I have written before on my thoughts about the downside of measures. 

BT failed to meet one its key performance indicators (KPIs) in the most recent reporting year.  Looks bad right? 

The indicator is for sickness absence rate, to reflect the overall health of our employees.  It increased rather than decreased.  

Especially during H1N1 or similar spreads of infection the best course of action is to encourage employees to stay home with even more rigor than usual when they have these types of illnesses, or think they might. And that was what we did.  We failed to meet the target last year partly largely due to this increased rigor. 

But that might not be the best way to meet the target. One could say that the best way to meet the target to reduce sickness absence is to encourage people to report for work as much as possible. Only take sick leave if you really have to. If an epidemic takes hold you are going to fail the target anyway and have a good explanation. But H1N1 didn’t take hold as much as had been feared and we failed our target anyway.  

Perhaps we should be thanked for failing that target. Perhaps it contributed to restricting the spread of H1N1. But details like that get lost in the noise. It is a downside of measurable targets that we focus on the binary achievement or failure. It doesn’t invalidate the approach at all, but it does reinforce the need to look holistically and keep numerical targets in perspective.