If you’ve ever watched a team of rowers glide across the water, you’ve seen how important it is to keep a shared vision front and center. When crew members aren’t in sync, their work can become inefficient, morale may decline, and notching a win can prove challenging. So it is, too, with busy health departments. Without centered goals communicated effectively to employees, it’s far too easy for the work to flounder and employees to burn out.
The practice of centering goals and taking steps to ensure that every team member’s work aligns with those goals has many benefits. It helps teams to work together, and to flex and adapt as demands and priorities shift. It also helps teams use resources effectively and promotes information sharing. Understanding how their work contributes to a larger goal can also help keep individual contributors engaged.
Centering goals that resonate with employees may feel like a heavy lift, especially in larger or complex organizations. But it doesn’t have to, according to Buddy Hargett, director of Organizational Effectiveness and Development for the Lake County Health Department and Community Health Center in Waukegan, Illinois.
Hargett oversees strategic planning, quality improvement, organizational development, recruiting, marketing and communications, and learning and development for the department. “Those are all the pieces that help move strategy along,” he said. “We want to know where we’re going, we want to make sure we’re getting the right people with the right skills here to do that work, and we want to be able to tell our stories.”
Lake County Health Department and Community Health Center is a local health department with 1,000 employees and includes a federally qualified health center. “About one in every 20 residents in our community comes to us for their healthcare services,” Hargett said. “We provide healthcare to the most vulnerable in our community of 700,000 while also trying to address public health issues.”
Employees work in the department’s main Waukegan office and in 22 locations countywide. “It does make planning more complicated when parts of the organization deal with population-level planning, assessments, and initiatives and you have another group that has a patient in front of them,” Hargett said.
Find your lane and stay in it
Broad, visionary goals can feel overwhelming at times. While they offer essential targets, it’s important to tie larger goals into the work employees do every day. Hargett said his agency begins with completing a community health assessment and community health improvement plan every five years, using NACCHO’s Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) 2.0 framework.
“That’s where the big picture stuff happens,” he said. “We have a group of 120 community partners called Live Well Lake County. It includes leaders from nonprofits, hospitals, and churches, as well as people with lived expertise.”
Lake County Health does the “heavy lifting” of data collection, surveys, and focus groups to complete the community health assessment. “We work with Live Well Lake County to develop a countywide health improvement plan,” Hargett said. “We take that plan and ask, ‘Where do we fit, as a local health department, into the priorities identified by this community-driven group?’”
Some of the group’s priorities are more upstream, such as improving educational outcomes. “That’s not us,” Hargett said. “We ask, ‘What is our piece of this countywide plan and what are we going to do at our local health department?’”
Answers to those questions form the foundation of Lake County Health’s departmental goals. The department has 66 programs, and Hargett said his team starts by asking how each department priority and goal fits in at the program level. “We keep working down from there,” he said. “We break goals down into themes, priorities, and actions until we get to separate streams of work with specific activities that need to get done.”
Find the common thread
With varied programs and employees working in different locations, how can health departments keep teams centered around common goals?
“For us, the common thread that runs all the way through is quality improvement,” Hargett said. “Our centered goal is to be better today than we were yesterday. We want every program to have this mindset.”
That quality improvement goal has remained through various iterations of the department’s strategic plan, Hargett said. When executive leadership changes, goals may become more disease-specific or veer upstream toward solving community issues.
“We would have staff that were excited about those goals because they could see themselves in the work,” Hargett said. “But we had other groups where that wasn’t the case. For example, an employee might say, ‘I test water. Where does my work fit in?’”
Quality improvement as a centered goal helps remind every employee that the work they do matters, even if it doesn’t tie into other specific goals. “There’s a stewardship aspect to it,” Hargett said. “Our community deserves that and that’s the impact we want to have. Why we exist as an organization should be felt throughout the entire agency.”
Celebration helps keep goals centered
Every two years, Lake County Health completes employee engagement surveys that solicit broad feedback on the employee experience, including culture, perceptions of leadership, connection to the organization’s mission and vision, and employee perceptions of development opportunities. Separately, the agency has Quality Improvement Committees that help assess performance within service areas and develop activities to drive improvement within each program.
“As an agency, we get far more frustrated at apathy than at anything else,” Hargett said. “If a program is actively trying to make improvements, even if those improvements are incremental, we’ll talk about how incremental improvement is still improvement. If that’s what the program can do right now, let’s celebrate it. They own it, they’re excited about it, and we can keep them moving toward that centered goal.”
Lake County Health also brings its leadership together for a half-day meeting twice a year to talk through goals and improvements. But a key focus remains being better today than yesterday and celebrating progress — no matter how small.
“It’s too easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis,” Hargett said. “People couldn’t move forward because they didn’t think something was good enough. So, we had to step back and say let’s do the work toward being better. That’s our goal.”
Hargett noted that celebrating incremental progress can prove challenging for leadership at times. “This approach requires a lot of humility, grace, and patience,” he said. “We want things to be impactful and to show the public, elected officials, and community partners the amazing work we’re doing. A group may celebrate incremental improvement of 2% in the last three months, but we’re still 20% below our target. Celebrating with them and telling them to keep it up can be hard when you see the gap that still exists. As an organization and senior leadership team, we must remind ourselves that they’re doing exactly what we told them to — they’re better today than they were yesterday.”
Action steps for centering goals
- Keep it simple. Don’t overthink goal setting. Use established models and frameworks only as they’re helpful. Gather feedback and set goals that are right for your organization.
- Listen, then talk: Employees who are excited about their work can influence others. Find out what matters to your team and create goals that help them feel connected to outcomes.
- Communicate. Then, communicate some more: Make sure all employees understand how their work contributes to the common goal.
- Celebrate wins: Regularly recognizing progress toward goals helps keep teams on track and motivated.
- Be a snowplow: Whenever possible, clear the path and make it easier for employees to improve.