Earlier this month, CCJ had the chance to talk with Drew Wilkerson, president of North American transportation at fleet and brokerage giant XPO Logistics, about how the company weathered and adapted to 2020’s hurdles. Wilkerson detailed the steps XPO took to protect drivers and other personnel from the COVID-19 virus while balancing a fast-shifting supply chain and freight demand:
CCJ: Hey, Drew. First off, the COVID-19 pandemic has been such a through-theme in everything that’s happened this year. For fleets, that meant impacts to business as well as, obviously, dodging the disease itself and trying to protect drivers and other personnel. What happened at XPO this year with the pandemic? What has changed at the company with everything that’s happened this year?
Drew Wilkerson: Over the past eight months, the pandemic has changed life as we know it. Transportation in general has always been an essential business. We’re always the first ones in after a natural disaster. So when the pandemic hit, we wanted to step back and focus on three things. The first thing we focused on was employee safety and wellbeing. The second thing was continuing to keep our operations up and running. And the third thing was helping our customers create solutions and adjustments in their supply chain and transportation management.
People was the most important thing to us. When you’re talking about terminals and warehouses in our own supply chain, we had to reconfigure how we were doing everything. We made sure we were going well beyond the CDC guidelines. We had the social distancing. We had the PPE. We set up sanitizing stations. We had to do that to make sure that our essential workers were protected.
For workers that were able to, we shifted a lot of people overnight to go into work from home. Overnight there were thousands of people who were able to go from working in the office to working from home with customers and carriers and do it in an efficient way.
For all of our employees, for XPO in general, we focused on making sure they were physically and mentally healthy. We offered pandemic sick leave, negative PTO, free counseling services, 24/7 access to doctors, free COVID testing, front-line employee appreciation efforts. These were all things we wanted to do to make sure they were protected physically and mentally.
