Pacific Gas and Electric Company is one of the largest combination natural gas and electric utilities in the United States. Based in San Francisco, the company is a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation.
When it comes to compliance training, all organizations (including PG&E) need to answer several questions:
- Who needs training?
- What training is needed?
- When do employees need it?
- Why do they need it?
Although some organizations may be able to answer the above questions with varying degrees of confidence, there is at least one more final question that most have not, or at least available benchmarking has suggested, has yet to be answered:
- How do you know you are right?
Most organizations answer these questions in one of two ways:
1. Train everybody on everything all the time
2. Leave it up to the lines of business to figure out and manage training on thousands of individual spreadsheets/learning management systems/databases.
A Different Approach
Not satisfied with either of those two options, PG&E set out to pioneer a new Training Governance Process complete with a Compliance Training Dashboard and Database.
The process involves four steps:
1. Identify: Compliance owners were identified in PG&E to interpret regulations and extract training requirements.
2. Review: Designees from the lines of business were tasked with reviewing, challenging, and agreeing to those interpretations.
3. Approve: Senior leaders within PG&E approved the work.
4. Apply: Profiling leads from the lines of business were identified to apply the requirements
To facilitate this four-step process, a comprehensive Compliance Training Requirements Database was developed to map all regulatory compliance training requirements, and trigger activities, durations, and frequencies down to the courses required. Finally, employees and leaders now have the transparency auditors demand, to see what drives training requirements vs. having a laundry list of courses to pick and choose from that seem to match up.
PG&E also developed a Compliance Training Dashboard to monitor the health/status of those profiled for courses. Now employees and leaders can see which employees are current with training (green), going to expire (yellow), or already incomplete or expired (red).
Results/Outcomes
Previously, PG&E had no way of being able to answer all the questions in the problem statement with 100 percent confidence. Now, the company has an auditable/traceable process to ensure compliance training requirements are being met. This approach has given the company a focus on the right training for the right people at the right time.
As a result of this process, PG&E reduced training that (based on applicability) was not relevant to employees’ jobs totaling 184,312 training hours. The company also identified areas where employees needed additional training totaling 2,112 hours. As a result, PG&E achieved cost savings amounting to $938,400.
