I, KPI: When People Become Their Metrics

Written by Andrei Costea on August 17, 2026. Posted in KPI

For centuries, professions carried meanings far removed from any actual job descriptions. Teachers were nurturers and enablers. Engineers were architects and makers. Doctors were caregivers and saviours. Public servants were literally people serving the public. 

Performance was certainly expected, but mostly measured through the lens of the work itself. An experienced engineer didn’t measure their success in equipment uptime. A doctor didn’t go home tallying percentages of discharged patients. A policy analyst didn’t define a productive day by the number of reports finished.

Their work was full of moments that could never be fully captured on a spreadsheet, but many of those unmeasured moments were precisely what got them into the profession in the first place. Modern organizations, however, slowly began to break that link. As performance management became more sophisticated and measurements more granular, organizations increasingly embraced the idea of constant reporting.

Now, this in and of itself is not a bad thing. Organizations require clarity in their operations, and performance metrics can be incredibly powerful tools for linking strategy to measurable outcomes. The real problem isn’t felt until later when things get overdone.

Evaluating behaviour has undergone such tremendous uprooting that, in many cases, behaviour is being shaped, not merely measured. Repeated behavioural reinforcement, over time, becomes a habit, leading to changed priorities that, in turn, become a core aspect of professional identity. “This is how my work is measured” gradually shifts to “This is what good work looks like” and finally “This is who I am.” 

Organizations have, perhaps subtly, started to train people to tie their self-worth to the numbers. Organizational psychologists have long noted how external reward for an action can gradually supplant intrinsic motivation. This is known as the Overjustification Effect.

In a similar vein, Self-Determination Theory explains that people feel better about life when they have some control over their tasks, can be competent in them, and have a sense of purpose, but that this motivation is diminished if externally imposed controls take over those inner drivers.

Of all the effects of performance management, this may be the most underdiscussed. Organizations are terrified of employees “gaming” KPIs, picking the “wrong” indicators, or measuring far too many things. Few, however, seem to pay attention to the inevitable process by which their employees learn to tie their identities to the very metrics the organization uses to monitor their performance.

Ultimately, dashboards are less likely to function as a mirror onto professional performance and more as a lens through which individuals see themselves. They are measuring a proxy for success rather than success itself, focusing on green indicators, favorable trends, and a solid quarterly report, rather than the substance of the value created. So the question quietly changes from “Did I do something valuable today?” to “Did my numbers stay green?“. In fact, at that point, organizations aren’t managing performance anymore; they are shaping professional identity.

Government Performance: When Public Servants Become Compliance Managers

The government is just one sector that vividly illustrates such a shift. Over the decades, public agencies have developed performance measurement in an effort to improve accountability. The use of taxpayer money requires public officials to be transparent; elected officials need proof that government policies work, and citizens demand that governments provide demonstrable results rather than empty promises.

Due to these demands, KPIs have become ubiquitous across the public sector, ranging from case-close times and permit-approval processing times to budget execution, customer satisfaction, inspection volume, and compliance rates.

None of these measures is inherently flawed, and many of them have contributed to operational discipline and better response times. The problems occur when these measures ultimately alter what it means to be an effective government employee.

1. Take, for example, a regulatory inspector whose job it is to enforce environmental regulations. 

Historically, their career trajectory is oriented toward a mission-based approach – reducing the risk of harm to public health and the environment and educating the public on environmental policy. 

These tasks require careful decision-making, dialogue, and sometimes extended investigation, and many have helped prevent harmful activities. If the job is reorganized so that employees are evaluated based upon the number of inspections conducted in a month, subtle changes in employee behaviour can emerge.

• We go from ➛ “Which of these inspections will contribute the most to environmental safety?“
• To ➛ “How many inspections can I complete by month’s end?” 

Case-related activities are put on the back burner in favour of routine, less time-consuming inspections. A pursuit of efficient throughput displaces professional judgment. While the individual has become more productive and efficient in executing their tasks, their sense of professional purpose and impact has eroded.

As noted by researchers in behavioral psychology and organizational design, “individuals will repeat those behaviours for which they are consistently rewarded” (e.g., in organizational performance systems, rewards can be symbolic recognition, financial, fiduciary, or simple acknowledgment by managers). Public organizations don’t often explicitly encourage their employees to prioritize measurement over meaning, but performance management systems do just that.

1. A similar shift in identity can be observed in public policy formulation. For instance, consider a public policy analyst whose mission is to develop policies to enhance economic opportunity in their region. 

Good policy development requires innovation, open-mindedness, questioning established assumptions, extensive stakeholder engagement, willingness to reconsider original proposals, and the capacity to admit when a given approach may not achieve its intended outcome. The work itself involves considerable ambiguity and is inherently risky.

However, many policy departments measure success based upon report completions, consultations held, milestone completion times, and the number of projects delivered on time and on budget. These metrics are no indicators of the quality of public policy produced. Over time, analysts may begin to view themselves as administrators rather than problem-solvers; the number of reports produced takes on a higher significance than their contribution to informed policy decision-making. Taking the time to gather compelling evidence and debate potentially controversial findings would put the policy writer at performance risk that would not be faced by a policy writer producing a report more promptly.

The outcome is a less effective public policy in exchange for a more efficient output of report production.

1. Perhaps the starkest example of this unintended side effect of performance measurement is evident in the government’s citizen-facing services. 

Most public agencies track average times to complete tasks such as issuing permits, licenses, processing benefits, or answering queries. While there’s no denying that swift processing saves valuable time and resources and should indeed be encouraged where it represents efficient, effective government service, speed itself has acquired an almost sacred status.

Case completion times may even be viewed as reflecting the personal capability of the individual responsible for completing them, regardless of whether these cases require significant social service provision or legal deliberation.

A given employee might have two applications come in the same morning:

1. The first can be addressed quickly within twenty minutes.
2. The second is complex, requires a telephone consultation with other government bodies and a deep analysis of relevant legislation, and will likely take several days to complete. 

If time to completion is the measure that determines success, then the employee will be motivated to expedite the first and avoid engaging with the second’s complexity so that their numbers continue to look strong on the monthly performance review. 

While the manager has not instructed anyone to shy away from difficult or time-consuming cases, the organization’s reporting systems have implicitly taught employees to prioritize quantifiable output over the quality of public service delivery. This insidious transformation of identity within public organizations has been one of the most staggering and, in some respects, the most challenging consequences of the modern emphasis on performance measurement. 

Governments invest tremendous resources in these measures to improve responsiveness and effectiveness, but as measurement becomes more sophisticated and all-encompassing, there is a danger of narrowing the definition of a good public servant. Over time, public sector employees who originally joined the government seeking to solve complex societal problems and make a tangible contribution to public well-being may find that they have become focused on improving their scores on a dashboard.

The mission has not disappeared; it has just been translated into the language of numbers, and eventually it can start to look as if those numbers really are the mission itself.

Oil & Gas: When Safety Professionals Become Incident Managers

The oil and gas industry is arguably the one in which performance measurement has been implemented more widely and integrated more deeply than in any other. Given the sheer scale of operations, the hazardous environments, and the enormous potential cost of failure, measurement is an operational imperative. 

Industries within the oil and gas sector have implemented sophisticated tracking systems for a variety of performance indicators, including equipment availability, maintenance compliance, production efficiency, process safety, environmental impact, workforce competency, and dozens of safety-related measures. To a significant degree, these metrics have made the industry demonstrably safer than it was several decades ago. 

Therefore, precisely because performance measurement has been implemented so widely, the oil and gas industry is a perfect example of how metrics gradually influence the way professionals see themselves over time. 

Let’s examine three common areas where the practice of measurement shapes occupational identity.

I. Safety culture

When an occupational health and safety, environmental, and risk (HSER) manager starts their career, the driving mission is clear and singular: everyone should be safe. 

Their day-to-day work is devoted to identifying hazards, empowering their colleagues to speak up, investigating near-miss incidents, and instilling a culture in which reporting mistakes is natural and welcome before they become accidents. For a long time, performance measures have supported this work; they provide a framework that encourages reducing harm and helps pinpoint areas where improvements are needed.

Over time, however, one number in particular often becomes pervasive within organizations – and often it’s the lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) or another similar type of incident-based statistic.

Typically, a low number means a safe place. Yet, once all-in discussions revolve solely around achieving a “zero” number, a subtle shift may start to occur: employees can start to associate achieving performance with maintaining the number, rather than with creating and maintaining the culture that is the reason the number is low. 

• A supervisor may no longer log a minor “reportable” incident for fear of the “statistics.” 
• A worker may fail to mention a minor, workplace-acquired cut because they don’t want to negatively impact their team’s “record.”
• Managers may end up debating whether an incident meets the reporting criteria, rather than focusing on understanding why it occurred and taking steps to prevent it.
• The organization begins to protect the number that is supposed to reflect risk reduction. 

The paradox here is that some of the safest workplaces are those where employees feel psychologically safe enough to report issues, even if it initially results in the numbers reflecting an issue.

II. Maintenance and asset integrity

Maintenance engineers tend to be the sort of folks who love taking apart machines and putting them back together – complex systems and machinery excite them. They have the technical acumen to anticipate how machines can and will fail, often before any visible symptoms emerge. For them, this involves everything from proactive inspection to deep-level repair and understanding system dynamics.

However, many maintenance functions are measured by a variety of KPIs that can shape professional identity in interesting ways. These can include planned maintenance compliance, backlogs reduction, equipment availability and uptime, and on-time execution. Such measurements are essential, without a doubt, but engineers may end up seeing their work less as optimizing a system for safety and reliability and more as “keeping the indicators green.” 

For example, imagine that during routine maintenance, a qualified engineer determines that an asset requires additional inspection and maintenance outside the regularly scheduled process. In a best-practice scenario, this should be handled in accordance with established procedures, focusing on what’s necessary to ensure long-term reliability and safety.

Instead, they run into the issue that taking an asset offline for non-scheduled work may negatively affect overall plant availability metrics and other performance measures. 

No one explicitly says to the engineer “ignore it,” but they can feel internal pressure, as the responsibility for demonstrating effectiveness shifts: 

• We go from ➛ “I am an engineer who understands this equipment and should fix it as needed” 
• To ➛ “I am an engineer who is measured on availability, and taking this offline will not be a good thing for the company.” 

Over time, this constant exposure to such incentives may nudge professional focus away from what is best for the system toward what’s needed to present good numbers. Maintenance excellence can inadvertently become about reporting excellence.

III. Safety leadership

Most leaders of safety organizations can articulate (and strongly believe in) the importance of building a “learning culture” or “reporting culture” – one in which reporting of near-miss incidents is not seen as problematic, but as an opportunity to learn and prevent future accidents. 

This bears an unintended psychological impact: long-running streaks of incident-free operations. The longer the company maintains this “record,” the more everyone feels attached to it. Workers feel it. Frontline supervisors feel it. Upper management feels it. The entire workplace feels it, and, before you know it, a perfect safety record moves from being a performance indicator to a key aspect of the company’s identity. 

When an organization proudly states, “We had a great run of X years without a recordable,” it transforms the act of reporting an incident from an opportunity to improve into an attempt to end a celebrated achievement.

Psychology teaches us that identities are reinforced by repetition and social validation. As employees are repeatedly told, “We are the guys who run our operations without an accident,” those values can quickly become the workforce’s identity. Ironically, this desire to protect the identity may inhibit the learning culture that is needed to actually keep people safe over the long term. The industry is slowly waking up to this reality by introducing leading indicators that complement its long-standing practice of lagging performance measures.

These leading indicators (such as learning observations, behavioural interventions, hazard identification programs, and proactive risk assessments) signal a shift from seeing professional work as the guard duty of a number to viewing it as the responsible management of risk and the continuous improvement of an organization’s capabilities.

Construction: When Project Managers Become Schedule Protectors

Construction is run under a constant stream of fire under its proverbial behind. 

• The budget is sealed. 
• The timeline is out there for everyone to see.
• Clients demand sure things.
• Investors demand visible returns. 
• Managing performance becomes paramount. 

Companies keep tabs on the budget variance, the on-time completion rates, productivity, rework, safety incidents, equipment use, procurement cycles – everything it takes to keep even the largest construction projects from spiraling out of control. For project managers, these metrics provide crucial visibility into what’s happening. Over time, though, they also subtly change what it means to succeed.

1. Let’s look at schedule, probably the most obvious metric in construction. 

We all know we need to deliver on time; delays cost time, money, opportunities, and jobs for everyone from the subcontractor to the end user to the neighborhood around the site. We also know that schedules are living things, not etched-in-stone laws of nature.

• Construction hits unexpected bedrock. 
  • The weather shifts. 
    • The supply chain falters.
      • The designs need to be altered.

Good project managers understand these realities, and their job involves judgment & flexibility about changes. Yet when on-time completion is the ultimate benchmark for success, that can lead to a different, more limited role: “I’m responsible for protecting the schedule.” 

“I’m responsible for delivering the best possible project” is no longer behind the steering wheel; it’s not even part of the conversation occurring in the car. That’s critically important for a few reasons.

Suppose you discover halfway through construction that a minor modification will dramatically increase a building’s resilience for decades to come.

From an engineering standpoint, it’s a clear improvement. From a KPIs standpoint, the redesign adds a few weeks to the project. The project manager must decide whether they are a builder or a schedule guardian, and by the time organizations reinforce decisions with KPIs year after year, the answer is often obvious. 

1. A similar phenomenon occurs with productivity measures. 

We track labour rates, equipment efficiency, and throughput to ensure work gets done efficiently, because construction is, after all, an incredibly resource-intensive endeavour. However, productivity measures tend to focus on visible activity and output rather than on the thoughtful prep work that enables high-quality execution. 

Picture two supervisors: 

• The first, realizing the potential for confusion, takes a couple of hours before his crews begin installation to coordinate subcontractor schedules and clear potential conflicts.
• The second supervises his crews’ continuous activity despite having a pile of unresolved questions.

According to the day’s dashboard, the second supervisor clearly had a more productive day. Activity continued, and the work output was impressive. Weeks down the line, the project suffers costly delays due to rework because all that prep didn’t happen. The first supervisor was building for tomorrow, and the second was optimizing for today.

Systems that measure performance rarely reward proactive problem-solving that may never actually surface as a problem. Over time, people come to believe that active work and output are rewarded more highly than proactive avoidance of potential problems. 

1. Nothing demonstrates this shift more profoundly than safety leadership. 

Companies monitor incident rates, safety inspections, safety briefings, and compliance actions. The problem arises when safety, which should be an expression of craft, becomes just another task, and when safety documentation is perceived as equivalent to actual safety. 

Completing checklists and filing reports can be perceived as being productive because they generate readily quantifiable results. Conducting tough conversations about safety hazards, patiently coaching an inexperienced team member, or stopping work to address an immediate hazard requires more patience and is harder to quantify. In these situations, too, the role silently transforms.

Over time, the job becomes less about building something well and more about managing reports, schedules, charts, graphs, and other metrics. Construction has long been a trade driven by craft, ingenuity, the willingness to confront ambiguity, and the determination to adapt when circumstances change…qualities that rarely fit smoothly into KPIs. 

The risk isn’t that KPIs will put an end to what it means to craft and be part of it; the danger is that they will fundamentally reshape what craft looks like. When the metrics for success are matters like schedule adherence, people will still build projects, but they may begin to lose the very identity that motivated them to become builders in the first place.

Transportation: When Operators Become Punctuality Optimizers

Of all the industries we could choose to observe, transportation is probably one of the most externally visible ones. 

The numbers generated each day by every airline, train company, logistics firm, port, and public transit authority are mind-boggling. These organizations are producing vast quantities of data to inform decisions. The on-time performance (OTP), expected delivery window, vehicle utilization rates, fuel efficiency, wait time per passenger, load factors, vehicle turnarounds, and customer satisfaction scores indicate whether the system is working well.

The organizations whose work depends on millions of people moving from place to place at specific times rely heavily on this information to coordinate operations across enormous networks. Nevertheless, of all the Industries that have so much data, transportation perhaps best captures the danger of equating operational excellence with numerical excellence. 

Let’s imagine a very sharp airline operations manager. What drives them into the aviation business in the first place?

Passion, enthusiasm, dedication, joy, a fascination with aviation, logistics, and engineering, or, most importantly, a commitment to transporting people safely and efficiently to where they need to go. Maybe all of these, at once, all the time.

So, then, what is the most often discussed single data point for most airline operation teams? 

It’s on-time performance!

Now, now, lower your pitchforks, please. On-time performance is an incredibly valuable metric. Customers, connecting flights, operational costs, and more are all negatively affected when delays occur. No one is claiming it is not important. However, when punctuality ceases to be a goal and becomes everything that person ever was, professionally, that is when the trouble begins.

1. I) Consider the scenario of our aforementioned airline operations manager, and let’s ideate 2 scenarios for them:

Scenario 1 – Think about the operational and behavioural consequences of a departure in which the aircraft pulls back on time but leaves with a cabin issue that significantly increases stress for both cabin crew and passengers. 

Scenario 2 – Now compare this to another departure where the aircraft leaves several minutes later because the team used those extra minutes to resolve an issue with a piece of equipment, assist an elderly passenger, address a situation with a screaming baby, or ensure all the correct bags were loaded, etc. 

From a dashboard’s perspective, the first option wins hands down. For a professional, however, the second might reflect much better operational judgment.

As with every system and human, that very act of monitoring the “right things” and offering them as rewards in the system for a sufficient period of time conditions people to pursue the number rather than the purpose behind it.

Teams slowly begin to ask, “Did we protect our OTP?” instead of “Did we perform well?” This is subtle, and the behavioural consequences can be significant. We see this phenomenon mirrored across other major industries within transportation, like logistics and supply chain.

Organizations across these sectors rely heavily on the delivery performance indicator. Customers now expect increasingly tight and precise delivery windows, and most companies have developed highly sophisticated methods for monitoring these metrics. While logistics coordinators, drivers, and dispatchers all recognize this importance, their continued exposure to metrics (even when used appropriately) will influence how they see and interpret their own roles.

1. II) This brings us round to another scenario – the delivery driver!

Imagine a delivery driver approaching the time and weather is deteriorating. They can either:

Scenario 1 – Slow down and potentially find a safe haven 

Scenario 2 – Push through and hope for the best

Given our present climate change woes, where the weather is impossibly unpredictable at times, professional judgment will suggest to slow down and accept that some of these delivery times may be adjusted later in the day, when their performance report will, unfortunately, highlight poor on-time performance.

The delivery driver is unlikely to endanger their life or that of others to make it on time; nevertheless, their frame of reference will likely shift to see their poor OTP score as an indictment of their ability rather than an acceptable outcome given unforeseen circumstances.

The majority will continue to prioritize safety, but their sense of professional accomplishment may begin to shift: rather than being seen as professionals who reliably and safely deliver people and goods, their internal professional identity may become that of a protector of delivery performance. Their professional identity now incorporates the KPI. 

III) In the case of public transportation, we will find a remarkably similar story. 

Scenario 1 – Should a professional working in the public service move people around a city comfortably and efficiently?

Scenario 2 – Should they become a performance enforcer, responsible for protecting the schedule at all costs? 

Transit agencies will monitor many things to ensure reliability and efficiency: passenger volumes, schedule adherence, average boarding time per passenger, on-time departure rates, average dwell time at stations, and the like.

All the above indicators will no doubt lead to better overall system performance, but public transportation is ultimately a human system. Yes, throughput is important, but moving people in comfort & safety, from point A to B, is even more so.

Not every passenger fits a standard profile. There are elderly travelers, people with disabilities, young children, and individuals who cannot rush and require extra assistance. When, as part of that performance management regime, we focus on schedule performance, we may create an identity conflict. 

This problem won’t arise if performance metrics are set and monitored to manage the system, but the minute employees’ identities manage it, the problems can begin. At least the irony is that no one goes into the transportation business to maximize on-time performance. They are in business to provide safe, reliable service to meet people’s travel needs. Punctuality is only one component of delivering that service.

Healthcare: When Clinicians Become Throughput Managers

Few fields may demonstrate how performance measurement can transform professional identity more starkly than health care because more is at stake than the success of an organization – human lives themselves. 

Modern health care depends heavily on measurement, and for good reason. Hospitals measure Emergency Department (ED) waiting times, bed days, readmission rates, numbers of surgeries performed, infection rates, patient satisfaction levels, care timelines, staffing levels, and hundreds of other metrics that can guide quality improvement and ensure accountability. Without such measurement, health care leaders could not know where to direct resources or pinpoint areas for systemic improvement and patient benefit.

Yet health care has always been about more than just that, more than just metrics. At heart, it is a vocation centered on discretion, compassion, and personalized attention. Performance systems, of course, oversimplify such complexity. 

ED Wait Times

Let us look, for example, at health care performance metrics for emergency care waiting times. While minimizing unnecessary delays is a worthwhile pursuit, with benefits for patients and the health care system alike, in practice, ED work does not proceed in a straight line defined by average times.

Patients arrive with all manner of urgency: some require but ten minutes, others six hours; one family conversation might stave off a formal complaint, while another requires as much reassurance as a prescription. Often, these acts of service represent some of the finest clinical practice and are difficult to quantify. When clinicians are rewarded for shaving off waiting times, it can prompt a subtle shift in their identity: “Did I treat the patient optimally?” or “Did I move the patient through the department most rapidly?”

The two objectives are hardly mutually exclusive, but when one becomes visible and the other remains unseen, the visible outcome naturally receives higher priority. We see a similar shift occur for decisions about hospital patient discharges.

Length of Stay

Another frequently used measure is the length of stay, used in part to help hospitals manage their capacity and avoid inappropriate admissions.

Again, a valid measure that serves a real purpose. However, decisions to discharge a patient are often complex and not purely dictated by strict, measurable clinical criteria. A patient may, on paper, be technically “discharge ready” but feel nervous about managing at home. Another might benefit from a few extra days of observation for reassurance, even if there is no immediately pressing medical need for more intensive care. 

Clinicians make such judgments day by day. However, when, time and again, our hospitals focus on patient throughput, our beds, and our flow, the length of stay increasingly gains psychological weight over its functional meaning. Delayed discharges may begin to feel like interruptions of flow and barriers to organizational performance rather than clinical considerations, not by design, but because our performance systems encourage such reactions. This specific detail – performance systems affecting the identity of health professionals themselves – is perhaps the most pervasive of all. 

Identity of Choice

Few people choose careers as doctors, nurses, technicians, or paramedics simply because they find delight in improving dashboards or making progress toward organizational targets. Most enter the field out of a deep desire to care, to heal, to solve complex problems, and to improve the lives of others. It is this inherent motivation, which organizational psychologists have shown to be the strongest long-term predictor of job engagement, that pulls these individuals through many a night of emotional hardship. 

It is these motivation systems that are most endangered by an organizational environment that overemphasizes measured outcomes. When the organization’s performance metric takes precedence over that purpose, something begins to change, even if the clinician does not abandon their care for patients.

Instead, they increasingly begin to experience their work as defined by outputs: numbers of patients seen, numbers of procedures performed, number of appointments scheduled, number of metrics met. Caring does not vanish – it is simply diminished in what counts as success. 

Many health organizations are aware of this threat and are attempting to broaden their focus toward patient experience, interprofessional collaboration, the development of learning cultures, staff well-being, and psychological safety. All of these efforts acknowledge that great health care depends not just on measurable efficiencies but also on protecting the fundamental reasons people came to the profession.

At the end of a stay, most patients don’t remember how well their care improved the hospital’s quarterly reports, but rather that someone listened, someone cared, and someone acknowledged their unique and individual story.

Final Thoughts

The major benefit of KPIs is focusing attention. They assist organizations in transforming a big ambition into a concrete goal, creating common alignment among teams, and providing evidence of whether progress is being made. 

Without the metrics, strategy is little more than aspiration, and within any set of metrics lies another, much more subtle force that most observers do not know: measurement not only shapes decisions, it also shapes people.

Behavioural psychologists demonstrated long ago that habit, and eventually identity, are forged through repeated reinforcement. Therefore, performance systems teach not just process but also employees the objects of attention, the feelings of success, the rewarded behaviours and what they’re meant to turn into, ideally, professionally. 

Most often, no one sets out to prioritize their dashboards over their mission. Yet, through a gradual sequence of performance reviews, recognition meetings, promotion opportunities, and the green indicators turning, professionals begin to intuitively protect the measures originally developed to do little more than guide their performance. None of this implies an organization should drop KPIs – au contraire, metrics remain necessary. 

In their place, the best question any leader can pose may well be less, “What will this KPI motivate?” – a question extensively addressed over time – and more, “What type of professionals will this KPI eventually build?.”

After all, organizations, over time, perform as well as their people are made, not because they measure well, but because they are well.

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Tags: behavioral reinforcement, Government performance, Healthcare performance, KPI management, Organizational Behavior, Performance Management, professional identity, project management, safety management, Transportation performance