Pivoting in a pandemic: How the rail workforce adapted to stay safe and maintain operations
11/3/2021
By Julie Sneider, Senior Associate Editor
On March 13, 2020, Kayden Howard was vacationing on a cruise ship when she started receiving messages from her two college-age children telling her that school was shutting down to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Howard grew alarmed she wouldn’t be able to get off the ship to return home before travel restrictions set in.
Fortunately, she did get off the ship in time. Soon after returning home, Howard — vice president of health, safety and environment for Kansas City Southern Railway Co. — was at her kitchen table, sitting in front of her laptop and writing guidelines designed to keep the railroad’s employees safe and the trains running.
“These were monumental decisions to keep our workforce safe and healthy, but at the same time we had to keep our trains moving so that we could maintain the flow of goods that Americans so critically needed,” Howard said.
Howard and two other rail executives recently discussed their experiences in helping to lead their companies’ response to health and business challenges during the pandemic’s early days, how those responses evolved as the virus wore on, and the impact on their organizations’ culture. They shared their stories at a session during the 2021 League of Railway Women (LRW) annual conference, which was held virtually Oct. 18-20.
“It was like building the plane and flying it at the same time.” — Dr. Marie-Daniele Pitchen, CN League of Railway Women Joining Howard were Marie-Daniele Pitchen, chief medical officer and director of occupational health services at CN; and Sarah Teachout, senior vice president and chief legal officer at Trinity Industries Inc. All hold positions that required them to be leaders in gathering information, making decisions and developing practices to keep their companies — which are considered part of critical infrastructure in the United States and Canada — running during a pandemic.
They described getting used to pivoting regularly as more was learned about the coronavirus. In the early days of government-ordered shutdowns, all three companies organized work-from-home scenarios for employees whose jobs could be worked remotely, and established social-distancing and other health and safety protocols for those who could not. To develop protocols, they generally relied on guidelines from federal agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“From the executive team to our front-line employees, people were looking to me to make decisions about the safety and health of our workforce, and sometimes those decisions actually slowed down our business operations,” said KCS’s Howard. “Fortunately, I had a supportive executive team that put safety ahead of productivity. The real problem was, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. For example, early on we really didn’t know how the virus was transmitted.”
That meant Howard’s team spent a lot of time implementing decontamination procedures and searching for nitrile gloves, hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes.
“As we all know now, [preventing transmission] is more about wearing masks, social distancing, handwashing and quarantining after an exposure” to someone with COVID, she said. “My point is that we pivoted. Every time we got new information, we adjusted our practices. And we continue to do so now.”
All three women said they had to address multiple challenges simultaneously, including establishing internal and external resources they could rely on to help them make decisions and set policies.
“To me, it was enormously calming to know that our industry was going through this together.” — Kayden Howard, Kansas City Southern League of Railway Women “It was like building the plane and flying it at the same time,” said CN’s Pitchen, who’s worked in rail only for the past couple of years. For instance, when trying to figure out contract-tracing of individuals who tested positive for the virus, Pitchen and her team realized public health agencies were too overwhelmed to assist. That meant the company had to set up its own form of contract-tracing, something Pitchen had never done before.
The companies expanded their pandemic-response teams to be cross-functional so they could understand how each department would be impacted by newly implemented policies. Legal departments had to ensure the medical privacy of workers was protected and that COVID-19-related government laws and mandates — which can vary in local, state and international jurisdictions — were being followed.
“In the spring and summer of 2020, it was particularly challenging in that the information and facts about COVID-19 and the different government responses were shifting,” said Trinity’s Teachout. “Our team had to be diligent in monitoring case counts, community spread and changing government mandates. That required us to be both nimble and fast, yet thoughtful and disciplined in vetting information, and also careful about procedures we were putting in place.”
One way Trinity’s decision-makers remained in-the-know was to retain an infectious disease expert who had experience treating COVID patients.
“We felt we needed to have that medical expertise and guidance when we had questions,” she said.
Howard and Pitchen said they began meeting virtually with counterparts at other railroads to stay informed of COVID trends. Antitrust issues weren’t a concern when it came to sharing information on how to deal with the pandemic’s impact on their workforces.
“Relationship building is so important,” said Howard. “While I’m not a doctor, the Class I chief medical officers graciously allowed me to sit in on their weekly calls. And then my peer group, the chief safety officers, collaborated often. … To me, it was enormously calming to know that our industry was going through this together.”
Prior to the pandemic, CN, KCS and Trinity frowned upon work-from-home scenarios, the executives said. Still, once government shutdowns were implemented to stop the virus spread, their companies had to establish policies, protocols, technology and electronic communications that enabled those who could work remotely to do so. The companies learned “employees could be trusted to work at home and actually do a good job,” said Pitchen.
“We felt more communication is better even if we didn’t have all the answers.” — Sarah Teachout, Trinity Industries Inc. League of Railway Women “Remote work taxed our IT organization to set up the capability to do video conferencing and other tools that we never had before,” Pitchen said. ”And, we also had to have the bandwidth to permit these things.”
Regular communication with employees across the company was key to keeping things running as smoothly as possible, all three said.
"How we communicate with our employees was a big shift — the frequency of it and the ways in which we were communicating,” said Teachout. “We felt more communication is better even if we didn’t have all the answers. Whether it was through emails or texts, we developed technology to push out more content to our workforces across North America.”
Social distancing policies were established for in-person meetings when communication couldn’t be shared virtually. Also, the company offered webinars where they brought in doctors and other health care professionals to talk to the workforce about the virus, vaccines and safety protocols, Teachout said.
Despite the challenges, the pandemic has produced some “silver linings” in how business gets done.
“It forced us to communicate with each other better,” said Teachout. “We weren’t a heavy Zoom company to begin with, but now we’re able to connect with other members of the company that we otherwise wouldn’t have met with. It also caused us to innovate for our customers. Because people weren’t traveling as much, we developed a virtual inspection of our railway cars.”
The pandemic pushed CN to develop a flex-time policy, said Pitchen.
“We had been a little rigid about it before, but COVID permitted us to rethink everything,” she said. “When we all proved that many of us could work efficiently and productively at home, that changed our way of doing things.”