At a minimum, people spend 40 hours of their lives every week at work. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but that’s still a significant portion of their waking hours. If employees feel like work is a place of stress, drudgery, or ruthless competition and pressure, they’re not going to enjoy coming to work. They’ll be more inclined to look for a way out of excuses for missing work, and that can hurt your overall productivity in addition to your bottom line. The solution is to change your company’s culture and make it a more positive, reaffirming, and productive place to work. A company is only as successful as its employees. A good manager knows this and wants to do all he or she can to make sure their team feels appreciated and valued. The good news is, appreciating your employees doesn't necessarily mean having to shell out bags of cash in the process. Here are some ideas on how to thank your employees without wrecking the bottom line: 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: It's a fact of business life: Employees aren't likely to stay in one job forever. Something might happen to prompt them to start looking for a new opportunity and, regardless of what you might to do try and retain them, they leave and the company has to find someone new. Employee retention is a challenge for all companies, and for managers in particular. Finding, hiring and keeping great employees is an ongoing process and one which deserves adequate attention and care to do correctly. It costs more than just time to replace an employee 
