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: 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. As you're polishing up the resume in preparation for looking for a new job, you'll want to highlight all the impressive skills and experiences obtained during your career. Most ads will indicate the skills that are key to the job, and for HR and administrative positions, organizational skills will be at the very top of the heap. Keeping things on track, on schedule, and budget could not be more critical for an office, and the sharper your organizational skills, the more you're likely to stand out from the rest of the applicants. But which skills are most important? And what, exactly, are organizational skills?
The longer a person is in business, and in a position to make personnel decisions, the greater the odds of making a bad hire. A person can look outstanding on paper, make a great first impression and feel like a perfect fit for your team, but after the first few days, it's more a round peg in a square hole situation than hand-in-glove. Bad hires can breed resentment, kill productivity, slow momentum, and foster anger among a team. And after the loss of an employee, hiring a new one that doesn't work out can be very frustrating. It's not the end of the world, though. 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 It's the most wonderful time of the year! The parties, the treats, the spirit of good cheer and goodwill, that magic that comes with the holidays and makes everything just a little better. With that holiday magic, of course, come endless distractions: online shopping, juggling appointments, trying to get more done in less time and maybe trying to cut a few corners during the workday to get everything done on time. How can you keep your employees focused on the tasks at hand when visions of sugarplums are dancing in their heads? 
