Case Study 2: Setting Performance Objectives
The case study “Setting Performance Objectives” talks about a supervisor named Jane Persons who is supposed to come up with five objectives for the word processing department of a company. Jane feels that the whole thing is “wheel spinning” and that there is no way they can set that many objectives for her department. She feels that the other departments, such as the sales group, can set objectives, but that it would be pointless for hers.
Jane is correct when she says that the planning system is a lot of wheel spinning. Everyone is going to be trying so hard to think of the ways to make their area better that they will not be focusing on the job at hand. In her area there is not much they can do to improve because they just do the processing it would be hard for them to come up with anything. One example she gives is “we will process 9,500 pages in the next year.” This is an impossible objective because they cannot put a number on how many pages they will process.
A key performance area Jane could focus on is that the employees are sure they are paying attention. If an employee hits a wrong button then they could mess up a whole lot of papers. It is impossible to never make mistakes; however, if they are paying attention than many could be avoided. They cannot put make an objective to say they will not make errors because that would also be an impossible goal. It is hard to set a goal for a job like this because they do not know how many papers they will process each year, and there is no way to set a goal of how many they want to process.
Jane stated that “the objective is to do a good job at getting the required word processing done for these other departments as quickly as possible.” This objective meets the Guidelines for Setting Objectives because it is measurable. The guidelines state that the objective should