the session shared some of the latest CSRA projects, all backed by peer-reviewed empirical research. Learning from incidents is critical to improving corporate safety memory, making sure we don’t make the same mistakes twice. Dr Sherratt presented a suite of free-to-access tools grounded in empirical research that can help enhance learning by mitigating the inevitable bias investigators bring to their investigations. She also highlighted the unintended consequences that can result from a blanket “no blame” policy around incidents, and how to safely navigate that to ensure optimal learning occurs.

Dr Sherratt also shared findings from the ongoing CSRA project “Measuring the Unmeasurable”, which has been unpacking the sticky phenomenon of “safety culture”. This research determined that safety culture is an integral part of organisational culture, but also that the things that matter most for organisational culture are also the most unmeasurable. Prominent among these factors is “commitment”, so the project team looked to what an organisation actually does with its resources as evidence of that commitment. Tangible aspects of organisational structure and resourcing are now being evaluated to ascertain how these business factors affect safety performance, results are forthcoming.

Finally, and hot off the CSRA press, Dr Perry presented early findings from the CSRA project exploring the optimum ways to deliver safety training for workers in the field, whether that be via video, lecture, lecture with interactive activities, lecture with interactive and hands-on activities, or a hybrid combination of these. Training is essential to ensure corporate safety memory is embedded within the entire organisation. The research found that learning is optimised through videos and hands-on activities, whilst engagement is enhanced through interactive and hands-on activities. Depending on the resources available and the desired outcomes from the training, these findings enable decision makers to select the

Finally, and hot off the CSRA press, Dr Perry presented early findings from the CSRA project exploring the optimum ways to deliver safety training for workers in the field, whether that be via video, lecture, lecture with interactive activities, lecture with interactive and hands-on activities, or a hybrid combination of these. Training is essential to ensure corporate safety memory is embedded within the entire organisation. The research found that learning is optimised through videos and hands-on activities, whilst engagement is enhanced through interactive and hands-on activities. Depending on the resources available and the desired outcomes from the training, these findings enable decision makers to select the

optimum delivery systems to deliver an organisation’s specific requirements.

The CSRA team also helped facilitate the round table discussions that followed their workshop presentations, which explored how to improve corporate safety memory via these different topic areas and resulted in some interesting and lively discussions.

For more information about the CSRA, to access the incident learning tools, or to find out more about any of this research, please visit www.csra.colorado.edu