Team Process Selection: Setting Smart Goals and

Team Process Selection: Setting SMART goals and avoiding social loafing For the purpose of this paper, I agreed to volunteer on a local committee designed to reduce childhood obesity in our immediate area. As is the case with many communities, the increasing BMI of children due to unhealthy food consumption and a lack of places to exercise are of great concern, especially to parents of elementary and middle school-age children. The committee was designed to create a less obesegenic environment through a variety of initiatives for this age group.

The committee works closely with the local elementary and middle schools, providing suggestions and support to make it easier for children to walk to school. Recent efforts have included putting in new bike racks on school grounds and hiring an additional crossing guard, to make walking to school less hazardous. The school has also eliminated bake sales as a source of fundraising. Volunteers go to local schools, scout troops, and community centers to educate children about making healthy choices.

The committee has sponsored races especially for children to promote healthy living. It has a Facebook page where it shares healthy suggestions for kid-friendly recipes and suggestions to parents to incorporate healthy foods and healthy life practices into the family's daily life. SMART goals are an acronym for goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely ("Creating SMART goals," Top Achievement, 1). In the case of the committee, I would give the overall performance a 'B' for its efforts.

While the overall goal is obesity reduction, there are no specifically quantifiable goals, such as reducing the BMI of students at area schools by a specific measurement, increasing activity by a certain measure, or increasing consumption of healthy food. This is partially due to the fact that it is very difficult to measure how effective an obesity-reduction campaign is, given that children are affected by so many other factors in their daily lives.

Also, BMI is difficult to measure in constantly-growing children, and children unlike adults are supposed to be gaining weight (provided they are not extremely obese). The population is so broad it is challenging to create goals that are specific and measurable. This make the 'attainable' status more questionable, as does the realism of anti-obesity efforts which have such a diffuse goal.

However, the committee could at very least set more specific goals for itself, such as having one event every month, updating the Facebook page on a specific timetable, and creating a specific number of events with area organizations and schools on a schedule. Another of the problems is that the causes of obesity are difficult to determine (whether they are primarily due to diet or a lack of activity).

The efforts of the committee are occasionally stymied because there is disagreement about what aspects of the anti-obesity effort should be emphasized: dieting or exercise. Because the membership is somewhat fluid, depending on volunteer's various schedules, this also creates a lack of ideological consistency as some members disagree as to what is a healthy vs. An unhealthy diet for children. Despite these problems, the committee does try to promote healthy eating and encourage children to move more and engage in fewer asocial, sedentary activities like computer games.

Focusing more on healthy lifestyle changes vs. anti-obesity efforts might also help to focus the efforts of the team and create a more cohesive effort. The team members who were present seemed relatively committed and there was little evidence of social loafing. Social loafing refers to "group members who don't carry their weight -- the free riders, the ones that hard-working group members hate and the ones that make faculty wonder if it's ethically responsible to use group work" in school or at work (Weimer 1).

In a volunteer effort, some form of team work is a virtual necessity. Fortunately, when group members are volunteers and are there because they want to be there, not because they feel they 'have' to be there, social loafing is less likely to occur. I did notice one or two members of the group were less vocal, but I attributed this to shyness more than to a desire to 'sponge' off of the efforts of others.

In volunteer efforts (unlike at school or work), chronic social loafers are simply inclined not to show up. However, given the variable membership of the all-volunteer committee, this does indicate that overall many members may be technically part of the organization but make very little physical contribution to the effort from month to month, engaging in a kind of invisible social loafing. The difference between.