DAU Foundation

A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

DAU Foundation is a non-profit entity that operates in the packaging industry has a strong commitment with society. Its mission is to improve the quality life and independence of people with mental disorders, and introduce them in the labour market.

Nowadays, 80-85% of the workers in DAU have mental illness with a grade over 33%, and the number of workers is growing every year.

The Foundation not only hire people with mental disorders, they follow a process with them: workers are trained, then get the job in the company and once DAU professionals consider that a worker is prepared for work outside in another company, they look for a job that fits with that person.

The work carried out by the employees is very varied, adapting to each: computing, assembling furniture, manufacture cosmetic and pharmaceutical products, ecological food processing, etc.

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

The main ethical challenge that this company addresses is to manage to achieve their social goal of being the springboard for people with mental disorders to get into the local labor market and at the same time to be able to perform well and deliver a good service in order to keep the project viable and growing.

They achieve that by providing personalized monitoring to workers, assessing their needs and training them in doing diverse tasks, taking part in activities to interact with other workers and reinforcing their commitment to the organization by making them see that they have a role in the organization and are valued. This way, they make efforts to perform well in the workplace and have a more proactive behavior.

Once a worker has proved to work well in the DAU’s work camp, under normal working conditions, the foundation looks for the company in which this worker will fit best, not only in terms of productivity but obviously also in terms of working conditions.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

The type of organization it is, concerning their core activity, values, their social goal above any profit objective and basically the main reason for their existence makes them, in our view, unsuspicious of any kind of covered unethical activity. While it has some similarities with common business, like seeking profit and being increasingly productive, as a foundation, they reinvest their profits in the project so that more people with mental health problems can take part in the labor market, thus having an important social role in the community.

It inspires us the way they make business while committing with society, acting ethically and being generous, helping people that probably without DAU will not have the chance to work anywhere. We think that is the most important of all, irrespective of their core business activity being packaging or any other activity.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

One of the most important challenges the company has is that they need to improve the employment service, which is the last step of the labor insertion process, by which DAU’s workers are hired by other companies.

These workers start to work in common companies and fulfill their contracts, but the rate of workers that eventually come back to DAU is too high, so there is work to do with workers so that they can renew their contracts with their companies and completely achieve real long lasting labor insertion. We propose to have better communication between these firms and to be comprehensive because this type of worker need a period of adaption and it would be interesting if in the new company they are hired, they have a training program similar as DAU.

Another aspect is motivation. It’s so difficult to grade efficiency in their workers because may be one is amazingly more productive than the second one but the second is working harder than the first one because he double the grade disease than the other. We think it would be interesting instead of rewarding the best month employee, it’s better to introduce many concepts like the most punctual, the most helpful or the most constant. But, we have to take into account that we are talking about people that can react very negatively to some changes and to the things that they feel unfair.