The Responsibility Project: Greyston Bakery
Eth-316
May 15, 2014
University Of Phoenix
The Responsibility Project: Greyston Bakery
When looking through the multiple videos on the Responsibility Project website, the one that caught my attention more than the others was the video of Greyston Bakery and how it uses its ethical principles to provide opportunities to their community, but also how it uses them to operate as a successful business. The video also shows how Greyston Bakery uses external influences as a medium on how they determine not only how they respond to the events that are occurring around them, but also what contributions that they give back to their communities.
The importance of the issues discussed in the short film are very much noticeable. The most noticeable subject that was heavily discussed in the short film was how external influences determine not only the organizational ethics that exist in Greyston Bakery, but also how it conducts its business. As Greyston Bakery President and CEO Julius Walls Jr., states, “Greyston is a social enterprise” (Liberty Mutual, 2010), that has both a Social Mission and a Profit Mission. The foundation of the Social Mission ethics is the use of Open Hiring also known as open door hiring. This process is the hiring of employees from the local community regardless of their past and education. This process also includes providing them not only with employment opportunities, but also providing them with services and assistance that under normal circumstances would be very difficult in obtaining on their own. This practice has allowed social barriers such as homelessness, drug use and incarceration to not only be broken, but also has allowed those hired to see that not only is employment one of the first steps toward success, but also giving them the opportunity to make that first step.
By interacting with their community and also employees in this way the relevance in both organizational and personal decisions are very apparent. By hiring employees regardless of their past, they are tapping into a workforce that most other employers would generally ignore or not want to use. By then offering those employees not only basic services such as healthcare, vision and dental care, and also more difficult to obtain services such as affordable housing opportunities, childcare, education, and also employment development, they are turning those outcast employees into a dedicated and hardworking workforce. These employees then adopt the same type of work ethics as their employer and return the generosity by both working to make the same opportunities that they were given, available to others, but also a successful and profitable company.
This allows Greyston Bakery to respond to any social pressures from the community on a way that not only follows the organizational ethics that were present when the company was founded, but this also allows Greyston Bakery the opportunities to continue making contributions to the community. These contributions take the forms of