Your worst nightmare just happened. You’re two days into a much-needed vacation when you receive a phone message from one of your best employees telling you he resigns. There goes your vacation and instead of relaxing, you spend the time wondering what happened.

Losing a valuable employee unexpectedly — especially in an industry such as secondary woodworking where good employees can be hard to find — can spell trouble for a company. But it’s more of a common occurrence than you might think. Consider these statistics from the 2005 Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study: only 17 percent of Canadian workers reported being highly engaged with their jobs while 66 percent reported being moderately engaged and 17 percent, fully disengaged. According to the study’s findings, engaged employees tend to stay with the same company longer. Indeed, 63 percent of the people who reported being highly engaged had no plans of leaving their company while only 12 percent of the disengaged employees felt the same way.
 

The old business truism that replacing a customer is more expensive than retaining a current one also applies to employees. Studies put the cost of replacing an employee as high as 150 percent of an annual salary for hourly employees when direct costs such as replacement and training and indirect costs such as lower productivity are factored in. And if you think that the number one reason employees leave is for more money, think again. Monetary incentive is rarely cited as one of the top five reasons.

 
What causes employees to become disengaged and more likely to leave? There are a host of reasons but there is one in particular that I think every business needs to pay attention to:  company culture. Regardless of the size of your business, if you embrace a culture of respect, fairness and empowerment, and take a genuine interest in your employees’ well-being, you increase the likelihood of keeping your employees for a long time.
 

Here are seven strategies to help you translate a healthy company culture into actionable steps: