Berkshire Bank has become the trusted advisor its clients and communities depend upon, helping innovate businesses, create jobs, grow wealth, and improve the overall quality of life for the people and places you care about most. As a high-performing, relationship-driven, community-focused bank, volunteerism is a central part of Berkshire’s award-winning culture.
Berkshire puts its values into action to help communities achieve their potential by providing employees with 16 hours of paid time off to participate in a wide variety of community service projects during regular business hours. The bank also hosts a signature day of community service, Xtraordinary Day, when it closes all bank branches and offices for the afternoon to encourage all employees to work on projects in the communities the bank serves. Since 2019, Berkshire’s employee participation rate has consistently ranged between 80% to 100%, nearly three times the national average. Those same employees have contributed hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours valued at millions of dollars to lift-up its communities.
The company achieved 89% volunteer engagement rate in 2023 and featured in the 2024 CSR Industry Report. We interviewed Lindsay Codwise, Community Programs Officer, to learn how Berkshire Bank attain such consistent results.
Can you talk to the goal of the XTEAM Volunteer Program and why it is important for Berkshire Bank to achieve high levels of volunteering engagement?
The goal of our XTEAM program is to foster employee engagement while simultaneously helping support the communities in which we all live, work, and play. It provides our company with the opportunity to enable employees to give back in meaningful ways. We strive to have something for everyone when it comes to our volunteer offerings, from sorting donations at a local food pantry to hosting mock interviews for individuals entering the workforce – often right from their home or office!
A key part of our program’s success is that we empower our employees to select and champion the projects and causes they are most passionate about. It also serves as a great way to encourage team building across departments. We’re not afraid to get creative when it comes to how we volunteer, even spending a fall afternoon apple-picking and then donating the apples to Elder Services’ Meals on Wheels program. Ultimately our volunteer program helps advance key business goals, positively impacts engagement, turnover, and helps build new business relationships, in addition to creating positive brand awareness. We believe employee volunteerism is good for employees, good for our communities and good for the bottom line.
Employees can often have busy and changing schedules which can make volunteering more difficult. Could you share some of the innovative approaches you take and the creative opportunities you offer to address this?
We pride ourselves on our ability to provide paid time off for employees volunteering during company time and recognize that people are incredibly busy with projects, priorities, and deadlines. Sometimes finding the time to volunteer just doesn’t seem feasible. We’ve worked very hard over the last few years to mitigate this challenge as much as possible. In addition to the influx of remote/virtual volunteer opportunities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also integrated “micro-volunteering” into many of our daily operations. For example, we will often designate a small portion of a regularly scheduled department meeting to small, creative volunteer projects such as making dog and cat toys, which we then donate to the Humane society, or creating no-sew fleece blankets to give to local shelters. We’ve also built a great relationship with the Happy Hope Factory, which offers easy to assemble kits that we send to our retail employees, as well as new hires, so they can volunteer at their own convenience. Happy Hope Factory distributes these kits to children in hospitals and shelters to help brighten their spirits.
Despite all these efforts, we realized that the only way to ensure that all employees could have the chance to participate as part of our XTEAM, is to hold our annual Xtraordinary Day of Service (XDay), when the entire company closes for an afternoon for everyone to volunteer collectively.
In 2016, our inaugural XDay was held and included the C-Suite! 95% of our workforce spent that afternoon volunteering on a variety of projects in our local markets. The internal camaraderie and community impact that resulted from this event led to Xtraordinary Day becoming a core part of our XTEAM program that we’ve continued to implement annually ever since (except in 2020 due to the pandemic).
Could you speak to Berkshire Bank’s 360 approach to nonprofit partnerships and how volunteering initiatives can align with corporate giving and grants?
Through the Berkshire Bank Foundation, we provide approximately $2 million in grant funding annually to support nonprofit organizations throughout our company footprint. However, we want to do more than simply write a check. Wherever possible, we work with the nonprofits we fund to create a 360-degree partnership. This often involves volunteerism and even board or committee membership. In recent years we created a “Board Match” program, where we work to identify and connect employees interested in board service with organizations in need that reflect their interests/expertise. We usually look to our funded partners for these opportunities to deepen our employee/community engagement.
Our XTEAM program can serve as a helpful alternative when budgets are tight. We offer our human capital, of time and talent. It’s also been a great way for us to build and establish relationships with organizations for potential future funding. We offer every employee at Berkshire up to $500/year in matching gifts, so they’re able to financially support their charitable organizations.
As a bank, what are some of your strategies to fulfill requirements related to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) through volunteering and financial education programs?
To meet the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) requirements, our employees use their skills/expertise to assist organizations working with financially underserved populations. In most cases, our employees are doing this work through their individual volunteer efforts, particularly nonprofit board service.
With CRA service, it is important to ensure proper tracking so we can accurately report on our hours, both in total and by Assessment Area. We have increased our communications encouraging employees to log these hours, but we also realized that a perfect way to increase our CRA participation was to proactively offer more of these projects as part of our XTEAM corporate program. There are several organizations that we routinely partner with to provide CRA-eligible financial education and/or skill-based volunteer opportunities. Additionally, we worked with our retail leaders to actively promote financial education programming as part of our XTEAM volunteer efforts by including an incentive as part of their business scorecard. When matching our employees with potential board opportunities, we try to ensure that the nonprofit is CRA-eligible wherever possible as well.