Alex Vallejo joined Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) 17 days after a gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, California, killing eight people and destroying dozens of homes. The company faced scrutiny from local, state, and federal agencies, as well as losing trust with its customers.
In his role, Vallejo helped to reimagine a tracking system that encouraged employees to raise compliance issues, escalate them, and resolve them quickly. He also helped align the company’s goals with its federal compliance monitorship.
As a result of his work, Compliance Week has named Vallejo as its Compliance Innovator of the Year, an acknowledgement of how far he and PG&E have come.
Last September, Vallejo became an executive vice president and chief people officer at PG&E, but prior to that role, he was the company’s chief risk officer and senior vice president of ethics and compliance. In that role, he led the transformation of a compliance program initially built under pressure from regulators into an award-winning program. His creative use of governance tools, lean management principles, and culture-first philosophy resulted in measurable results across one of the country’s most heavily scrutinized utilities.
“Compliance is about being trustworthy and building trust,” Vallejo said. “That’s the through-line for everything we’ve done.”
Vallejo’s key contribution was the reimagining of PG&E’s Commitments Information Center (CIC), a tracking system the company used to monitor regulatory commitments. Under his leadership, the CIC evolved from a static dashboard into what he describes as a strategic forum providing a real-time, cross-functional venue where compliance issues could be raised, escalated, and resolved quickly. This system has a standard color scale indicating if metrics were being met (green), something might be off (yellow), or if they’re off track (red). Instead of panicking at the sight of red metrics, Vallejo and his team took a different approach.
“We took a mantra to say, let’s celebrate the red right, so that people felt very comfortable saying, I have an issue, I have a problem, and that those things don’t go subterranean,” Vallejo said.
The approach drew on lean management principles already embedded in PG&E’s operations, repurposing existing infrastructure rather than building something new. The results were obvious: the company’s on-track commitments climbed from 85 percent in 2022 to 100 percent in 2025.
“If you’ve got a problem and you keep it to yourself, it’s your problem,” he said. “If you’ve got a problem and you put it on the table, it’s our problem to solve. So let’s celebrate the red. Let’s bring up the issues so we can work on them together.”
PG&E has operated under federal oversight for years following the San Bruno pipeline explosion, and Vallejo was asked to stand up the company’s federal monitorship function. This role is typically met with a defensive stance by some compliance officers, but not in this case.
“What was different was embracing the monitorship and the oversight as an opportunity to get better,” he said, “rather than resist and keep them at arm’s length and give them the minimum amount of access.”
He opened the books, created consistent lines of communication, and aligned the monitor’s goals with PG&E’s own. The strategy paid off, as the company achieved roughly a 66 percent net reduction in electric infrastructure and vegetation management inspection observations from one county-level monitor, a 14 percent net reduction from a state-appointed safety monitor, and a 10 percent year-over-year increase in more actionable observations from the Governor’s Operational Observer. The improvement was not just with the outcomes, but also with the quality of regulatory feedback.
“We shared a common goal, which was a safer PG&E,” Vallejo always told the monitors. “You want the same thing we do.”
One of Vallejo’s proudest achievements is PG&E’s Speak Up Awards program, now in its 11th year. The awards program is an annual company-wide event led by the CEO and senior leadership that publicly honors employees who raised concerns or drove positive change. Anyone at the company can nominate a colleague.
The numbers show that the program has gained momentum over those years. In 2024, the company received 64 nominations. Last year, that number nearly doubled to close to 120. Fifteen champions are selected annually, recognized in front of thousands of employees at an in-person and virtual event, and each is awarded a cash donation to their charity of choice.
Vallejo says the program was designed to recognize not just the nominees but the people who nominated them, creating what he describes as a flywheel of speak-up culture.
“Speak up, listen up, follow up,” he said. “When somebody speaks up, you’re listening to them, and then you’re doing something about it. There’s no faster way to kill a culture than to not do anything about an issue somebody raises.”
The program has reduced reliance on anonymous reporting, a sign, Vallejo says, that employees trust the system enough to put their names on their concerns.
Vallejo’s innovative changes to his compliance program also meant not only getting the trust of employees, but also the trust of senior leadership. Whenever he met with some pushback over his ideas, he would adjust his ask to bring everyone on the same page, which was to align with the outcomes that were best for the company.
“What’s the why behind the what?” he said. “If we align on the outcome — a better, safer, more reliable, more affordable PG&E for our customers — then we can work backwards from that and address the concerns.”
That philosophy has carried Vallejo through a career with PG&E that started from being a member of the company’s law department to the current Chief People Officer. He describes the trajectory as colorful. From the outside, it looks like the kind of career that can only be built at a company that gives someone room to grow.
Vallejo accepted the Compliance Innovator of the Year award, but he says he’s been fortunate to be part of great teams at PG&E.
“It’s the team’s award,” he said. “But it’s great to be recognized.”
