Cultivate Strives to Enhance Employee Multigenerational Collaboration Virtually

by  Cultivate 

COVID19 has greatly impacted individuals, teams and companies. Whether companies transitioned all of their employees to working from home overnight or shut down offices temporarily, we’ve all been affected in one way or another.

Cultivate, one of our seven Affinity Network Groups within our Diversity & Inclusion initiative seeks to provide innovation and success through multigenerational collaboration. However, when we transitioned to a primarily remote workforce in spring 2020, we were challenged with how we’d continue our work to enhance the multigenerational team culture through virtual outlets.

Organizations globally are seeing age diversity within the workforce as a competitive advantage, especially given delayed retirements and the entrance of the newest generation, Gen Z. An increase in age diversity within the workforce allows additional opportunities for companies to provide a work environment that fits employees of all generations. According to the 2020 Global Trends report by LinkedIn, “56% of companies say they have recently updated policies to appeal to a multigenerational workforce.” ON Semiconductor is included in that effort with the rollout of the Flexible Workplace policy in the U.S.

Cultivate is focused on enhancing our multigenerational culture to be more collaborative and streamlined. Studies show that 89% of talented professionals say a multigenerational workforce makes a company more successful. It is our obligation as an organization to leverage the strengths of each generation to work better together collaboratively.

We have been working on several initiatives during COVID19 to enhance multigenerational collaboration:

1. Cultivate launched globally in Malaysia, Philippines, India and Korea. Trainers and Cultivate charter leads participated in virtual train-the-trainer sessions of Cultivate’s training course, “Working on a Multigenerational Team.” Bringing this training and Cultivate to new regions allows for the continued drive of enhancing multigenerational collaboration. We are thankful to our newest partners to drive Cultivate in their countries!
2. In our offices, we’ve continued to support usage of our collaborative spaces, while ensuring social distancing measures so that employees could operate safely in the innovative environments.
3. For our headquarters employees looking to give back, we partnered with a local Phoenix-based non-profit organization to offer virtual community volunteering opportunities that range from creating notes of encouragement for our community teachers, seniors and healthcare professionals and also making homemade masks for healthcare professionals.
4. We partnered with the Organizational Design Forum (ODF) and talked with design professionals about how to create an experience that appeals to multiple generations.

“As a board member of the ODF and an internal OD practitioner at ON Semiconductor, it was exciting for me to blend discussion between the two organizations. The ODF community comprises some of the most prolific thought leaders in Organization Design, and it was a fantastic opportunity for the company to share some of the work that Cultivate is doing and to hear from others about what else is going on outside our company,” states Adam Redshaw, GSCO Change Readiness Manager, Organization Development & Effectiveness Program Manager (OD&E). “By engaging in this sort of dialogue, it allows us to position ON Semiconductor as an organization trying to make a difference in this space and to learn about new ways that can help us become more successful in a variety of ways.” 

As we continue to persevere through COVID19, we will continue to drive the mission of enhancing multigenerational collaboration across the organization. Henry Ford stated, "Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together is a success.”

We look forward to continuing to learn and innovate as we drive towards future successes.

Learn more about ON Semiconductor’s commitment to Diversity & Inclusion through our Affinity Network Groups and in our 2019 CSR Report.

Contributing Authors: Kristin Stephan, Andrew Nelson and Jordan Smith