Sales and Marketing Excellence: Hiring Wisdom: Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Your Best People Will Quit

Or you can do what some companies do - figure out who your best employees are,

then expect them to do all the work without any additional reward. via http://www.tlnt.com/

Treat everyone equally. The key is not to treat them equally, it is to treat them all fairly.
Tolerate mediocrity. A-players don’t have to or want to play with a bunch of C-players. Furthermore the team may stop hiring any better people since the headcount is already filled. Comment: We're in such a niche that new recruits are hard to find, and expensive. So when we find them, we tolerate all kinds of complete and utter nonsense because we feel pressure to keep them. I say a mediocre employee will eventually disappoint customers, withering their value anyway.
Have dumb rules. Great employees want to have guidelines and direction, but they don’t want to have rules that get in the way of doing their jobs or that conflict with the values the company says are important
Don’t recognize outstanding performance and contributions. Remember Psychology 101 — Behavior you want repeated needs to be rewarded immediately.
Don’t have any fun at work
Don’t keep your people informed. You’ve got to communicate not only the good, but also the bad and the ugly. If you don’t tell them, the rumor mill will. In this age of technology there's no excuse not keep your people informed
Micromanage. Comments: Normally the person that micromanage doesn't have the knowledge or skill to do the job in the first place!. Give your employees the freedom to utilize their creativity and personal strengths to get the end result desired.
Don’t develop an employee retention strategy.
Don’t do employee retention interviews.
Make your onboarding program an exercise in tedium. Most are poorly organized, inefficient, and contain boring policies and procedures, and hours of regulations and red tape. Make sure your orientation delivers and reinforces these three messages repeatedly:A. You were carefully chosen and we’re glad you’re here;B. You’re now part of a great organization;C. This is why your job is so important.
Comment: If it’s 4 days to wait until you can even log in to your laptop / get email up and running etc – this is not OK. Reduce that time to 2 hours.