News and Views

The Oxley Group is a Cumbrian company with innovation and creativity written into its DNA.

Founded in 1940 to produce capacitors for the military, the company was instructed by the Ministry of Aircraft Production to relocate to safer premises in Ulverston in 1942 and has been headquartered at Priory Park, Bardsea, since the 1950’s.

Today Oxley is a world leader in its field, providing customers with a wealth of knowledge and expertise in areas such as LED lighting, night vision lighting, EMI filters and the design and production of high specification interconnect components.

Flexibility and the ability to respond to changing circumstances are also key values. That’s why Oxley is currently trying to respond to health service needs by looking at manufacturing NHS face protection as well as looking at ventilator components and we’re repurposing our onsite PPE to the front line.

Here are some of the initiatives we’ve put in place, following Government advice. We’ve responded quickly to the current situation and we’ll make further improvements where needed to keep people safe. Having operated in Cumbria for almost 80 years, our team and our community are of paramount importance to us as a business.

• All Oxley employees who can work from home have been provided with lap tops and are now working from home. This means there are fewer people on site which reduces risk for everyone. 
• The Senior Management Team has been buddied up and some work off site whilst others are on site on a rota system to provide management cover. It is vital that we separate this team in case some become ill so we have cover to take their places and maintain business continuity. Also, the fewer people on site together makes it a safer environment for all.
• We have relaxed our green policies on single use plastics for eating and drinking purposes.
• We have introduced new enhanced cleaning protocol with regular cleaning of all shared areas.
• We have introduced a new wipe down policy at the end of each shift with cleaning material available in each area.
• We communicate with all staff regularly about the need to follow good hygiene advice.
• We have enhanced measures on site to enable all to follow the 2 metre social distancing rule.
• We’ve introduced shift working to ensure fewer people are on site at any time and key people doing tasks are not working together.
• We’ve reorganised seating and workstations, repurposing meeting rooms and unused areas to allow distancing.
• We’ve introduced a short term allowance to enable everyone to get to work without the need for car sharing.
• No face to face meetings now take place, instead all the workforce communicate using technology such as Microsoft Teams.
• Elongated and separated break times to reduce canteen capacity and remove queuing points have been introduced.
• We have banned all ‘cut throughs’ and walking from department to department around site and disabled pass access. Employees now use Microsoft Teams to talk to colleagues across site.
• We are committed to utilising technology and innovation where possible to avoid the need for human interaction and we’re open to employee suggestions on achieving this

Listening is important to us and we’re totally open to employee feedback on what else we can do to improve things and everyone can feed in suggestions at any time.

We pride ourselves as a business on being dynamic, agile and flexible and we’re using this to our advantage at the moment by being able to respond very quickly to improvements needed to continue to work safely and to continue to deliver our customer commitments.