A word or phrase for valuing the metric over what's being measured

As an example, let's say a company does an employee satisfaction survey and the scores come back low. Instead of addressing the complaints, they send out a memo saying that they'll start basing bonuses on the survey results. Lo and behold, scores improve dramatically, and the execs pat themselves on the back for raising employee satisfaction.

Or perhaps a factory has a perfect safety record on paper, so when someone gets injured, they pressure the person to not report it as a workplace injury.

Basically, having a metric for some real-world situation, but then making the metric artificially high in ways that don't relate to the situation it was designed to track.

Solution 1:

I think the term that best describes this is perverse incentive.

A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the interests of the incentive makers.

See: Wikipedia - Perverse Incentive

I’ve linked the wikipedia article because it contains a lot of scenarios that match the example you provided - action/initiative taken to address a problem but results in an outcome that doesnt really deal with it. Here’s one of the many examples:

In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat tail handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.