Compassionate Workplace Part 3: Greyston Bakery
What happens when organizations prioritize people and the planet, and how do they create systems of compassion? What does a compassionate workplace look like?
These are questions I’ve been asking for a couple of years, and that’s the focus of my book, A Case for Compassion – What Happens When You Prioritize People and the Planet.
I researched compassionate workplaces and wrote about them in Chapter 7. In the chapter, I feature a few organizations that exemplify compassion with the hopes that others will be inspired to follow their lead.
Here’s an excerpt from the book about a hugely successful bakery in New York known for its innovative hiring practices — Greyston Bakery — that declares, “We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.”
Please note the discussion questions at the end. I’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to leave comments.
Greyston Bakery
Out of desperation, Dion Drew added his name to a hiring list at Greyston Bakery in 2009. Drew had spent the previous eight months looking for work, but no one would give him a second glance. He had returned home after serving time in a federal prison for three felonies charges of drug trafficking, and it looked like he might have to start selling drugs again. He simply had no other choice.
But then Greyston Bakery hired him, and over ten years later, Drew now works as a supervisor and trains new hires. Drew regained his dignity thanks to a company that sees the value of all human beings.
“I feel like I took a lot out of my community by selling drugs, like I was bringing the community down,” Drew said. “I want to be a positive influence now. I want to see Yonkers and my community grow” (Pirson 2020, 236–47).
What happened to Drew isn’t uncommon at Greyston Bakery. Its website reads, “We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people” (Greyston Bakery, n.d.).
Those beautiful words stopped me in my tracks when I first read them. If that statement isn’t compassion, I don’t know what is.
How it Started
Zen Buddhist monk Bernie Glassman opened the bakery in Riverdale, New York, in 1982. He started it as a workplace for his students and then saw an opportunity to support community members who needed work. Glassman could apply lessons from Buddhism to real issues in his neighborhood, where employers typically overlooked marginalized people. Eventually he relocated the bakery to Yonkers and continued to hire people who needed a break.
A 2020 article in Rutgers Business Review describes it perfectly: “Greyston Bakery has, for more than thirty years, offered a job to people who typically get screened out of the standard hiring process. Whether they be immigrants, people without relevant working experience (such as homemakers), disabled people or former convicts—all such groups have an opportunity to gain meaningful employment” (Pirson 2020, 236–47).
Today when employees like Drew show up for their first day of work, the human resources manager hasn’t read their résumés, conducted background checks, or called any references. The employees were hired because they filled out a simple application for employment at Greyston. Period.
Glassman pioneered this approach, now known as “open hiring,” and the experiment turned out quite well. The factory produces thirty-five thousand pounds of brownies and blondies each day. In fact, there’s a chance you’ve eaten a brownie from Greyston, even if you’ve never been in New York. Ben & Jerry’s buys Greyston Bakery brownies for its Chocolate Fudge Brownie flavor. (As if I needed another reason to love Ben & Jerry’s!)
To inspire and support business leaders who want to emulate this socially conscious hiring strategy, Greyston launched its Center for Open Hiring in June 2018.
The End Result
According to an article in the US News & World Report, the Center for Open Hiring worked with more than fifty business leaders and asked them to consider hiring someone without an interview: “The employers met new hires (who work as paid apprentices before they graduate to full-benefit employees) and learned that open hiring is most successful when individuals have access to mental health services, workforce development and other community programs” (Kaplan 2019).
Open hiring doesn’t just serve a community; it makes fiscal sense. By omitting extensive background checks, Greyston substantially cuts down on its hiring expenditures. Plus, turnover rates are commensurate with the industry standard.
Questions to ponder:
- Considering the success of Greyston, why aren’t other organizations using opening hiring practices? What can remove those obstacles?
- Imagine being an employee like Dion Drew. How did Greyston’s hiring practices impact his life? What’s possible now that wasn’t possible before?
- Do the benefits of open hiring practices outweigh the risks?
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