Metrics or Targets and the abstract of evaluations?

July 14, 2021/Business/

Really good funeral directors are great to have working on your team. If you have a really good funeral director in your employ, how do you know it?

Are there metrics that can be quantified to tell if you do have a really good funeral director on your team? If so, how do you get those metrics to the leadership level to be evaluated? I suppose that you could have surveys filled out by a family member. . . . but what if the family member that fills out the survey is not indicative of how all family members perceived the funeral directors efforts — Good or Bad?

With apologies to the newsletter “The Hustle“, I just read a cautionary tale of how “Metrics” can become “Targets” and that situation might not be good for a business.

The Hustle told the story of the nail factory manager that wanted more output from his workers. He decided that the workers would be evaluated on how many nails that could put out in a day. Well, he soon learned that they could double the output of the nails, but the nails were only half the size that he wanted.

He changed the evaluation metric to pounds of nails per day and found that the workers could manufacture more poundage per day by making the nails twice the size that was necessary.

You get the point. . . .his metric had turned into a “Target”. And the “Target” did nothing for the business. . . it only satisfied the metric that had been agreed upon for the workers to get bonus pay. Too small nails and/or too little nails did not work for the carpenters that were the customers.

The Hustle pointed out some professions where general metrics have became targets without really improving the end result of what the customer came for. Here’s a couple of examples they gave:

The Legal Profession: The metric seems to be “Billable Hours”. . . shouldn’t it be “Impact”?
Academia: The metric seems to be “Publications”. . . shouldn’t it be “Creation of Knowledge”?
Teaching: The metric seems to be “Standardized test scores”. . .shouldn’t it be “Enrichment of Minds”?

You get the message, and hopefully, you can also see the difficulty. The “metrics” that are used are all easily quantifiable. . . the reality of what success should be is not. . .it is an abstract.

So, how does a good funeral home owner know when he has a great employee? Is the great employee the one who reaches the top range in that metric of price per sale? If so, how do we know that that funeral director has not turned that metric into his target to simply satisfy his employer and maybe, while satisfying that metric, other metrics of client satisfaction trail off.

A questionairre should catch that occurrence, but even if it does how does one deal with an employee that satisfies one metric but not another? Evaluating employees is an imprecise science.

I’m a team player and at the height of my business I employed six funeral directors. While we did have evaluations, I never had individual metrics. We only had team metrics and the only one that mattered was number of calls performed by the funeral home. Reaching our goal for the year paid the first bonus, ten extra calls got us to the next, and ten more the next and so on.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

I was always happy to pay the bonuses to the entire team because that meant that the business and management was doing fine as well. And, at the end of the day with a prospering business. . . . it’s really about selling more nails. . . or servicing more families, isn’t it? And, our team knew that more calls meant bigger bonuses. . . and I observed them turning new calls into forever families. That’s how a business gets built and prospers.

When it came to arrangement room sales numbers I always felt that was my responsibility as an owner. If I needed, according to the budget that I had set up, $5000 in margin per call, it was my responsibility to set the prices so that over time, that is the number that would be the average. I always felt that it was my funeral director’s resonsibility to be able to fit any family into a budget and services that the family was comfortable with without having a sales “metric” or sales “target”.

I have the chance to visit with front line funeral directors all the time because of this blog. There seems to be an overarching concern with the number of “metrics” many of them are asked to achieve. If I owned some of these funeral homes, I might be concerned that these “metrics” are just being turned into “targets” to reach a goal without the long-term prognosis in play.

There is no right or wrong answer on this subject and there are a lot of different ways to evaluate and bonus employees. If you are a funeral home owner or manager, I challenge you to be creative in how you do so and maybe with the right system in place you can help yourself, your business, and your employees.

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