Hiring managers, HR reps, and team leaders know intuitively why it's essential to keep your best workers happy and under your roof. When a good worker goes somewhere else, it creates a bottleneck in production. It hurts efficiency, lowers morale, decreases institutional knowledge, and it brings on a period of reduced productivity until a new person is recruited, hired, trained, and ready to work. But when top talent is being contacted by other companies, or if someone's unhappy and starting to look around, what can be done to retain them? It doesn't necessarily mean cracking open the vault and offering a hefty raise (but that might be something to consider if the person is especially valuable or holds a set of rare skills). Here are some ways to keep your best workers on your team: Feedback doesn't have to be a dirty or scary word. It's of the utmost importance that employers, managers, and team leaders know what's going on with their subordinates. It's crucial for productivity, morale, and retention. But why? Isn't feedback just another word for complaining? That might be the way it was in the past -- think of those old suggestion boxes that went overlooked and ignored -- but we're wiser now, more considerate and more interested in hearing from our workers. 
