Get a shot, win a Tesla? NC company hopes incentives will boost vaccination rates

While some of the Triangle’s largest tech firms have begun implementing vaccine mandates for their employees, Durham semiconductor company Cree is hoping to convince its employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by offering them a chance to win a new Tesla.

Cree, which is changing its name to Wolfspeed next month, said Tuesday that to encourage its nearly 3,500 workers to get vaccinated it will reward vaccinated employees with a weekly chance to win things like gaming systems, jewelry and consumer electronics from now until Dec. 15. The company said the biggest prize will be a Tesla Model Y, which has a retail price starting at around $53,000.

“We’re trying to encourage people to make a decision to go ahead and get the vaccine,” Cree CEO Gregg Lowe said in an interview with The News & Observer. “That decision is up to them, but we’re trying to encourage them. And we’ve done that in multiple different ways.”

Lowe noted that the leadership team all sent photo of themselves with their vaccination cards to employees, and the company sends information about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine to its employees regularly.

But Lowe said he wants to get vaccine rates higher, and he thinks the new incentive program could raise its internal rates by 20 percentage points. The company chose to offer an electric car to workers, he said, because they use silicon carbide, which is what Cree manufactures.

When asked what percentage of Cree’s employees are currently vaccinated against COVID-19, Lowe said the company did not have a number to share.

But “if you assume that that the average at Cree is the average in North Carolina, which I think is just a little bit north of 50% or something like that,” Lowe said. “We’re anticipating that this is going to take us 20 points up, so around 70, 75 (percent).”

“We’re working through the logistics of how we want to manage that,” Lowe added. “There is a little bit of sensitivity inside the employee base about tracking people ... so we are definitely sensitive to that. But this is definitely going to be something that already has sparked a great deal of interest across the company.”

Around 52% of the state’s total population is fully vaccinated, according to numbers from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

It is unclear how effective lottery-type incentive programs are to increasing vaccination rates. A study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that Ohio’s lottery that offered $1 million to people who got the COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t “associated with increased rates of adult COVID-19 vaccinations.”

And Noel Brewer, a professor of health behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, told The N&O earlier this year that direct payments for vaccines seem to drive a larger response than lotteries.

But Lowe said he’s already seen “tremendous” engagement from employees because of its incentive program.

The Triangle’s largest employers remain somewhat mixed on mandating vaccines for their employees.

Red Hat, Citrix, Cisco, Pendo, IBM and Google have all said employees who are not vaccinated are not allowed in their offices. While others, like Bandwidth, Lenovo and Duke Energy, are not issuing a vaccine mandate, The N&O reported.

Others have taken harder lines, like SAS Institute, which said its employees must be vaccinated or else potentially face termination.

When asked why Cree didn’t choose to institute its own mandate to increase vaccination rates, Lowe said those decisions felt “heavy handed” to him.

“From my perspective, this is a decision that employees should make for themselves based on the facts,” Lowe said. “All of our leadership team has kind of led by example and is vaccinated. But, you know, different people have different opinions on that and I’m not to judge that myself.”

“We are here to give them more information and more facts, and then obviously we add things like these incentives to have people really kind of check into it and say, ‘Hey, this really could be a very positive thing,’” Lowe added.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that will require companies with more than 100 workers to have their employees vaccinated or face weekly COVID-19 testing. The Labor Department is still finalizing how that requirement could be applied.

Lowe said once those rules are issued Cree will have the ability to offer weekly testing to employees.

At the moment, he said, Cree’s internal protocols do a good job of preventing spread of the coronavirus among employees.

A majority of Cree’s workforce does their job inside of clean rooms, where workers wear protective gear.

“Every employee has an entire gown around their entire body. There are a face mask across their mouth, and they have two pairs of gloves on,” Lowe said, all items employees wore before the pandemic. “The only exposed skin is just a sliver of your eye, and ... our air is circulated through HEPA filters.”

Additionally, the company does temperature checks on employees and staggers shifts so that workers don’t have to change clothes in confined spaces.

Cree has also fully embraced hybrid work since the start of the pandemic. Lowe said he was not a believer in remote work 18 months ago, but productivity has been so high that he now believes it would be foolish to abandon it.

That also means employees who don’t have to be on site can choose to stay at home.

Lowe said, to his knowledge, there have been zero cases of COVID-19 transmission inside the company. Encouraging vaccinations, he added, is more about preventing employees from getting COVID-19 while at a grocery store or restaurant.

Lowe said workers who are not vaccinated are hesitant to get the vaccine for a variety of reasons, from religious reasons to a general distrust in vaccines.

“The best we can do is just give everybody the facts in terms of ... the advantages of having a vaccine,” Lowe said, like the fact that the vaccine is effective at preventing hospitalizations from COVID-19.

“It’s a decision people need to make for themselves, and I think we’re starting to build the momentum there,” he said.

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate