Managing Lies

The Illusion of Zero Injuries: Why the Industry Hides Incidents

The pursuit of perfect safety metrics often leads to the opposite effect: real problems fade into the shadows, and statistics are built on hiding facts. This problem is familiar to most industrial enterprises where the motivation system is strictly tied to the absence of accidents. In his presentation, OMK Safety Director Alexander Pivikov analyzes the phenomenon of "managing lies" in detail and shows how the transition from a punitive system to proactive metrics changes the safety culture.

The Anatomy of Concealment: Where Occupational Injuries Disappear

The speaker highlights several key drivers for hiding incidents. The main one is the financial motivation of top management. When the annual bonus depends on zero injuries, it is easier for line managers to reclassify an incident as a domestic injury than to initiate an investigation, attract the attention of regulators, and bear reputational costs.

To break this vicious circle, a radical step is proposed: excluding the occupational injury rate from managers' KPIs during the culture transformation stage. Instead, the focus shifts to overall injuries, including domestic ones, since an employee's safe behavior cannot be limited only to the plant territory.

Rebalancing KPIs: Safety System Development Index

You can only manage what is measured honestly. The presentation details the approach to forming an integral indicator — the Safety System Development Index. Its essence lies in rebalancing metrics:

• Reducing the weight of reactive indicators: injuries are taken into account but are not the sole evaluation criterion, which reduces the motivation to hide minor injuries.
• Implementing proactive metrics: assessing the quality of safety audits, registering near-misses, and eliminating identified hazardous conditions allow for proactive work.
• Protection against manipulation: the integral index allows a department to receive a bonus due to high proactive work, even if a micro-injury occurred. However, fatal cases (accidents, fatal injuries) inevitably crash the indicator.

Digitalization Without Illusions

Effective data collection is impossible without a reliable IT tool. Using an in-house development as an example, the speaker shows why out-of-the-box solutions often prove ineffective. The main requirements for an automated safety management system are simplicity, reliability, and adaptability to real business processes. The system should help a line manager see the deadlines for eliminating violations and analyze the quality of audits, rather than just generating beautiful dashboards for management.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to identify hidden accidents by analyzing access control system data and medical center visits?
• Why tracking domestic injuries is an effective tool for preventing occupational incidents?
• How to properly balance reactive and proactive indicators in a top manager's motivation package?
• What are the most common mistakes made when implementing IT systems in HSE?