To deliver quality services to stakeholders in an efficient and cost effective way, councils need to ensure their staff are accountable and focused on their performance. This becomes even more critical in times of budget cuts or shortfalls and staff reductions.

Accountability often starts with good talent management practices, and in particular, goal management best practices. Here's a look at practices for effective goal management and how they can help drive accountability.

· Document goals, usually as part of the regular performance review process, but sometimes as part of a separate goal setting exercise. Ensure they are agreed to and written down so both managers and employees know what is expected of the employee.

· Managers should meet at least quarterly with all staff members to review and document progress on goals, set new goals and/or adjust existing goals. Research by Bersin by Deloitte has shown that organisations that review goals quarterly see better results. This is due in part to the fact that there is now a regular forum for employees to ask for help or coaching, for managers and employees to adjust or rebalance goals, and for performance to be reviewed and discussed. It also helps to ensure that employee goals are always current, relevant and clear. But it also ensures that goals aren't set and forgotten. Employees know they'll be asked to regularly account for their actions and progress.

· Involve employees in goal setting. Encourage them towrite the first draft of their own goals. Make sure goals aren't just handed down or assigned to them from on high. When employees write or help to write their own goals, they naturally feel more committed to them and more accountable for accomplishing them. They feel like they have a stake in their own success. And they tend to have greater clarity about what is expected of them.

· Give employees visibility into the organisation's high level goals and help them understand what they are/mean. Make sure they know what the organisation is trying to accomplish and why. When employees see the organisation modelling accountability in this way, they are more inclined to be accountable themselves.

· Link employee goals to the organisational goals they support. This gives employees a larger context for their work and helps them see how they are helping the organisation deliver on its mission and strategy. This context contributes to employee engagement and helps to drive high performance and accountability.

· Ensure all goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound). Using this formula helps ensure clarity. Employees need to clearly know what they are supposed to accomplish, by when, why it's important, and how success will be measured. And this requirement also extends to organisational goals. Too often organisational goals are written in vague terms, with no real time-line or defined measures of success. If employees are to feel engaged and accountable for helping to achieve organisational goals, the goals need to be effectively written.

· Make sure managers and employees engage in an on-going, two-way conversation about expectations, performance and development needs. Let employees know they are free to discuss the challenges they face and ask for help, as well as showcase their accomplishments. Managers should provide on-going feedback about performance, coach their employees, recognize and even reward accomplishments, and help employees to continually develop and improve their performance. This on-going dialogue helps to communicate the importance placed on employee goals and performance, and drive up accountability.

· Regularly communicate goal progress and status at all levels of the organisation. If no one cares about your progress, why would you? To keep employees accountable and engaged, you need to regularly ask them to communicate the status of their goals, and communicate that up the management chain in an appropriate form. You also need to regularly communicate the status of organisational goals to employees, so they see progress being made at a higher level, and continue to feel engaged in contributing to organisational goals.

· Review and assess performance of previously set goals as part of a regular performance review process. Where performance gaps exist, the manager and employee should put development plans in place to help the employee improve their performance. This helps to communicate the importance placed on employee performance and encourages greater accountability.

The simple fact is, staff pay attention to what's important to their managers and tend to focus their efforts on those things. If you want to make employees more accountable for their work and accomplishments, you need to make goals an important and regular topic of discussion, at every level of the organisation. Best practice goal management can help you do that.

Scott Russell is a certified human capital strategist and regional manager at Halogen Software.