Returning to the Workplace | onsemi

The work that we do as a company is vital. Many of you have seen prior messages where we discuss the criticality of our business. We are deemed as “critical infrastructure” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and many other governments have deemed our company as an “essential business,” which means our company has continued to operate throughout the past few months.

The overloaded power grid and people around the world would not be able to work from home effectively without many of our technologies, household goods operate on our technologies and most importantly, our front line workers need our technologies to provide lifesaving measures for those affected with COVID-19.

While we are far from the end of this pandemic, many countries and localities are easing the restrictions that have been put in place. Over the past weeks and months, many onsemi employees have continued to work safely at our sites in order to keep our critical on-site operations running and we are now looking at the situation at all of our sites globally, evaluating when it’s appropriate to invite the employees who have been working remotely to return to the workplace.

As the governments have access to data around the risk from the pandemic, we will be looking to them as a trigger for our plans and ramp to full workforces in locations as government and health restrictions begin to lift. As discussed in our recent earnings call, these restrictions affected our operations, and impacted our ability to supply products to some of our customers. Following an extended shutdown in China, our factories resumed production, and are now running at close to full utilization. Subsequently, in March, our facilities in Malaysia and Philippines, where a sizeable part of our back-end operations are located, were severely impacted due to lockdown mandates issued by various governments. Our Malaysia and Philippines manufacturing plants ran significantly below capacity for most of March and April into the beginning of May.

Our top priority will remain providing a safe environment for all our workers, recognizing the different needs and situations of each location, site and employee.

The general strategy on returning to the workplace is to ramp attendance back to the pre-pandemic policies. This means that we don’t want to go from the current situation to having all employees return to work overnight. We need to do this so that we can ensure that we are agile enough to react if the situation gets worse. As communities start to interact more, there is a risk of additional waves of infection. If we ramp our return to the workplace, we can adjust our measures as the local situation requires while minimizing risk to employees.

Our workplaces will be quite different as we have all of our teams return to the workplace. Some of the differences you may see at our sites include social distancing markings, less chairs in public areas such as breakrooms, conference rooms and lunchrooms, and increased cleaning frequency. In addition, the use of masks will be different. As a company, we are recommending all employees wear face coverings in common areas or in situations involving face-to-face contact. In any situation where social distancing is not possible, employees should wear the personal protective equipment (PPE) required by that situation.

We will be maintaining protective measures at the sites, such as temperature screening or social distancing for some time after the site has returned to normal attendance and will continue to evaluate the risk situation at each site before modifying or eliminating any of these protective measures.

The pandemic is teaching each of us to collaborate in our work and personal lives in ways we may have never imagined. We are collaborating with remote work colleagues, communicating with those working on our factories lines that support critical products to our customers, and engaging with quarantined family members in a way we haven’t had to in our lifetimes.

This experience has fundamentally shifted the ways that many of us think of work, whether it’s at the office or from home and we look to take the positive outcomes of compassion and comradery back into the workplace through this transition.

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