Employee Engagement - Low Attrition , Higher Productivity

During my span of work at my previous organization, I have come across several brilliant associates who excel at their deliverables. They efficiently complete their piece of code but I don't find them thinking "out of the box". They work on their respective modules of an application and are well informed about that particular module. However, when it comes to the complete application/product knowledge, I see the domain awareness missing. This lack of overall awareness about the application/product severely restricts their ability to innovate and come up with newer and more effective solutions that will benefit the product/application.

Another issue is , due to this lack of awareness, associates don't realize the significance/importance of their work. For example, we always encounter cases where associates are not keen on prod-support work. This is because they don't realize the criticality of prod-support to create a reliable, repeatable customer experience. Once, associates recognize the impact their work is creating, they would approach it with more passion & enthusiasm. We often hear about 'Employee Engagement'. It's a concept that is generally viewed as :- managing discretionary effort, that is, when employees have choices, they will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests. An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work.

It has been proved that engaged employees are 62% more productive than disengaged employees. This additional productivity results in higher quality in their deliverables, hence higher costumer satisfaction.

I strongly feel that , to create Engaged employees, we need to ensure that they need to realize the importance of their work. This will happen only if they have knowledge about the complete product/application (know the complete domain of the product/application ) . To ensure this, we need create an environment in the organization, where domain knowledge sessions are encouraged and supported. I acknowledge that a process is already in place for this. However, I don't see it (to be ) functioning ideally. One way we can increase the inclination of associates to gain knowledge on the domain of their work(learn the domain ) is through creating a system where its made mandatory for all teams to conduct one domain knowldege session every fortnight/month.

To summarize the idea, we need to put stronger focus on learning the domain & functionality of the products/applications associates are working on. This domain knowledge helps to get the overall picture, thus creating an opportunity to innovate and improvise. The domain also ensures higher Employee engagement, resulting in higher productivity and enhanced costumer experience.