The KPI Playbook: Insights for Impactful Metrics

Episode Transcript:-

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Hello, listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the Elevate EHS podcast. I’m your host, Hilary Framke from SafetyStratus here with Jason Johantges. Hi, Jason.

Jason J: How you doing today?

Hilary Framke: I’m doing fantastic. I got coffee. The world is good. 

Jason J: Coffee makes everything better, in my opinion.

Hilary Framke: Couldn’t agree more. So look, we’re going to do an exciting episode with Jason today. He has agreed to do one of the cutting edge things I’ve been wanting to do with my podcast, which is take one topic and just dig into it. So we are going to peel this onion back. Today’s podcast episode is going to be all about EHS KPIs or key performance indicators. So before we get into that, Jason, tell us a little bit about your EHS origin story and where your passion for EHS metrics comes from.

Jason J: Oh my goodness. So my origin story started in college, I was studying environmental engineering with a focus on water pollution and some other things and had a class that went over industrial hygiene and just general health and safety concepts and I thought that was really interesting. When I graduated school, I went to work for a construction company, actually commercial construction, nothing to do with environmental, but I started getting involved with health and safety and environmental compliance issues around our job sites in Columbus, Ohio And thought this is really nice.

This is a great job where you’re trying to keep your workers safe, you know keep the company’s freedom to operate from regulators coming in or fines and other things. This is really more interesting to me because I feel good about what we’re doing versus just watching a construction project go on.

So I made a little bit of a career transition at that point and started going to work for general industry with a focus on environmental health and safety and just building programs at a corporate level, and that’s really what I got started. So interest in college. And then once I really got out in the real world and saw application of it, got a good warm feeling like we all do. We do EHS because we like to do it. It makes us feel good. That’s where my origin came in. 

Hilary Framke: That’s amazing. I think that’s non traditional Jason to actually have studied at least some of the sector in college and then pursued it as a career. I never hear that in origin stories. So kudos to you.

Jason J: Yeah, and if you need a water treatment plant built I used to know how to do that I don’t anymore. 

Hilary Framke: We all have skills that get rusty on us.

Jason J: Oh, yeah. 

Hilary Framke: So tell us why you were willing to do this focus podcast on EHS metrics? 

Jason J: Oh, it is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because we’ve really been focusing here where I’m employed now on using better metrics help drive our time, energy and really tell how we’re performing, right? And metrics are so critical to let you know where to focus your time, your money and attention to make sure all your goals are being hit. So we’ve really revamped what we’re doing and how we’re looking here to try and make us a better, not just an EHS performance, but a better company as overall. 

Hilary Framke: That’s awesome. I think so many businesses underestimate the power of metrics, especially for EHS. Now they see it maybe in production, quality, maintenance and facilities, finance obviously it always got cornerstone on metrics, but they missed the opportunity in their EHS metrics to really drive that program forward.

So I’m excited that we’re focusing on this today. 

But let’s actually start at the beginning, right? Even before metrics are chosen and what type of metrics, we’re going to get into that a little bit later in the segment. But even before we get started, who do you think are the key stakeholders who should be involved in this process of defining EHS metrics?

Jason J: First and foremost, it should be the group that knows the information better. So you start with your EHS team, and then because you understand the concepts and the things that we’re trying to accomplish and really what has meaning in the realm of EHS. Once you get that settled you really have to finish with your key stakeholders because your experts have created these metrics. Now you got to involve the groups that are really going to be measured against them because if I’m the EHS manager at a plant though those metrics that we’re doing don’t just evaluate my job performance, but the performance of the site as a whole, so what we’ll do here is we’ll start with the concepts why you know, what’s the goal?

What’s the metric that leads to that goal? And then we’ll work in with our operational partners or our stakeholders that are affected by that to make sure they’re aligned with them to not only understand the EHS implications, but the overall operational goal expectations too, and how it supports them.

Hilary Framke: Have you run into a situation, Jason, where a key stakeholder, an operations leader, let’s say maybe your VP of Ops is reviewing the metrics that your EHS team has chosen and feels that this is not the right direction? How have you handled that? 

Jason J: Yeah, I think it happens with anybody, even people internally with their own EHS teams, you always have to have an open mind because perspective from other people, what’s important to them is critical to developing a good relationship as a supporting partner out here in what we do. So listen to their concerns. Understand how that goes towards their goals. Understand how that will go to your goals. And either you pivot based on what they said or you try to sell a stronger reasoning of what you’re trying to do and how it will help them overall reach their goals. And sometimes, we’ll make that change because it is important. And other times we will fight and stand up and be strong about what we need to do and why. And again, our job is to sell this, how it’s going to make our operational partners better. 

Hilary Framke: Absolutely. 

And I think this leads us really nicely into the next question about preparing to set your EHS metrics within your organization. So what are the key preparation steps that your team takes before you even sit down and start to think about what metrics are chosen?

Jason J: Oh, super good question. So you have to have a plan and goals in mind with what you’re trying to accomplish as your team to be able to set metrics, right? Because if you don’t have a road map, we call our things road map. We do SWOT analysis. We create road maps every year, one three year plan, five year plan.

So if you don’t have an idea of where you need to get to, what you’re trying to accomplish, You can’t start setting metrics because your metrics are not going to mean anything to you. So set your goals within your organization. Where do you need to go? Hey, do you need to train people better?

Do you need to understand regulatory compliance? What are the things you need to do as a group? Now we can start working towards what are those metrics that work towards those smart objectives that you’re going to build in your roadmap.

Hilary Framke: I like that. So taking a look at maybe your five year strategic plan for where you plan to be, your mission, your vision, how does this contribute to those larger objectives within  the organization? 

Jason J: Exactly. Like with the SWOT analysis, if you’re not familiar with the concept, everybody listening, you look at your strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and you identify those and what you do with your opportunities and weaknesses.

You create plans around those to build those up. With your strengths you keep plans in place to keep driving your strengths forward. One of the things that we had seen as one of our, both as a weakness and opportunity is to build up our in house plant level EHS expertise where, more training, more time, more education to that group will help because not only does it make them better at their job, but it also makes the site do better in terms of compliance performance too.

So we created a plan of how do you onboard and do continuous education of our EHS staff. So now when we start building metrics that relate kind to those concepts, whether it’s compliance calendars, we’re doing compliance activities where you’re doing training, a piece of that foundation’s already built there.

Hilary Framke: That’s so great. And then do you also collate information like the data analytics around like incident trending of root causes of natures of injury, causes of injury, maybe inspection results, corrective action closure. Do you take a look at all those different data outputs from the programs that you’re running, analyze those as well before you set metrics?

Jason J: Absolutely. Because again, you’re going to measure things that you’re asking others to do that are going to create the results that you want. So you have to understand what those metrics and those things are telling you to be able to set goals around them. For instance, we’re pivoting a lot to do leading indicators because we want everybody to do the activities ahead of time that we believe are going to lead to success and affect the lagging indicators. So what do we need people to do? We need people to do their training, train the associates so they have the knowledge on how to do the job in a successful manner.

Okay measure your training percentage we want people to report all incidents big or small, create a metric around, are you reporting? Are you capturing these things and doing a near miss a unsafe condition type of report? Are you creating actions around these incidents so not only is it important to report an incident, but have you identified the root cause a CAPA and have you actually followed up and closed out a CAPA because, again, if you’re identifying an incident and then you’re not or a risk and you’re not doing an activity or an action around to mitigate it, what’s the point of identifying to begin with? So again a lot of what we’re looking at to your questions Hilary are, what are the metrics telling us?

What do we want people to do to be successful? And now that’s what you’re creating. You’re leading indicator metrics around we know if you do these five or six subsets of things you’re going to drive towards success and affect those lagging indicators that most people really just traditionally focus on.

Hilary Framke: Oh, okay. We’re going to jump ahead because this is actually one of my questions. So you’ve brought it up. So this is a huge debate. The debate continues, right? On whether organizations should use lagging or leading indicators in their goal setting. I want you to weigh in. It sounds like you’re a fan of leading.

Do you track lagging as well at the same priority level on the same scorecard? 

Jason J: You do. I mean you should always track lagging. One, if you take a look at OSHA, that’s how you define your industry of performance with your TRIR you still need to do that because that’s generally how to know how you’re comparing against your peers or whether or not regulatory agencies are going to hate you, so that’s still important to have. We’re doing here is changing hearts and minds on focus on the lagging stuff or the leading because with the leading activities you’re going to affect the lagging. It’s already happened.

The event’s happened, somebody’s hurt. They’re on the OSHA log. There’s nothing you can do to prevent that incident from happening because it’s already happened. That’s fine. That still needs to be some kind of bar you need to set organizationally. I feel, and my team feels here, leading indicators are most important because of what I was talking to is the lagging stuff’s already happened.

If you get everybody doing the things that you feel and show that are going to lead to success, the lagging numbers are going to be affected by that. So by doing your leading, measure your leading, focusing on the leading, you’re going to get the success with a lot of the lagging pieces. 

Hilary Framke: Okay, this is very interesting.

So I think if I were to take a big survey of all organizations, I think there’s still a bunch of organizations that are only tracking lagging indicators for EHS metrics. I think there’s now the pendulum has swung. And there are organizations who are only tracking leading indicators, right?

Because of the reasons that you’ve said. Now, my personal vote is you’ve got to have a mix, okay? And you’ve got to have eyes on both. It sounds like you feel the same way. Now, look which ones we put on a scorecard, which ones we give  visibility to different levels of the organization. Obviously, it can vary significantly based on the size of your work. And the maturity, right? I think of your business and what it focuses on. But I think what’s important and I want to call out a concern of mine that I’m starting to see with this pendulum shift is, don’t be careful of just tracking leading and not keeping your eyes on lagging because there are thousands of leading indicators that you can choose.

You can’t know that you’ve chosen the right ones. If they are impacting the lagging metrics, so I would put out a cautionary tale to those organizations who are just doing leading, you have to look at them in the same right at the same level of significance and say, hey, these may be great leading indicators, but if they’re not bringing our lagging metrics down, we’ve got to pick different ones.

We can’t be too married to these, right? If they’re not really impacting the bottom line, right? 

Jason J: Yeah. You’re doing activities that aren’t affecting performance at that point. So you need to shift and figure out what are those leading activities you need people to do and measure against to get the outcome. So you’ve said all really great advice to everybody out there. It’s up to me again like you, it’s 100 A mix of the two. You’ve got to understand the performance in with the lagging but with the leading stuff that leads to affecting performance. What we’re doing with our scorecard is we’re taking a three year TRIR and LTA averages for our sites or our divisions to say, hey, if you’re performing well on your scorecard at the end of the year, you don’t earn your safety recognition award unless you’ve beaten those three year averages on the lagging too.

So you can get perfect every month on your leading indicators, but unless your performance has been better than your three year average on the lagging, you’re wiped out of contention for a safety award. 

Hilary Framke: Oh, I really like that, and I think too often, we’re so busy doing the things, doing all the leading activities and not thinking about, are we actually seeing impact in the performance, as you said, a shift in that performance metric on the backend.

They have to go hand in hand. I really liked that, that you found a way to measure and track the leading, but also consider the lagging. 

Jason J: Yeah. And our operational partners really like it. They feel it’s very fair. Now I’m in a seasonal business with a lot of temp associates or seasonal associates that come in. 

So if you say, I just want to measure year over year performance. One, it’s hard to do in a seasonal work environment. And two, you get an outlier year somewhere, either really good or really bad. And that site’s already going to know going into the year, they’re hosed on achieving, because you’re compared versus one year versus a multi.

Hilary Framke: Yeah. It’s very demotivating, right?

Jason J: And that’s what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to use these metrics that demotivate. Because we want them to be excited. We want them to still focus on doing their leading things instead of, oh I’m out of contention. Why do I even need to do this? 

Hilary Framke: No, absolutely. And I think too, this comes with having a strong EHS metrics program also is heavily impacted by the backbone of the organization and the maturity of the organization and how they treat metrics. We know a tale as old as time, you’re going to get beat over the head if you’ve got a red visual indicator and you’re off target.

That will force people and it will make people try and work around the goal, right? If that’s the type of response that they think they’re going to get from their leadership. So emphasizing and pushing the organization culturally to reconsider what off target means.

I tell my teams, I fully expect if we’ve set stretch goals, which is the only type of goal I like to set, we’re going to challenge ourselves. If we set stretch goals and they’re progressive in nature, so they’re going to grow slowly month over month, that we will be red for at least the first third of the year.

Maybe into half the year, if the goal is brand new, it’s a new program, build out. It’s a new way of operating that we’ve got to train teams on. So I will not be surprised at all when my scorecard is pink and red. But tell me, I want to see that progressive growth, right? So as long as you can prove to me that we’re building the presence of any performance improvement in our month of our month performance, then I’m fine with it. But if you’re red and you’re getting deeper and deeper red, let’s go back into maroon and now black, this is a problem.

Jason J: Yeah. And you said some really important things like the red is beautiful piece where, you know, with what we’re doing, if the site isn’t performing, let’s say on the lagging piece, where they want to be, it’s a lot easier now to go back and correlate the data on your leading indicators Okay. Hey, they’re having more instance than they have on average the last three years what’s going on? Maybe their training percentage is low. Maybe they’re not doing their corrective actions on instance, maybe they’re not doing their behavior based safety op and again the activities that we said lead to success, they correlate 99.9% of the time to if you’re off base on your lagging you can now go in and see through one of our five or three of our you know, where you’re missing and what’s driving that?

It’s nice because again, visibility. 

Yes.

You don’t have to guess why something’s happening.

Hilary Framke: And I think if we’ve set the right goals we almost need to assume that they’re going to be red to start because why is it a goal if we’re not bad at it? There shouldn’t be gimme goals that again, another one of my pet peeves with EHS metrics on a larger operational scorecard.

It shouldn’t be that EHS is greenwashed so that the scorecard looks better overall, right? Our goal should be just as challenging if not more challenging than the other goals in the organization. And if it’s totally greenwashed. If I see that as an EHS leader, I’m going to say we’ve either set the wrong goals, we’re circumventing the goals, or what we’ve got potentially the best performing EHS program I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

Let’s find a better choice. 

Jason J: Perfect anecdote to that is, so this is the third year we’ve been active on our EHS scorecard. The first year we did it, we had three classifications, champion gold and silver. And the goals within those leading indicators were oftentimes easy to achieve. Some of the reasons why that was, we have a very broad, diverse organization. Different levels of maturity in the programs depending on the businesses. So we needed a level set everybody on the ground level. I know this is going to be too easy for an advanced group, but it’s going to be hard for a new group. But we needed to do that.

So we had a lot of people that scored a champion or a gold level. So the second year, last year, we tweaked the goals. We took the scoring, we only made two levels. They’re a champion or a gold level. We took away the silver level. We made the training percentage metrics harder, we tweaked all that stuff and in the last year, one of the operations directors came and was like, Hey, this is actually better.

This is a better stretch of where do people fall in the categories. It feels more right. It feels like more of a challenge and a little bit better of a system. So we’re even validated by going, Hey, we tweak things, we change them, we made them harder and our operational partners really appreciate that.

Hilary Framke: Oh, I love that. And I think that says a lot about where the continuous improvement side of your business and where it wants to go. I think the best businesses, right when they look at metric programs, they’re going to see it as a way to keep an eye on our growth. As you said in the beginning, is it helping, are those metrics helping us achieve our three year vision, our five year vision, they should be taking us there. I walked into an organization once who had a come in maybe 3 months after the metrics had been set. So I was seeing them for the first time. I was going to be their global director. So they were going to be mine to manage. I’m looking at them, right? And then I just reviewed the mission, the vision, the strategic plan for the organization.

The first thing I noticed was there’s no correlation. All these topics that you brought up, that you wanted to strategically pursue right and reducing carbon emissions, waste reductions and having more recycling versus landfill and all these amazing things they had said on the previous slide.

No landfill diversion metrics on the metric slide. This is what metrics should be used for, right? They should push you on that pathway, so don’t miss that opportunity as a business to do the same thing that you do for operations and finance and everything else within EHS. 

Jason J: Absolutely. And it’s just before this meeting, I actually met with the team who are creating the concepts for the scorecard for our fourth year. And we have a fiscal calendar. It starts in October. So we need to have our new scorecard ready to go socialize in front of everybody starting October 1. So we’re talking through the metrics now.

And Hey, what’s that next level of advancement of those actions that we need our operation partners to continue to drive the goal. So where you might start out as a broad goal or an easier number to achieve. We start constricting and tightening down and focus on more specific activities within those categories.

For instance, we started three years ago with all incidents need to be reported and you have a goal of reporting X amount of these things to do, where this year we change it to okay not only do you have to report an incident, but you have to have a CAPA and it has to be closed on time. We’re now pivoting that and tightening that up too.

You have to have all that. Plus it has to be reported and closed out and reported in 24 hours, which is our standard. You have to report all instances 24 hours and closed and classified within five days. So those requirements aren’t term. So we trained you to report all incidents. We’ve trained you to report instance and add a root cause and corrective action and close it. Now we’re training you to do all the stuff in the appropriate amount of time. So we keep driving those goals forward. 

Hilary Framke: Jason, what a cool concept. I really like this. It’s almost like versioning, right? So you’re saying, okay, this is where we want to be strategically.

We can’t just jump there. There’s all these preparation steps that need to happen. What a cool idea to set an evolving goal year over year that slowly builds on itself so that by year three, you have all of the tools that you need to be successful in that. 

Jason J: You can’t go from zero to 60.

You have to build up the steps because it’ll fail, people will be angry at you, and you’ve just blown the whole concept of what you’re trying to establish. Evolving, increasing goals, whether it’s harder numbers to achieve, more specific actions within those goals. And that’s what we’re doing, more specific action in some of our goals.

Hilary Framke: I really like that. 

So you brought this up a couple times. So I think I know your answer, but I’m still going to ask it. What’s the best mode of communication for EHS metric performance throughout the year? 

Jason J: We have our scorecard and we know what date of every month it comes out for everybody to see all updated, but there’s other metrics that we share weekly too.

So we do a scorecard. And it’s great and we use that in high level meetings. We use that in regional meetings. We use that in site level meetings. Everybody knows it, everybody’s engaged and that works best for us. It’s visible. No question.

Hilary Framke: Is that just an EHS scorecard or do you have EHS metrics inside a larger business one?

Jason J: Yeah, super good questions on that. So we’re going to toot our own horns here a little bit. We saw the opportunity within EHS, the need to have set metrics and goals, and to be able to share those out with everybody so they understand. So we do have an EHS only scorecard, but we do have dashboards and other scorecards now for other areas of the business, for their sales operations, distributions, R and D, whatever, where those pieces are now components are built into components of other people’s dashboards as they build their own scorecards.

Hilary Framke: Awesome. So the answer is both. 

Jason J: Yes, the answer is both, but we saw a need to do that. We took it on upon ourselves to do this and help it. And now as other groups are coming up with similar concepts, we already have our EHS platforms built. So when they put it in their overall scorecard, like you take operations, quality on time, delivery, safety, like we have our stuff built for them already. Hey, we’re done.

Hilary Framke: Love that. I finally had the opportunity. I had been playing with the idea of tiered scorecards for some time, based off the concept of the tier meetings, with SQDIP it process. So the idea of a tier one that is an entry level, a more frontline level type of goal, a tier two, that’s more of a middle management, and then a tier three, more executive was finally able to launch and try this at my last business that I worked for. So how it worked was, they were actually all different EHS metrics, but they compounded on each other. Let’s say so for instance, the investigation one that you brought up, investigations reported on time within 24 hours and then investigated within five days was a tier one goal, right?

And then the tier two goal was to reduce root cause. percentages, right? So we had done some root cause trending and that. Tier two goal actually went to the regions. So the tier one goal was at the local sites. The tier two goal was at the regional level and then the tier three goal was the executive level goals, right?

And so that obviously the executive goal was TRIR down, right? So that lagging metric. But inside the middle managers working on the root causes and risk reduction percentages that are coming out of the investigation. So that’s how we built it. And we had four different goals inside each tier part of the scorecard.

So interesting very outside of the box. There was a lot of pushback. People felt like there were 12 goals. This is way too many EHS goals. But there’s really only four because just like the SQDIP meetings the only things that you talk about at tier two level aren’t the tier ones that are off target. So if they’re green, we don’t talk about them at the tier two scorecard and same is true of tier three. We don’t talk about the tier ones or tier twos that aren’t off target, right?

We just escalate the things that are going well up to those levels. I actually thought this. So look, I was only there about 18 months, right? To be able to see it launch and run so initial pushback, but it was a program that I think we had the ability to mature that after my departure, could have been really cool.

It started like by like month six, month seven, people started to get on board and understand the concept because it was so similar to the construct of the SQDIP process. And started to get on board. So it’s very cool. 

Jason J: Yeah, great concept of the tiered goal setting internally with the EHS.

We actually have some of our own measures of success. We create a measure of success tables that really go along with our SWOT analysis roadmaps that we build into. So on our scorecard, we’re showing five leading and two lagging indicators, but with our measures of success internally for the EHS team, we have a broader set of things that we look at that go along with it, and then expectations to your taking your incident data, whether it’s site level, regional level, whatever it is in creating action plans based around it. And then we have a quarterly all hands meeting where everybody every manager or business owner gets to talk through? Hey, where are we at in the roadmap? You know if I hit my goals, if I haven’t what’s stopping us? What help is needed? Let’s take a look at the metrics. How are we doing? What are we learning from our metrics and trends and stuff that we want to focus on? so it’s fun because everybody gets treated like a business leader. They get a chance in front of their peers to talk through how they’re doing if they need help, what’s going on.  They really get a sense of ownership.

And I think it makes people value their work or care about their work a little bit more, and we never used to do that. 

Hilary Framke: Yes, everybody wants to know where they sit, and they want to understand if they have opportunities, what specific activity do I need to go do to be successful in this to help us achieve that vision that we have for our EHS program, and I think metrics help you get there. 

Let’s shift gears a bit. What are your thoughts about another kind of hot button topic, qualitative metrics, like improving a program or building a green team and environmental team in the year versus quantitative metrics with numbers?

Do you think that qualitative metrics are okay to have on a scorecard or not? 

Jason J: Yes and no. I’m not going to commit. Concept I was just talking about with the overall company scorecard versus internal scorecards. I think as long as you differentiate those levels, like I’m okay to have qualitative metrics or qualitative goals for the internal EHS team when we’re talking through roadmaps then those quarterly reviews.

I think that’s fair. Ultimately, if we’re doing something for organizationally or creating really goals around that are strong goals and people are going to be graded on those, you got to have SMART goals. So you really have to have something that’s measurable. So you can say, Hey, a goal is to improve a program. Okay. What are the steps you’re taking to improve the program? If you start breaking stuff down, it gets a little bit easier to be measurable or SMART within it, but it’s hard to put that on a scorecard for external partners outside of EHS.

Now, that’s my opinion. I would love to hear from anybody who wants to hit me up at some point through LinkedIn and tell me otherwise, because I’m open to learning other things, but that’s just my internal philosophy. 

Hilary Framke: Yeah, let’s open up a really disruptive comment section. I’m down for it. So drop your comments here if you disagree with Jason.

Jason J: People disagree with me. I’m okay with that. It’s an opportunity to learn. 

Hilary Framke: You know what? You can’t drive change if you don’t have tough conversations. I’m all about it. I’m going to weigh in too. So look, I am super against qualitative metrics on a scorecard because exactly what you said they’re not measurable, a 10 isn’t something that I can watch change throughout the year and watch its health go up or down on a monthly basis.

I don’t want to hear, okay we’re six months in, you still haven’t done it, okay, no, you’ve done it in month seven so now you’re green for the rest of the year with no effort. That to me is not a KPI.

Correct.

So what I started to do in my businesses was, but look what we do is extremely qualitative, right? So it’s hard. 

Jason J: Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Hilary Framke: Not to set any. You wanna set some. So what I did is you’ve got your KPIs that you’re setting that are locked down, that are gonna go on a scorecard and be communicated, but then you have like your excellence strategy or your roadmap to success, right? And  measures of success, I think is what you would call those we actually set just like KPIs on an annual basis in the different categories and they’re connected to the KPIs, right? So they might be the program build outs that we need in order to run these metrics. They might be some type of compliance audit that’s occurring throughout the business.

It might be doing wellness events at the various sites at a certain percentage, right? And it’s a part of our strategy. But it’s not robust enough to end up on a scorecard. 

Jason J: You said it perfectly. Those are the roadmap or key components for your reaching the strategy or vision. They’re not necessarily measurables against activities. Again, that’s why we do those internally.

We do those roadmap checks quarterly more qualitative, we look at our scorecard metrics there too, but that’s okay for the company, for our partners, we need to have solid. I can measure this. I can’t measure this.

Hilary Framke: Yes. Love it. Sounds like we agree.

Jason J: I agree with you.

We’re the smartest people. So yeah, of course we agree. Come on. We’re the smartest two people talking on this podcast right now. 

Hilary Framke: Yes. 100%. Okay. 

Last question for you, Jason. I feel like I’ve put you through the ringer. So last one, what is your favorite EHS KPI and why?

Jason J: So that’s a fun question. Also, i’m gonna give you two i’m gonna give what’s a current one and what we’re moving to and i’ve already talked a little bit about them.

I really love the metric that we’re using this year on incident reporting where you get credit if you’ve reported the incident, you’ve created a CAPA and you’ve closed the CAPA in the time you’ve set to close that out. I think that’s incredibly important again. I said it before, it’s nice to identify hazards. The most important thing is what have you done to correct them fix them before it happens again or hurt somebody else in the situation. So I love that one like right now because it shows hazard identification and actions with it and if you don’t have actions, you’re never going to get better.

So that’s my current favorite one. My new favorite one is going to be on our scorecard next year. When we measure the timeframes for all that to take place. And are we doing it within the expected times? Because that’s going to show real focus and importance and criticality of everything, right? 

Hilary Framke: You mean like percent closure rates? Is that what you’re saying? 

Jason J: Have you reported in 24 hours? Have you done the investigation, close the classified in five days? Because that shows criticalness of the issue. Right now, you can take three weeks, which is bad but that’s really going to tighten things up. And I cannot wait to see how well we excel against that metric in 25. 

Hilary Framke: And then the year after that, it’s going to be setting some timeframes on closing your corrective actions in a certain timeframe. 

Jason J: We already have that a little bit, actually. One of our measures now is compliance calendar closure rate. So not only do we have our set monthly calendars, which says daily, weekly, monthly, activity, or quarterly, or biannually in there, but If you have set an action item based on an incident and have not closed it, that will work against you in that category.

Hilary Framke:  Oh, you guys are fancy over there.

Congratulations. Love that. I think that’s great. It says so much about where you’re trying to take your program and progress and continuous improvement, which we’re all about in EHS. Jason, we’re going to wrap here. I would invite everyone to drop your comments. Here around this podcast clip, tell us what you think.

Tell us your favorite EHS KPI. I’m accepting all criticism. 

Nobody’s going to say that this has been fantastic, Jason. Thanks for all that you do in our EHS industry. And thank you for being on the podcast today. 

Jason J: Thank you for asking me. It was my pleasure.

Hilary Framke: Bye.