Expeditors Reviews

3.3

54% would recommend to a friend

(2,246 total reviews)
avatar

Jeffrey S. Musser

70% approve of CEO

55% positive business outlook

Expeditors has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 2,246 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Expeditors employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Transportation and logistics industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
11 Dec 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Stability. There were no layoffs during COVID and the company has never had layoffs. There are more "Lifers" than any business I've ever worked at. I had many colleagues with 20+ years experience at Expeditors that had never worked at another employer. This meant interpersonal relationships were really strong, some people have spent their whole careers working together. In a business full of red tape and bureaucracy, these interpersonal relationships are really valuable. The company has a very strong preference for growing-from-within, allowing a lot of flexibility for workers that want to move laterally into another organization. This was my key motivation for joining the company. My plan was to join the organization and use this culture of lateral movement to transition from one field of technical work to a different type of technical work. I was successful in achieving this goal and Expeditors made it pretty easy to do that. Employee Stock Program is pretty good, the stock soared under COVID and the workers who held stock made out pretty well.

Cons

Senior Leadership has hated Work From Home and tried over and over to remove this health and safety benefit. Leadership was trying to bring people back May of 2020, July 2020, September 2020, November 2020, February 2021, April 2021, June 2021, July 2021, August 2021, September 2021, and finally forced everyone back into office October 2021, causing an exodus of workers with immuno-compromised family, myself included. There was a salary freeze under COVID, but there was no pause in stock payouts for Senior Leadership. They are hardcore capitalists and have personally accrued massive wealth during the pandemic. Worker forums were shut down. There is no feedback loop to take worker feedback into consideration when making decisions about COVID policy. "Open Door Policy" is a ploy to stop collective action by putting workers exclusively into 1:1 conversations with their manager. This same manager determines that workers salary, benefits, bonus, and career prospects. This shuts down the communication from worker to leadership. Workers never received more than 2-week notice about policy changes around working from home. The duration was spent with the unavoidable forced return looming just 2-weeks to a month out. Meanwhile, senior leadership figures relocated to Texas, Hawai'i, California, and took Zoom calls from their boats. A shameful disconnect from workers struggling with the realities of life in COVID. Expeditors does not try to compete on quality of life for their workers. Expeditors does not try to compete on salary for technical workers. Leadership does not believe in a remote workforce and instead prefers cubicle drones, even though this remote workforce ran the company during the largest period of profit and growth in history. The company prefers to grow-from-within, which offers flexibility and career path options internally, but severely limits knowledge in new fields. If a whole team has 10+ years at Expeditors, no one on that team has worked in any modern environments. They do not headhunt top talent from other businesses when they find the team lacking certain skills, strongly preferring "Do It Yourself" efforts. They are the slowest adopters of new technology of any company I have ever worked for. The company is deeply skeptical of new technology and is only now experimenting with practices considered standard in 2010. The company is on the far right of the technology adoption curve. They are laggards. This is not a place to work if you are an innovator that expects other people to innovate. If you are at the top of your field, avoid Expeditors entirely. Middle-management holds no real power to influence those above them. Being a "Yes Man" is the best way to drive career growth. I believe this is because of the emphasis on personal relationships, the career of middle management is anchored to personal opinions of their managers. Upward mobility is driven by these relationships. There are very few women and very few people of color in positions of authority. The dress code is ancient and embarrassing. Being "Men in Suits" worked for leadership in the 80's but is archaic in 2021. Workers had to sit at their desks in a necktie right up until 2021. Removing this requirement was meant to seem a huge concession to the workers. Something to be celebrated. Leadership removed the requirement for neckties at the same time they pulled everyone back in full-time. An empty gesture. A clear reminder that leadership will give as little as they possibly can in every situation. My first manager was completely incapable of helping me to improve as a technical professional. All of our 1:1 conversations were about the color of my socks, rather than the quality of my work. He was very concerned about his team developing a reputation for being lax about the dress code. He was not at all concerned about the team pursuing excellence. He regularly flew to India to get custom suits. If a management position is open, the workers under that manager are not interviewed or consulted. Managers are installed by fiat. There is no negotiation. One day you will arrive at work and your boss will be a stranger. You will not be warned. Their loyalty is not to you. If this company ran a government, it would be a Feudal Monarchy. Proximity to the king is the only quality that determines success.

2.0
9 Jul 2021

Tone-deaf Executive Management

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Coworkers across the globe are great. Interesting work. Stability before and during the pandemic.

Cons

Incredibly outdated mindset held by executive management. Men (finally) no longer have to wear ties, but we still have to dress up to come to the office and do the job we can quite productively do at home. The 26 WFH days per year is disappointing and insulting. Employees are continuously told we're the company's greatest asset but it's clear that our greatest asset is that big chunk of cash in the bank that lines executive pockets. In IS, you had no qualms about re-organizing the entire department while we were working from home, but now you insist that we work in the office, face to face.

2.0
27 Feb 2022

Severely underpaid, no meaningful advancement prospects

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I get to work on things that other individuals in my position at other companies would not normally be able to do. I have a lot of autonomy. However, this has more to do with my manager than with the company. Medical coverage is generous, but they’re trying to chip away at that too.

Cons

I need to start off with an apology for the vagueness of some of the following comments. My department is small and is a professional field performing a job function that unrelated but necessary to the company’s core logistics business. My writing is distinctive and I would be immediately identified. I am deeply unhappy with my job. Working here is a never ending reminder that my employer doesn’t value my work and a daily exercise in career stagnation. I’ve been at Expeditors for a while (over 5 years) and my salary is still less than what an associate’s first year starting salary is. Adjusted for inflation, I am making less than when I first started. I’ve been speaking with job recruiters at other companies and they are all shocked that I make less than them. One of my co-workers recently left and said that she received three different job offers from other companies with starting salaries that were almost double what she made at Expeditors. I don’t even know what my job description is. They hastily made some up when they were trying to promote the head of my team to take over the department. However, I guess it doesnt really matter what it says because I am expected to do work that exceeds my pay grade without being appropriately compensated. The descriptions also looked so ad hoc I didn’t know how seriously to take them. Compensation structure is opaque. I have no idea how raises are given or what they are based on. We are supposed to receive cost of living adjustments automatically, but I had to always ask about it first. This matters less for me, but I imagine it’s a burden on our admin staff. As far as advancement opportunities, I am fairly confident that if I stayed here for another decade, I will still be in my dead end position and more depressed about my future than I already am. My work product is excellent and I bring a lot to the table, but I know I will likely never be rewarded for it. This is a demoralizing realization to make 5 years in. Getting them to pay for things that normal employers (in my field) pay for (like mandatory training required for our licensing) is like pulling teeth. There is no written policy on this and they keep claiming they don’t have enough money to cover these things. I find this difficult to believe. Senior management is inflexible and still stuck in a pre-pandemic mindset about employee expectations. We rushed to return to the office while the delta and omicron surges were raging for no apparent reason other than a vague need to “maintain company culture.” If this is true, then that’s pretty grim. Day in and day out, we sit alone in our offices with no interactions between coworkers and have meetings with each other via Zoom. This is not company culture. This is management micromanaging because they don’t think we’re doing work when they’re not looking. If this continues, Expeditors won’t be able to attract the best and brightest in the future. In fact, the company was aware of this even before the pandemic. They couldn’t retain IS/IT resources so they decided to offer more attractive work week scheduling that differed from the rest of the company. What’s most upsetting about this revelation is that the company knows what it needs to do if it’s having trouble attracting labor, but just won’t do it. The resistance is puzzling. C-Suite is full of vaccine skeptics. They seem to be held to different standards about covid reporting and masking. I know for a fact that several of them had covid and were still going around to different floors people’s offices without masks. Unvaccinated employees are required to mask, but our unvaccinated president of global products was walking around without a mask when he caught covid last year. In the main corporate headquarters, we’ve been getting new infections weekly. The company also appears to be tired of hearing from its employees. We used to have an annual employee satisfaction survey. However, they stopped conducting it because “they kept getting the same responses every year.” I won’t insult the reader by walking through why I think that line of logic is deeply flawed. If the company never seriously intended to take action on the responses, then getting rid of the survey was, perversely, an efficiency improvement. Diversity and inclusion? What diversity and inclusion? Leadership is comprised of old white sexist and homophobic men. These are not just words—there have been lawsuits (“you need a good f- - - ing” is a choice passage from one of the complaints brought against someone in management). This old-school boys club attitude is deeply entrenched. The current head of Europe lost out on the CEO position years ago for a reason. Now we’re stuck with the founder’s son-in-law as the CEO. Speaking of the CEO, I do not like his attitude about employer/employee dynamics. He thinks employees have too much power and shared this with our department when asked about parental leave policies. Look, at the very least, frame those thoughts about employees in a less abrasive and accusatory way, especially when vocalising those thoughts to the employees themselves. Finally, the CEO is sometimes terrible at reading a room. He was at one of our EU branches and went on a rant about Obama for some reason and didn’t seem to understand why everyone was so uncomfortable. I dont care what he believes, but it was inappropriate and irrelevant to the situation. Jeff—not everyone shares your opinion. I have so many other things to say about why working here has sucked what little excitement I had for my profession out of me, but in the end, it seems futile. But mostly, I am just angry that I’ve wasted so much of my youth here before seeing the company for what it really is.

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