Protecting your funeral home or cemetery from lawsuits and bad publicity isn't just a legal and public relations issue, it's an ethical one. Creating an ethical workplace is not an indefinable goal; there are specific steps you can and should take to make sure you and your employees are behaving ethically to each other, to other businesses and to the customers whose trust we need.
An Ethical System Can Help Protect Your Cemetery or Funeral Home
by Christine Toson Hentges and Cindy Thompson, CCFE
 
(Editor's note: This article is excerpted from a workshop at the ICFA 2004 Convention & Exposition in Nashville.)
Today in the business world in general there seems to be a problem with a lack of ethics. We've all read about corporate wrongdoing, improper trading practices on Wall Street and, within our own profession, the Tri-State Crematory scandal.
In our profession, we rely on our families' trust, and in the current business climate we have to work to keep it. As managers, we believe an ethical organization can be created.
Successful leaders need to see that having an ethical system in place is important for the long-term success of the company, and that like most other systems, the pieces are interrelated-it's not good enough to have one piece, you really need a complete system.
You need to identify the ethical values important to you, and you need to communicate them to your staff. You yourself need to live by those values and hold the people who work for you accountable for doing the same.
You need to have ways to reward, recognize and celebrate ethical behavior when it happens. You need to have guidelines in place so people know what to do, whom to go to and how to get help if they are unsure about how to deal with something.
As a profession, we continue to base a majority of our sales compensation on commission, and that can make it difficult, when you are rewarding only productivity (paying people according to how much they sell), to also stress the importance of ethics and the long-term health of your company. Think about that when you evaluate your compensation package, when you hire and train salespeople.
Finally, you need to monitor and audit constantly, because you can't just trust blindly.
Examples from the Field
In addressing this topic, we need to include a disclaimer: We know we're not perfect, we're not setting ourselves up as the epitome of ethical behavior. But this is a topic we are passionate about, one we try to address in our own organizations.
Three examples from our own workplaces:
Toson Hentges: We have been doing random drug testing at our company, and not long ago one of the employees selected refused to take the test. He was a fairly valuable sales counselor, and I tried to convince him to take the test, but he refused. I gave him an ultimatum: Take the drug test or go to drug counseling. He quit. I was very upset, because, as I said, he was a valuable counselor and I didn't want him to leave, but I did not make an exception for him.
Thompson: Years ago, when I hadn't been at Mountain View very long, I happened to learn that a body we had received from the medical examiner's office had been buried without the viscera being replaced in the abdominal cavity. I was appalled-this was part of the body that hadn't gone in the ground. I called the family, told them what had happened, apologized and asked what we could do to try to make it better.
To my great amazement, they said they were shocked that I was honest enough to tell them about our mistake, since there was no way they could have known if I hadn't. We talked about the situation and they were satisfied with the solution we reached, which was to commit the additional remains to the ground in a vault above the casket.
Over the years, I've had to deal with other difficult situations, some harder than that one, and I have yet to be disappointed by a family's reaction. My staff knows that when we make a mistake, I'm going to call the family. I make it clear to our staff that this is how we handle things. I've made that a kind of mantra that I keep in the back of my mind: "We have to be willing to tell families when we make it a mistake." I don't ever want to lose their trust.
Thompson: In the category of "rules apply to everyone," I had a problem with one of our sales counselors, who had a tendency to "forget" that we have a lead protection system. This counselor got a call from a friend and, without checking the lead protection system, wrote up a funeral plan worth several thousand dollars for this person, who was an active lead for another counselor. The customer called to tell me she would cancel the contract unless her friend got the commission, but I felt it was important for my sales counselors to trust what I tell them. We returned the customer's money, and I think it will be a very long time before that sales counselor ignores our lead protection system again.
Avoiding Frog Stew
People who end up doing unethical things don't necessarily start out as bad people, as people whose goal is to cause trouble for your cemetery or funeral home. It often starts out very small. Maybe someone takes a little bit of money, gets away with it and from there, the situation snowballs.
We call this "boiled frog syndrome," or "frog stew." When you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, its reaction is to jump back out, and it survives. But if you put a frog in a pot of room-temperature water and then gradually bring the water to a boil, the frog doesn't sense the temperature change, doesn't hop out and gets boiled to death. The same thing can happen with people and ethics. Ethical behavior slowly gets away from us and before we know it-frog stew.
How do you go about ensuring ethical behavior within your company? You have to develop an ethical system, just as you have a financial system and a marketing system. After all, the presence of ethical behavior is just as intrinsic to long-term organizational success as effective communication, good planning or proper financial management. Once that system is in place, it must be supported by the company leaders and management practices. It can't be put in place and neglected; it must be supported all the time.
The first step is to identify the ethical values you want upheld, make them crystal clear and make sure they address everyone. Don't think only about how your employees interact with customers, think about how they interact with each other, with vendors and with the community at large.
Don't make assumptions. You may think that all of your employees know that it's not OK to go out to real fancy dinners with a vendor on a regular basis and refuse to see any other vendor with a similar product, but maybe some of them don't know. You need to make sure the values you want upheld are well communicated:
Get your management team to write down your ethical values. It forces you to be specific, and it forces you to be accountable as managers. If you're going to put something out there for employees to follow, it's important that the managers do so.
Make sure they're widely disseminated. I think all of us have had the experience of walking into a business where they have a section of a wall beautifully decorated with a picture of the founder, and maybe a list of the trustees and a copy of their mission and values statement. But if that plaque on the wall is the only place your values statement appears, you are a company looking for trouble.
You need to talk about your ethical values in the employee newsletters, in e-mails, at company meetings, during performance reviews. You need to be talking about it all the time. Otherwise, next thing you know people are taking longer and longer lunch hours. After all, who's going to notice? And then maybe a sales counselor decides to cover the down payment in order to make a sale. After all, won't the boss just be happy about the sale? It's very easy to talk yourself into moving just one step away from OK, and pretty soon you're several steps away and then-frog stew.
Talk about your ethical values when you're interviewing job applicants. Remember, it's a two-way process: You're evaluating candidates and they are evaluating your company. It's only fair that you tell people what your expectations are and that you make sure they know you take these ethical standards seriously as a company.
Talk about ethics all the time. To quote Gary O'Sullivan: "Talk about it till you puke."
Embedding Values in Your Company's Infrastructure
Consider ethics in hiring. Evaluate how well job candidates seem to fit in with your values. When someone is hired, include another discussion of values in the orientation process. (For tips on hiring, see "Hiring Success.")
Make sure your company's leaders and managers live the values they are preaching to employees. As a supervisor, you need to act like you're being watched, because you are. Every day, every action, your employees are watching you. Are you doing what you tell them they are supposed to do?
In doing research for this presentation, we read about a consultant working for a large Fortune 500 company. He was talking to the head of human resources, who was really upset because so many people in his department were cheating on their expense reports. "We're supposed to be setting the example for the whole company," he said, "and my department's one of the worst. I can't figure this out."
It didn't take the consultant long to find out that the department head, who traveled all the time and was entitled to fly first class, was trading in his first-class tickets and pocketing the difference. So it really was no surprise, for example, that his employees were charging the company for meals they could have had but didn't.
Your staff looks to you to set the tone, to set the example. You need to realize that the little things count.
Thompson: As an example, one day I caught myself doing something I shouldn't have. There was someone I didn't want to talk to, and instead of telling the switchboard operator to say I was unavailable, I told her, "Just say I'm not here." That wasn't true, and by asking her to lie, I was saying to my employee that under certain circumstances it's OK to lie.
Now, how long do you think it's going to take before that employee starts thinking to herself, "Well if it's OK to lie there, then here's another situation where it might be OK to lie. Cindy's not here to ask, but it was OK over there, so I'll do it over here." And if you've got 10 or 20 or 50 employees, that could multiply exponentially. You can't be there all the time, so how are you going to know when they do this?
You have to show zero tolerance for ethical violations. Decisions shouldn't depend on how productive an employee is. As in the case of the valuable sales counselor who refused to take a drug test, you have to make your decisions in terms of the values you have established.
Avoid establishing internal conflicts. Make sure your company's reward systems and performance appraisals are congruent with your ethical values.
If you are telling employees, "We love our customers and it's important for you to spend a lot of time with every family-we want you to take all the time it takes," but then all they get rewarded on is the numbers, you've created a problem.
Maybe you've got someone who isn't quite as productive as some of your other sales counselors, but their customers love them. They get the best referrals because their families trust them. Are they not valuable? We say they are valuable to your company, but if you say, "We value people who value our customers" on the one hand and on the other hand, base payment just on numbers, you're putting employees in a no-win situation. (We don't mean to say that people who care about their families don't get the numbers; we're exaggerating to make a point.)
Watch for and address external conflicts. The funeral and cemetery profession may not be as open to them as some other businesses, but we should be proactive.
Thompson: We have someone at our cemetery who works with outside construction companies who are doing projects nearby and want to bring us excess dirt from job sites. We make it very clear that the choice of which companies are allowed to do this is not a matter of slipping our employee some money.
Building an Ethical Toolbox
Your company has to build for each of your employees their own ethical toolbox, because they're not going to be able to call you every time and say, "I'm not sure what to do." You need to build their skills and abilities.
Awareness, skills and values are needed for an ethical toolbox.
Awareness means you need to raise the issue of ethical dilemmas to your staff. They need to learn to be aware that ethical behavior is something you want them to be careful about. Build their awareness so that when something is going on that's not quite kosher, they'll realize it.
Next, you need to make sure that they have the skills to deal with any questions or problems that come up, or that there are resources at your company they can turn to. You can put systems in place to help your employees when they are faced with an ethical dilemma. One company we read about had an 800 line for people to call when they thought they had come across unethical behavior.
And third, you need to make sure that employees perceive ethical behavior as something they need to practice to be successful at your company.
If you have awareness without skills, for example, you've got a problem. An employee might say to himself, "I don't think that's really cool, he's giving all the business to his brother-in-law," but if your company hasn't told employees what to do in a case like that-there's no 800 number to call, there's no one on staff designated to tell-the employee is kind of stuck.
You want your employees to realize what your ethical values are, to be aware of problems and to have the ability (skills) to do something about them so that when they become aware of a problem or are faced with an ethical dilemma of their own, they will act.
In doing our research, we ran across a page from the Enron code of ethics, distributed in 2000, which wasn't that long ago. Let's look at a few excerpts:
"Moral as well as legal obligations will be fulfilled openly, promptly and in a manner which will reflect pride in the company's name. Employees will maintain the confidentiality of the company's sensitive proprietary information and will not use such information for their personal benefit. ... Relations with the company's many publics-customers, stockholders, government, employees, suppliers, press and bankers-will be conducted in honesty, candor and fairness."
These statements probably look familiar to a lot of us. You may have something very similar in your own company's employee manual. We all know what happened with Enron: They ended up serving frog stew. So simply putting a code of ethics in place is not good enough.
Enron probably handed this out to every employee, maybe had all of them sign an acknowledgement form. But it looks like they never followed up. We need to educate our employees about ethical behavior all the time, on a daily basis.
Ethical Guidelines
You need to put ethical guidelines in place so that employees know exactly what is expected of them:
Create a values statement, which often is going to be very similar to the mission statement. Your employees should know it backward and forward-quiz them on it.
Establish guidelines for how to handle ethical dilemmas. If employees are facing an ethical dilemma, how are they supposed to respond? Are they supposed to report sexual harassment cases to somebody in particular? Who is supposed to be handling the media? Your employees all need to know whom to go to and what their responsibilities are.
Provide a detailed code that shows what each employee's responsibilities are regarding those standards. This cannot and should not be rocket science; you don't need to make it complex. In fact, you don't want to write something that's long and in language no one understands-it needs to be clear to people what to do.
When we say detailed, we mean you need to spell out what you can in black and white, especially when it comes to salespeople. For example, let's say you've decided to run a special promotion soon. Is it your company's policy to tell customers that a promotion is starting on April 1? Is it your policy to allow employees to offer prospects the promotional rate, or is it policy that employees cannot mention the promotion until April 1? Don't leave gray areas like this.
Support, reiterate and act by your ethical standards at all times. As managers, we need to walk the walk in all situations. If we get caught doing something that we just talked about not doing, we've put ourselves in a terrible situation.
Appoint someone in management to oversee implementation of your ethical code and to handle violations. This person obviously needs to be trustworthy, and not just in management's opinion-it needs to be someone your employees consider trustworthy. Never put your employees in the situation of having to report ethical concerns to someone they don't trust and don't want to talk to.
Advertise this person's position in your employee manuals, in memos and at staff meetings, at the same time you're reiterating your ethical guidelines. This person should be training employees on what standards are important and what is expected from them, as well as how to seek guidance, how to report concerns and how people who report ethical violations will be protected.
You will never get people reporting any sort of unethical behavior to you if they will face intimidation, so make sure there is protection for people who report problems. An 800 number that lets people remain anonymous is one good tool.
You want to create an atmosphere in your company that will encourage employees to report unethical behavior, whether it's a minor behavior they don't agree with or a large embezzling scam.
Ethics in Sales: Short-term vs. Long-term Success
It's very easy to feel like sales success is equated with unethical behavior. Maybe you've had a competitor saying untrue things about you- "their vaults aren't waterproof, but ours are; their bronze develops a patina in five years, but ours never does"-and winning some customers that way.
Sales are tougher and tougher to make these days, so it may seem like cutting corners leads to success, but in the long run those people will not win out, and you need to think about long-term success.
Reputation is everything. You need to also go beyond the walls of your organization and look at your reputation in the community. If it isn't what you'd like, what do you need to get it to where you'd like it to be?
Remember, in our profession, our sales staff needs to be creating a safe haven for buyers. This is critical, because we are selling something people are uncomfortable talking about. When your salespeople are creating that safe haven, they will be looking out for the long-term success of your company.
Traditionally, salespeople sometimes have been thought of as having questionable ethics because often they are paid on commission only, which means they will have huge highs and huge lows in compensation during their careers. If a salesperson isn't good at managing his or her finances and suddenly money is tight, the need for a quick sale may mean they'll do whatever it takes to close that deal.
Also, traditionally sales quotas increase each year. So a salesperson who worked really hard and had a great year may be told, "By the way, your quota is 20 percent higher this year," and the new goal may seem impossible to meet. As a manager, it's your job to establish realistic quotas.
Your staff must believe in the company. Do you have employees who are just doing their jobs to collect a paycheck and who have no pride in what they are doing? That is going to be apparent in everything they do, and if they don't believe in the company, who knows what they are saying about you behind your back that could cost you a lot of customers?
Your sales staff needs to be educated in the fact that they are the brand ambassadors for your company. As managers, we need to realize that sometimes we have things structured so that our salespeople are the only people some customers are in contact with. We need to make sure that isn't the case.
One really good idea is to send letters out to all prospects after a salesperson has made a presentation. It can be from the sales manager or the company president. Ask to make sure the prospect was treated well, received the information they wanted, even that the salesperson did have an appointment to talk to them. Provide a new number the prospect can call in case they want to talk to someone other than the salesperson they saw. This can save you some business in cases where the prospect and the salesperson simply had a personality conflict. Give the prospect the chance to call and say, "I love your company, love what you offer, but I don't like that salesperson. Send someone else."
(For more on ethical selling, see "Tips for Ethical Selling.")
Stick to Your Agreements
Ninety percent of the world's problems result from people not sticking to their agreements.
When you make a promise, remember that your word is your contract. Whether it's a promise for an appointment, a promise to your children or a promise to your employees, you build trust by doing what you said you were going to do.
Your quality of life can be directly related to the quality of the agreements you make. When you're dealing with bad people and bad agreements, your life is going to be hard.
Only agree to do what you can do; don't make promises you can't fulfill. This may seem obvious, but many of us have a tendency to want to say "yes" to everyone. "Yes, I can do that. And I can do that. And that. I can do it all!" We've learned the hard way that you have to think carefully before you say "yes." It's critical that you be able to handle what you have taken on. Learn to say politely, "Thank you for asking, but I just can't do it."
When you do get into a bind, admit it and renegotiate. Don't expect the other person to approach you; you take the first step. If you explain that there's a problem and try to renegotiate to do the best you can, it will save your integrity and probably save the deal, as well as any sort of future relationship with that person.
Keep track of what you agree to. Today we have Palm Pilots and computers and even cell phones to remind us of our appointments and what we have to do. You need to set up your own tickler system.
When you have a one-on-one meeting with an employee, come in with an agenda and take detailed notes. Summarize those notes afterward so that no one can put words in your mouth ("But I told you that last week and you said I could...")
Take care with whom you are making deals. If you're dealing with somebody who has a questionable reputation, you are setting yourself up for a problem. Your customers will notice if you're doing business with a questionable vendor.
Basic Standards
Obviously there are some basic standards that everyone, including your sales staff, must meet. Some people will come to us with different standards due to different backgrounds. Our companies need to make sure that we tell people our standards and that everyone is expected to meet them:
Honesty. You must handle your responsibilities with integrity. Never claim credit for somebody else's work. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it.
Compassion. In our field, compassion and caring is so essential. The people we hire must be empathetic, must treat our customers with respect and compassion. We also need to realize our coworkers are sometimes going to be sad, stressed out or overwhelmed, and we all need to be a support system for each other. Never degrade anybody who is having a bad day; try to support them.
Respect. When you're dealing with a diverse group of employees and some of them are coming to you with crazy, off-the-wall ideas, always show them respect. If you don't, you'll be teaching them not to bring you ideas, and who knows what you and your company will miss out on. Respect is also crucial in dealing with today's sexual harassment and discrimination laws. If you're showing any of your employees a lack of respect, you're liable to find yourself in a bad legal situation.
Responsibility. This seems to be the most lacking today. So many people take the attitude of "That's not my job," "I'm not being paid enough to do that" or "I'm too important to handle that." Taking responsibility is a key behavior we need to teach all of our employees.
Self-discipline. If you have financial problems, problems in your marriage, problems with substance abuse, you're going to have problems in the workplace. This is a reason for doing background and credit checks before hiring-a lot of that will come to light.
Giving. Giving is one of the best things we can do for our community. It does not need to be a huge amount of money or time, but it's critical, and you need to communicate that to your staff.
Toson Henges: We have a Greek section in our cemetery, and one of the things we do that's the most fun is volunteer to serve beer at a Greek church festival. We wear our cemetery shirts and get more comments and customers from doing that for a couple of hours than we would from a billboard or any other form of advertising.
Perseverence. This is critical for sales. You have to be able to hear "no" and keep on going until that prospect says "absolutely not" or "I bought from someplace else."
Avoiding conflicts of interest.
Monitoring and Auditing
Ongoing feedback from employees, customers, suppliers and even the competition is important. One thing you can do with your customers is send out a response form with a postage-paid envelope 30 days after each funeral or burial. Ask families to rate all areas of service and make suggestions.
On these follow-up surveys, also ask them to check off any additional products or services they might be interested in. Of course, if someone checks off that they want information on everything-memorials, trees, prearranged burial trusts, etc.-you might want to ask yourself what your sales counselor was doing.
And, of course, ask for referrals and for the names of anyone who might be interested in receiving your company's newsletter. This is another way to add to your database of people to whom you can be sending information on a regular basis.
Christine Toson Hentges, vice president of Pinelawn Memorial Park in Milwaukee, Restlawn Memorial Park in Wausau and Fort Howard Memorial Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is a fourth-generation cemeterian. She is a member of the ICFA Board of Directors, is president of the Wisconsin Cemetery Association and represents the Cemetery Consumer Service Council in the state of Wisconsin. She can be reached at (262) 646-3367 or christieh@tributeinc.com.
Cindy Thompson, CCFE, also a fourth-generation funeral director and cemeterian, is president of Mountain View Funeral Home and Memorial Park in Tacoma, Washington, having joined the family firm in 1987 after an almost 10-year career in health care. She is secretary of the ICFA as well as a member of the Board of Directors. She can be reached at cthompson@mountainviewtacoma.com or (253) 584-0252.
Copyright ICFA 2004
back to top
|
