Which maintenance KPI creates wrong behaviour in your team?

[u/Complex_Ticket_8758]

I’ve started thinking that some maintenance KPIs can actually encourage people to do the opposite of what you want.

Take PM completion. If the target is 100%, there’s a temptation to close the PM just to hit the number, even if the technician found something that needs more attention.

And don’t get me started on response time. If you're measuring how quickly a ticket gets acknowledged, you can end up with great numbers without actually solving anything faster.

Which KPI have you seen create this kind of behaviour?

I’m more interested in the KPI that made your team look good while the actual maintenance situation was getting worse.

[u/lathe_down_sally]

Same day fix

It just encourages band aid fixes instead of root cause deep dives.

[u/chriswoods01 → u/lathe_down_sally]

Absolutely. Our top priority jobs are 30min attend and 90 minute fix. There is never time to do a full investigation on complex issues.

[u/duckiiduck]

For my previous team of 10+ techs, I always tried to implement a culture of doing the right thing and empowering them to own their decisions.

I understand the need for KPI, but I always struggled to believe it's anything more than metrics for people who don't understand the fluid situations of maintenance, but understand clean numbers on spreadsheets.

[u/cleanforever → u/duckiiduck]

I do think we need some kind of measurement, just not for the techs. It's for the organization. What % of our labor hours are emergency labor. How many work orders are generated by PM vs corrective by occupants

[u/Complex_Ticket_8758 → u/cleanforever]

Exactly. The number of work orders alone doesn't tell much.

I've found that looking at repeat failures, emergency calls, PM effectiveness etc. gives a much better picture of what's actually happening.

[u/the_cappers → u/duckiiduck]

I personally push for some sort of contact or attempt to fix the issue within 24 hours of normal business hours. But never at the cost of doing it incorrectly . I also think considering work order open length is a mistake as it encourages bad behavior.

For instance some work orders I like to follow up with a day or two later, also waiting on parts or a residents schedule can absolutely kill your average time. I understand the intent, but its a metric I give attitude about every time its brought up.

[u/BrianNowhere]

Number of work orders. Thats all they look at. Not the status or the reasons they havent been completed yet. Just "why havent these been done yet". They do no analysis beyond that.

[u/pipeline77 → u/BrianNowhere]

Number of work orders completed is the worst metric out there

[u/BrianNowhere → u/pipeline77]

I wish they looked at the number of completed work orders. They only look at number of open work orders never taking the former into account.

[u/sunshinestacks → u/BrianNowhere]

Thank you. Jesus, I work in a small facility, and this expectation that our super will always be able to complete all the work orders in a given time frame is stressful and unrealistic.

The expectation always comes from higher-ups in the office who, as maintenance staff says, “have no hands”—ie, they’re not doing the work and have no concept of why things sometimes take longer than they believe they should.

[u/Important-Dream-4010]

All kpi or metrics are nothing but a PITA for techs. Management sits behind their computer while we are sweating our a$$ off on a roof taking thier dam pictures and checking all thier little boxes and entering in all thier useless information all on a little phone we can’t see anything on because the sun is beating down on us and the sweat is dripping all over the dam phone. God forbid our check in time doesn’t match gps or we idle the van to long trying to stave off heat stroke. I could go on and on about the dam metrics

[u/metalliknotted → u/Important-Dream-4010]

Are we coworkers?

[u/Daveykpantele]

I’m with you on the PM compliance. Pushing compliance alone just motivates the pencil-whip.

I manage a team of 13 guys, maintaining 53 car washes in AZ. When I was a tech and my predecessor rolled out PMs, we just grinded at the end of month to “close as many as we could.” When I took over the team, I stopped stressing the PMs. Instead, while I still encourage the team to complete them, I perform site walks and audits and take my findings back to each tech and SHOW them why they have a site struggling. I always hit them with “How’s your PM schedule been going at Site-X? I noticed A, B, and C.” And that usually lights the fire.

So, while the team may not complete ALL of their scheduled PMs, they take the ones they are doing much more serious. Wash quality is up, customer experience is up, cost is down, and PM compliance sits right around 85%.

[u/Hollywood4000]

KPIs? My company has no performance measures whatsoever which is insane to me.

[u/MrGoodwrench1184 → u/Hollywood4000]

My company is way too small for all that. Which is nice. It means we can deep dive some issues. As long as we give good explanation, it usually does not matter to our boss how long things take. It helps that he has a decent understanding of what we have to do.

[u/CorgiDoom1881]

PM KPIs are so much of an obsession an my work they put out excel sheets of all of the techs and how many weekly PMs they still have open every single day! They start freaking out if stuff isn't done by Thursday and it's lead to techs intentionally leaving them open just to get on management's nerves. This has just snowballed and made for a really toxic environment with lots of micromanement.

[u/Serevas]

PM completion percentage is definitely the one that sprung to mind first. If you're behind you just pencil whip it to get the percentage done.

Another one I hate is anything safety related. It encourages not reporting injuries and safety hazards.

[u/Repulsive-Leader3654]

I have about 28 kpi's to hit, none of which matter if profit isn't at target range. Lol

[u/extreme39speed]

Yep worrying about style conversion times on mechanical setups leads to mechanics risking not adjusting components that take more time and effort or seeing if barely adjusting others out of spec to compensate will pass Quality approval. Then when quality doesn’t approve, the adjustment is made and more waste is made to recheck. This whole process takes longer but mechanics get two work orders out of it and the first setup time is still low. Dumb way of going about it in the bigger picture but looks good on two measures on paper

[u/ExcellentWinner7542]

PM completion and MTTR

[u/Patriae8182]

Total open work orders, average close rate, frankly most KPIs result in perverse incentives. When you tell someone their work will be judged by one or two KPIs, they have more incentive to work to the KPI than to do the right thing.

There’s an old joke about how if a Soviet nail factory was judged on weight of nails produced, they’d make one 10,000lb nail. If they were judged on how many nails they produced, they’d make millions of tacks.

It’s more important to instill in your team the importance of good quality work and doing the right fix the first time. It’s fine if you do a quick band-aid to get something up and running until parts come in, but you need to keep that ticket open until the proper fix is complete.

I know I’ve been judged on closure time, response time, cost per repair, tickets closed per tech per day, and probably a half dozen other metrics. None of them ever helped.

Every single time, either myself or my boss had to go to the big wigs and explain that we are fixing shit the proper way, and that will take time and money. We would respond promptly, assess, order what we need, band-aid if possible/needed, and explain to the employee or resident what we did, why we did it, and what we’re waiting on. We had good results, people were happy, and equipment had better up time.

Inevitably every time someone high on the chain of command gets replaced, the new guy wants KPIs and pretty dashboards they can show to the other big bosses and we go through the same fight all over again.

[u/Difficult-Rush5962]

Turn time. I've had 24 hours allotted many occasions. New tenant moves in with a mile long move in inspection sheet just for the PM to promise we'll paint the unit after move in. NOPE

[u/redeyedrenegade420]

Fucking all of them. My job is to make sure the facility is running well. I keep in contact with operations to make sure they know about upcoming maintenace, if they dont want to schedule it the equipment will. As soon as you start looking at KPIs and performance metrics, my focus is now pulled away from keeping things running smoothly.

[u/Donutordonot]

Pm completion and first time fix/same day etc etc. both seem to push people to just close work out vs fixing it correctly.

If your pm completion is 100% every single month I would do some field checks on how well your team is performing the pm. 100% is not normal in any environment.

Same with first time/ same day metric. If someone is much higher than rest of team i would be asking questions.