Insights from a Health and Safety KPI Failure: What Went Wrong

I'd love to share with you a story on how not to define health and safety corporate KPIs. So the context is there was in 2023 this site, which is part of a large corporate group, so they have multiple sites and there's a corporate overhead.
They had many high potential hazards in 2023, let's say, I don't know, it was 100 or something like that. And then they also had whatever the number of person hours that were completed also in 2023. Like always happens, employees plus contractors plus whoever else, that's all about person hours.
So that was the actuals that happened in 2023. Then this is where it starts to get interesting. Then the corporate team worked out, if you had this many high potential hazards and had this many personnels, therefore, it's 2024, we can set you a high potential hazard frequency rate.
So, a target or KPI of how many high potential hazards you must report because it's based on how many person hours you had and what you had historically.
Now, unfortunately, part of that process, there wasn't any consultation or discussion. It was, okay, we've said it, here you go.
Off you go. Get on with this in 2024. So, what does that look like then for the site is there is an absolute target of they must report this many high potential hazards per month.
And if they don't or if they don't meet target, then the GM must report upwards to show cause or demonstrate or talk to why are they not meeting that particular target. And also, can't change it. It's set, set now. ingrained, no right to change or write a reply. what do you think might be the intended and unintended consequences of this?
One, do you think they're meeting their numbers of KPIs? Absolutely. What do you think is the quality of those high potential hazards that are being reported.
So, think about it. Anyone within the organisation can report a high potential hazard and think about the supervisors walking around the particular site.
Is the nature of the hazards they're identifying of a nature that are high potential risk? Are they associated with a critical control?
Are they associated with a critical risk? And I can guarantee you, because I've talked with the safety manager at this site, they do not. and the poor old safety manager is pulling his hair out. Because he's looking to take the organisation on a journey of quality over quantity.
Yet this whole structure has pancake flipped that. And we have an interesting tension. do you think this is adding value to the organisation?
Think how much work went into setting this up and how many hazards are being reported. It says a lot of work and a lot of activity, but is there an evaluation?
Is there any scientific validity, and I don't know, to saying well if we if we report more we're going to stop more. I don't know. if anyone who's watching this has seen something similar. Either something similar that's set up like this or something similar but it's been tweaked and it's been successful.
And what might be those measures? What was setup that could happen that could have happened or it's happened somewhere else to solve this? that's my share. I found this interesting. Certainly not an approach that I would take but this particular organisation did.

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