The Weekly Reflektion 50/2025

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are an important part of any business and should be set up to ensure the business is performing satisfactorily. Indicators may be leading or lagging, and they may be related to safety, external environment, profit, operating costs, or other factors important for the business. Note that indicators are measurements of performance and not the performance itself. They are subject to interpretation, and sometimes they are set up in a way that does not really reflect what they are intended to measure. This is great when things seem to be going well but unfortunate when incidents and accidents occur. Then the management often regrets not paying attention to the KPIs and the way they were set up.

How do you interpret your indicators?

Even though housework is inherently boring, it needs to be done, so just get on with it. Hoovering is no exception, and I often reflect on many issues as I navigate my battery driven vacuum cleaner over the floors. Sometimes I even cover those frustrating nooks and crannies and get after the fluff around the chair legs and under the cabinets. When I am finished, I can see the offending particles collected in the vacuum cleaner, and I can see the floors are clean. I empty the dust and consider a job well done.

Then the day arrived when a new vacuum cleaner was purchased. A cleaner with a green LED light that shone brightly on the dust, hair(we have cats), crumbs (we have teenagers) and other things that accumulate on the floors. Suddenly, I realized that what I previously had considered to be a clean floor was certainly not. I was shocked by how much was still on the floor after the first pass with the cleaner. Not only did I need several passes, but I had to use the boost setting. For two of the rooms even the vacuum cleaner was not enough, and a bucket, green soap and a mop was mobilized. Never was the saying. ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over’, more true.

The green light on the vacuum cleaner gave me a much better indicator for whether the cleaning was effective. Rather than judging the cleanliness from the dust collected, I now could use the amount of dust remaining on the floor as my KPI. Another advantage of the light is that it gave me continuous feedback on the effectiveness of my hoovering. I could keep on going until there was no dust left.

Management sometimes assumes the floors are clean because a lot of dirt has been removed. They even consider it an improvement when the amount of dirt increases, assuming that the cleaning method must be getting better. Management feels comfortable with this because it means they don’t have to take any action. They consider that doing nothing else is a good approach to coping with already having too much do do.

We have written several Reflektions on management being distracted by favourable KPIs. The use of Lost Time Incidents (LTI) to measure safety performance is one example. Another is the belief that since a Major Accident has not occurred before, then the systems in place for prevention of a Major Accident must be working. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by your KPIs.