The most influential, indispensable measures of an agency’s impact are those that demonstrate its contribution to the community’s well-being.
What do your measures say about your agency’s priorities? Do they emphasize its activities and performance? Or do they demonstrate the value it provides to stakeholders? The saying, "What gets measured gets done” is true: people pay attention to the things that are measured. Yet countless first responder agencies metaphorically shoot themselves in the foot by measuring their activities or performance instead of their impact on public safety. Is yours one of them?
First let’s define the relevant terms. Activities are tasks such as attending briefings, maintaining equipment, conducting investigations, and participating in training. Performance represents outputs – i.e., what happens when people – individually, as a team, or as an agency – carry out their assigned activities. Typical output indicators include individual performance evaluations, response times, and the number and/or types of incidents to which the agency responds each year. Outcome is the desired end result, the "big picture,” which for public safety agencies may be described as creating safe, healthy, economically viable communities.
Next, ask yourself this question: "Do our stakeholders care most about our activities, our performance, or the outcome we can provide them?” Unless they are highly unusual, your community members won’t care at all about your activities, though some may pay attention to your performance. Instead, their focus is on the level of public safety that they expect.
Here are three benefits to utilizing outcome measures: (1) you grab stakeholders’ attention because you are addressing what matters to them; (2) your agency is able to demonstrate clearly the contribution it makes to public safety; and (3) because your employees unmistakably can see what’s important, their efforts will be directed toward the desired outcome instead of concentrated solely on activities or outputs.
How do you identify outcome-oriented measures? Follow these three steps:
Identify a possible measure by asking, "How will our stakeholders know that we have done [insert action or result]?”
Determine whether that potential measure matters to them by asking, "Do they care?” If they do not, return to step #1. If they do, proceed to step #3.
Discover whether you truly have an outcome measure by asking, "So what?” If there is an answer, you aren’t there yet. Keep repeating "So what?” until there are no further answers. That result is your outcome measure.
For example, stakeholders know you engage in training because when you arrive on the scene of an incident they see your team working professionally to address the situation (step 1). Stakeholders care because they expect competent first responders to take care of the emergency (step 2). So what? By effectively handling emergencies, public safety professionals are contributing to the safety and health of the community (step 3).
Please note: while activities and outputs are necessary and should be assessed, their measures are not sufficient to enable employees and stakeholders to remain focused on, and achieve, the end result. Keeping the big picture as the agency’s top priority requires outcome-based measures.
To find other articles and resources that may be of value to you, I invite you to visit my web site at www.PublicSafetyInsights.net.
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