June 22, 2009

How to Set Goals in a Public Sector Organization

Goal setting intervention in public sector organizations has become a crucial topic on government websites and scholar articles of recent. State and government personal agencies are very concerned with high rate of retirements and are preparing themselves for the upcoming highly developed 21st century and recruiting and developing their potential workforce.

The main focus of goal setting intervention in public sector organization is to ensure that this organization continues to operate competitively and effectively even as leaders leave or pursue other ventures. This is frequent part of social work organizations whose focus is aimed at fostering client growth. It involves the process of systematically identifying, assessing and developing organizational leadership to ensure that all important positions in an organization are filled. By having goal setting intervention plan, managerial decisions, daily operations, and resource allocations can also be set to improve the performance targets offered by such agencies.

The first step in goal setting intervention in a public sector organization is to know what the customers think is important. This is a salient factor which drives goal setting intervention and performance measurement in agencies and government establishments.

A big question to be asked is if goal setting intervention applies to the federal government? Well, don't be alarmed, because it covers the federal government too. In fact, it has satisfied about 300 million customers. These agencies that are part of the public sector organization must have goals set through the President's Executive Order 12862. This order is called "Setting Customer Service Standard" which requires agencies to offer customer service that is equal to the quality business processes.

The federal government faces challenges that are not unique to the public sector, rather a combination of both which makes the fundamental performance improvements harder to achieve than expected.

A small amount of factors can affect goal setting interventions and management efforts, but customer needs, stakeholders concerns and corporate resources must be put into consideration. The following are some of the critical success factors used for goal setting in public sector organizations:

- The involvement of stakeholders must be present so as to help in the improvement program.

- There should be a measure of their performance and use it as a yardstick against other organizations performance and business needs.

- They should systematically link improvement goals to the organization's objectives and core business culture: this way a clear vision of the outcomes must be achieved at defined milestones.

- Improved goals to day-to-day decision making activities at operational level must be supported by educational training programs.

- Ambitious and realistic goals must be set which should be a basis of the mission, customers' needs and current performance levels which will challenge the organization to achieving great performance improvements.

Vital information to take note is goal setting intervention and process in public sector organizations requires careful consideration. In order to avoid negative consequences, the performance goals must be realistically achievable, at the same time, setting goals which are too modest can lead an organization to stick to the current work process which would be difficult to change in the long run, thereby creating counter productivity.

In conclusion, agencies need to make concurrent progress on important factors thereby agreeing on the missions and goals and defining the outcomes by building data systems and staff. With these in progress, goal setting intervention in public sector organizations will be achievable and attainable.