In a slow economy, employees have fewer opportunities to take a job at another company, but entrepreneurs would be remiss to take their fingers off the pulse of company morale simply because employees have fewer options. “Companies that don’t think about employee incentives and basically rest on their laurels and think ‘the economy means fewer jobs therefore, where are they going to go?’ Are the companies that, as soon as the labour market picks back up will see their turnover rates going from 5 % to 50 % and it will happen overnight,” says Mark Murphy, author of The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention and CEO of Leadership IQ, a Washington D.C.-based executive education firm.

So what’s one of the biggest reasons people quit their jobs? One of the major reasons is being dissatisfied with their supervisor. In the cramped confines of a small business, with the pressures of work, the relationship between employees can be tested on a daily basis. In bigger companies there are more opportunities to move to other jobs if you’re dissatisfied with a particular supervisor, whereas smaller companies may have less options so they run the risk of losing the employee.