Secrets to longevity and career growth at Wissen

Category

Blogs

Author

Wissen Team

Date

April 28, 2023

The conversation around employee turnover, tightening talent markets, and rising concerns about employee retention are only increasing in the enterprise circle. 

While the cost of employee turnover can be as much as 2.5 times an employee’s salary, turnover has other associated costs like lower productivity, reduced employee engagement, and cultural repercussions. 

All organizations are creating an environment that fosters employee engagement and aids retention. An organizational culture that focuses on employee retention sees higher employee morale, increased productivity and performance, and improved quality of work.

Fortunately, employee turnover is not something that has impacted Wissen. Our core team and a majority of employees have been with the organization since its inception in 2015. What are we doing right so that we are not plagued by the employee turnover crisis that most organizations are battling? 

We spoke to our employees about this, and here are the reasons they provided:

A technologist’s paradise

Most of our employees labeled our organization as a technologist’s paradise. Our employees are all passionate technologists. The key attraction for them, is the prospect of working on cutting-edge projects involving enterprise systems and large and complex datasets. They design solutions for some of the top Fortune 100 companies across a range of industries like banking and financial services, healthcare, telecom, manufacturing, and energy is an added attraction. 

The technologists also work with high-end technologies such as RPA, cloud, mobility, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, Visualization, and business intelligence which keeps them driven and excited.

While we give our employees this high-tech playground, we also understand that not all technologies want to move into people management roles. But to avoid this from impacting career progressions, we have clearly defined career paths to meet the development needs of technologists and managerial candidates separately.  

An enabling environment

A LinkedIn Workplace Learning report stated that 94% of employees consider staying in a company if it is invested in their career development. At Wissen, we believe learning to be a great enabler of work, and enablement at work translates to higher productivity, better outcomes, and invested and engaged employees.

Wissen translates to “to show, to teach, to inform, to guide & to direct”. We believe in diversity of ideas, thoughts, perspectives, and worldviews and are big fans of teamwork and collaboration. Our employees are on a journey of continuous learning through our robust learning and development initiatives. Some of the things that our employees appreciate are:

  • Our initiatives help employees constantly update and upgrade their skills and capabilities to help them in their professional paths. 
  • We conduct a range of activities to drive professional development, providing company-sponsored certifications, and organizing internal tech forums and practice groups.
  • Encouraging participation in hackathons, cross-functional and cross-technical training, and delivering instructor-led training programs for advanced technology topics, etc. 

Senior technical resources act as guides and mentors to those less experienced and ensure that learning remains a part of our culture.

Dynamic career progression

We focus on instilling a sense of responsibility, loyalty, and trust within our employees by continuously empowering and enabling them. Being a growth-focused organization, we have steered clear of archaic systems that link career progression with experience or tenure. Growth opportunities at Wissen are based on talent, passion, ownership, and the ability to deliver results. This has been a great driver of employee engagement across the organization.

Employees who demonstrate a ‘growth mindset’ are highly accountable, invested, and driven. These traits are recognized and rewarded. So, a software engineer who is an individual contributor can move up the growth ladder and become a director responsible for growing revenues and driving profitability by being performance-focused and growth-oriented.

It is not all work and no play

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. We recognize that while an indelible professional focus is essential for growth, only being work-focused is the recipe for highly disengaged employees. Our employees consider the balance between work and play and the efforts that we take to bring an element of ‘play’ in a rather serious work environment a big motivator that helps them remain engaged and invested at work.

Wissen challenges their employee's inner Messi and Ronaldo with football matches, encourages them to unleash the MasterChef in them, hosts Women’s Day celebrations, and has fun-filled activities organized over the year to keep them refreshed and charged for work. 

Surprisingly, most of our employees also put the internal ideating competitions and the several hackathons we organize in the play bucket stating that these kept monotonies at bay!

Knowledge sharing and free-thinking

Our company culture is deeply rooted in the principle that knowledge is power, and when shared, power multiplies. The employees greatly value this aspect. They cited that this environment that promotes knowledge-sharing and enables better decision-making has been the key attraction to stay tied with us.

Most employees love the fact that knowledge-sharing is not an amorphous concept at Wissen. There are regular brainstorming sessions to empower employees and encourage them to think freely without fear of judgment. 

We encourage open and ongoing collaboration. To facilitate that, employees can take up roles that are completely different from their existing ones, they are free to work on new technology according to their choice and available opportunities. We also encourage knowledge sharing by fostering cross-functional conversations and actively seek to bring people with different functional experiences to work towards a common goal.

The fact that top ideas generated through internal competitions or one-on-one sessions are rewarded and stand a chance to be converted into accelerators is the added incentive that our employees love.

Wissen is a focused company working on niche technologies for clients across the world. The organization has grown its revenues by 400% in just five years and has moved from two big clients to becoming trusted partners to lead technology transformations for 18 Fortune 500 companies.  

This organizational growth would not have happened had we not hired the right resources to join our tribe of passionate technologists. From the onset, we have had a stringent recruitment and hiring process to ascertain that the technologists who join us are the right fit, both professionally and culturally.

Our employees possess a comprehensive technical vocabulary and deep-tech knowledge. They are excited to work on modern and legacy technology and large, complex, distributed systems. They are domain experts and are also business-oriented. They can capably design systems, processes, and workflows to enhance and improve business functions. 

Our objective is to do things right the first time, whether it's coding or hiring. We can safely say that our efforts have been fruitful, especially as our employees reward us with loyalty.