Since the abrupt departure of former President and CEO Michael Daly, and reports of a “toxic” workplace culture at Berkshire Bank last year, new CEO Richard Marotta has said diversity and inclusion would be one of his top priorities. 

Now, the Berkshire veteran is taking serious steps to put his words into action, The bank has launched new recruiting efforts to make its workforce more diverse and plans to pilot and open several of what it calls “storefronts” in lower-income communities to reach more of the unbanked and underbanked populations in its footprint. 

“You need to look and act like the communities you are in and be able to provide banking services to everyone,” Marotta said. “One of the things we talked about is can we take this idea of a storefront and bring it into a community; listen to a community and build it around their needs and also provide banking services be it financial planning or financial literacy; and start to build trust with a community of folks that really don’t trust you or have minimal trust with banks.” 

Improvements to Talent Pipeline 

Berkshire plans to launch an internship program that will offer college scholarships and paid summer internships to students coming out of high schools in the bank’s footprint. 

“Especially for women and people of color, it’s important to just let people know there is a career in banking for them,” said Malia Lazu, chief experience and culture officer at Berkshire, adding that 80 percent of banking executives are white males.  

While 63 percent of Berkshire employees are women and 46 percent of women at the company are in management roles, according to Berkshire’s 2018 corporate social responsibility report, the report did not include statistics for the number of people of color who work at Berkshire. 

The bank has already begun to take steps to start to look more like some of the communities it is serving. 

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Berkshire recently added two African American business leaders to its board – William Hughes III and Baye Adofo-Wilson – and recently promoted Jacqueline Courtwright, a woman of color, to head of human resources. 

These moves may be able to correct some of the image problems the company has experienced in recent months. 

After Daly left the bank under unclear circumstances, analysts at the investment bank Piper Jaffray said they had received an anonymous letter from Berkshire employees saying the workplace culture at the bank was in dire need of change. 

They also analyzed Berkshire Bank employee reviews on Glassdoor.com and found that only 25 percent of employees would recommend working at Berkshire to a friend. 

“We think commitment and messaging from the top of the organization, starting with its board and executive team down to its line managers will certainly help to bring an authenticity and success to any diversity effort,” said Collyn Gilbert, managing director at the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, who covers Berkshire. 

An internal culture change is key to making Berkshire a better place to work, Marotta said. 

“I think that in order for people to want to work or want to do business with a company, they need to feel they belong,” he said. “If you don’t have a culture that makes people feel like they belong there, it doesn’t work.” 

Aligned with the Community 

By expanding its footprint to include underserved and underbanked neighborhoods, Berkshire may also be able to burnish the bank’s reputation. 

Berkshire’s planned “storefronts” will not be branches, but shared spaces that include coworking, event rooms and some limited banking services like interactive teller machines and a Berkshire MyBanker financial consultant. 

While no deposits and withdrawals can be made at the storefront, a bank employee can walk potential clients through the process of opening a banking account using the interactive teller machine. 

Bram Berkowitz

The first storefront will be a 2,000-square-foot space in Dudley Square in Roxbury, a community that Marotta said has long requested coworking space. The bank is also in talks to open one in Worcester. 

The first few will open sometime this year, and if all goes well, Marotta said the bank could open 10 to 15 of them next year across Berkshire’s footprint from Albany to New Jersey. 

Marotta said he first thought of the idea when he visited the Bank of Ireland, which had opened a shared space in Dublin to serve as an incubator for startups in the tech and medical supply industries.  

The storefronts will not be cookie-cutter and that the bank is working with at least 10 community-based organizations for three to six months before opening any storefront to help figure out what will be in the space and its location, Lazu said. 

“When you have money as banks do, it’s very easy to do things that are completely irrelevant to the actual community because you can; you have money to do it,” said Lazu, who is also the founder of the Boston-based work culture consulting firm Urban Labs. “We really want to make sure we are taking the organizing model and organizing with the community so they trust us and so we are getting honest feedback from them. We want them to see we are actually here to bring a value add, and not just coming in to check a box to say we did it and then wonder why no one is using the space.”