Chair and CEO
The insight Dorothy Savarese has gained in growing closer to her colleagues during the pandemic is helping shape the strategy at Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank.
Although employees have been mostly working from home, Savarese said she has learned far more about their lives than when they were together in an office. Besides getting to know more about their pets and their children, she has learned about the demands of child care, elder care and other personal issues her employees are having to deal with under the strain of the pandemic. Through a series of listening sessions, she also was troubled by accounts of how racism has affected many of her employees’ lives.
“It was moving and painful to hear some of the circumstances in which employees had been subject to outright discrimination,” said Savarese, the $4.6 billion-asset bank’s chair and chief executive officer. “What was just as important was to understand when they had experienced unconscious bias.”
The Hyannis, Massachusetts, bank, known as Cape Cod 5, is evaluating its processes to ensure its culture gives everyone an equal chance to grow, Savarese said. “We are all on a journey to understand how we can create an ever more respectful, inclusive environment, and it takes learning and focused work.”
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Savarese has made environmental protection, particularly as it relates to climate change, a cultural focus. At Cape Cod 5’s headquarters, solar panels were installed to reduce the bank’s carbon footprint, and the bank in the planning stages of adding more panels to its parking garage. It is also developing metrics to measure and shrink its carbon footprint even further, by evaluating its buildings, reconsidering the carbon impact of its supply chain, and reviewing its loans and investments for their climate effects, Savarese said.
“We have long had environmental stewardship as one of our areas of focus for our community engagement,” she said. “Given the increasing severity of threats, we have now made it a cross-cutting goal of the bank, being sure to embed it in all of our activities.”
Her leadership outside the bank includes her appointment this year to a second term as president of the Federal Reserve Board’s Community Depository Institutions Advisory Council. During the pandemic, the council played a key role in helping the Fed understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and responses like the Paycheck Protection Program.
