Utility Company Utilizes Simulations to Establish a Compliant Work Environment
Company info
Utilities
25000+
North America
500 Branches
$18 Billion
Business Need
Our client is a leading electricity and natural gas supplier in the West coast and Mountain region of the USA and Canada.
Compliance is an integral part of any utility company as millions of residential and commercial customers rely on them for clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy and water. Moreover, failure to comply with the industry’s laws and regulations can result in legal and financial penalties and loss of goodwill, further damaging the business.
However, despite their constant efforts and investment, the client was struggling with keeping current with compliance requirements because of the following factors-
- The sheer number of laws and regulations like EPA, FERC, NERC, along with a slew of other local, regional, state, and federal authorities, makes it hard for the company to keep up with the compliance requirements.
- Operations spanning across state lines and national borders diversifies the compliance training curricula, making it difficult to design and implement a coherent and uniform training program across the organization.
- Frequent changes in compliance guidelines makes it challenging to stay on top of regulatory standards.
Solutions
KS team met with key stakeholders, the L&D team, and regional managers to understand their current training practices and learning needs.
The analysis uncovered the following challenges in the way of building awareness and establishing practices in adherence to the compliance requirements—
When changes occurred to policies, the HR department conducted workshops and seminars and communicated via revised employee handbook, email, website posts, handouts, and physical displays like posters. These measures have time and again proven inadequate, mainly because reading mundane HR policies is a boring and low-priority task. Also, the importance and implementation of such policies were lost on employees.
Also, any change required a fresh session which meant a day or two away from productive work, which incurred a substantial cost. Moreover, for the training to be effective, it had to be repeated for reinforcement. To address the issue of the cost of time, web-based training was implemented to allow employees anytime, anywhere access to the training content. However, the web-based training lacked sufficient interaction, engagement, and a venue to practice application. It also fell short on addressing nuances of situational propriety that would have come up in face-to-face role-plays.
Additionally, none of these attempts at solving the problem were challenging enough to earn the learners a sense of achievement.
The KS team concluded that our client needed a training and assessment tool that was–
- Engaging to hold employees’ interest
- Challenging to provoke cognitive processing
- Interactive to ensure retention and recall
- Experiential to provide practice application of policies in everyday work situations
Additionally, we wanted a training design that afforded possibility of updation and just-in-time tweaks to keep up with future changes in societal mores or governmental regulations without adding significant cost in terms of time and money.
The KS team proposed EasySIM- a perfect blend of a problem-centered immersive microlearning solution that was grounded in experience and artfully channeled learners’ competitive drive.
The EasySIM team and the SME collaborated to build simulations based on realistic scenarios that the employees routinely experienced. EasySIM’s deep analytics mapped and tracked the participant’s journey through the entire learning simulation with predefined competencies and desired behavior patterns required for compliance. Every decision that the participant made triggered instant feedback, which not only provided the rationale for the participant’s eventual score but also served to educate them.
The EasySIM analytic engine generated real-time results, indicating each employee’s level of awareness and readiness as well as highlighting areas where they needed further help.
Benefits
- A notable desired change in behavior is being reported by managers across the board.
- Instances of complaints and violations have declined by 60%.
- The company has observed a surplus in the L&D budget. Moreover, as the design affords just-in-time tweaks and updation of the content without additional investment, the cost of re-training is going to be foreseeably minimal.
- Employees are reporting high satisfaction in terms of clarity in expectations and understanding of the implications of their behavior at work.
Declined instances of complaints and violations by 60%, saved on the L&D budget, and reported greater employee satisfaction.
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