As any half-decent HR course will teach you, branding will not actually keep cows, err, “employees” from wandering off. It does help you get them back if you lose them, but the real key to retention of livestock, errr, “human resources,” is having good fences. Keep ‘em penned in, and you’re in good shape! So how to keep employees from leaving? Easy! Below I present a handy list of ten options. Any one of these is good, but use as many as possible for maximum effect.

1. Locate in a small town where there are no other jobs or;
2. Locate in a town with expensive real estate so the fear of going into default on a huge mortgage keeps them from quitting.
3. Overpay the really good people so that they can’t afford to switch jobs. (Har har! Just kidding.)
4. Hire dullards that no one else would hire, and then you don’t have to worry about them getting jobs elsewhere.
5. Stupefy the workforce with tactical missteps, repeated strategic blunders and general insensitivity. Done over a period of years, it greatly reduces their self-esteem, and they lose the will to improve their lot in life.
6. Merge with a huge company that is run by bean-counters and staffed with shell-shocked survivors of several years of post-bubble layoffs and hemorrhage-like offshoring.
7. Ask employees to remove vacation from their account today that they will take in September. Now you know you’ve got some of them hooked at least until then. Of course, if someone would fall for this, you probably already retained these kinds of people with #4 above. This might be redundant, but why take the chance?
8. Give the CEO a huge raise at about the time that the company reports a massive loss. The really twisted employees will ignore a red flag like this, and stick around like rubberneckers at a car crash.
9. Allow employees to 100% vest in all of their underwater stock options. This gives them the ability to take a huge capital gains loss for tax purposes. This is a “goodwill” gesture that will leave them swooning with loyalty.
10. Move to a new building and put managers in offices and leave the low-level “headcount” in cubicles. Employees *love* this kind of arrangement, especially if it also makes their commute a bigger hassle. As an added bonus, it carries the ranching metaphor a little further, as they appear to be in veal hutches.

That wore off rather quickly. My second reaction was to scan Yahoo Finance. I found this:

XYZ – Analyst Sam Gladstone of JP Morgan had this justification for downgrading XYZ’s stock to a “hold” position. “The company is doing great. The ODM strategy is working perfectly. Inefficiencies have been wrung out of the business, and that place is running like a top! But I had to downgrade the stock because those pesky employees just had too much vacation time accrued. That’s a liability on the balance sheet, and they need to unload it if they want the stock to go above $4 a share.”

Lastly, I ran the memo through my translator:

Due to the Corporation’s ongoing inability to manage its cash flow and books in a responsible manner, and in an attempt to make our balance sheet look stronger without materially improving the business, employees are being asked to get their vacation off the books. Now that we are halfway through the quarter, I’d like to let you know that you need to find a way to burn a week of time off in the next six weeks. If this is inconvenient for you and you have vacation scheduled later, we are happy to take your vacation time in the form of an unsecured, interest free loan, and you and your manager can work out the details. Of course, if we lay you off, there is no guarrantee that you’ll get paid for that week, but hey, we’re looking for team players here, not people who invoke the fine print just to save a few thousand dollars! We thank you in advance for not bringing up the fact that [your CEO] got a gigantic compensation increase this year, the fact that you didn’t, and that the company continues to wallow in mediocre performance through no fault of your own. Just take in the shorts like a man, and then get back to work.

P.S. No dummy, you aren’t allowed to slip your schedule just because you’re being asked to take 16% of the rest of the quarter as time off. You have to find a way to get the work done too. Geez, what a stupid question.

Also, I have my handy “corporate cash crunch checklist” and it doesn’t look good. As we all know, the order of operations when companies flounder is as follows:

1. Freeze budgets. [check]
2. Clamp down on travel. [check]
3. Reassure employees with platitudes in town hall meetings. Express redoubled committment to already failing strategy. [ ]
4. Layoffs. [ ]
5. Repeat step 4 until the stock goes up or you run out of employees. [ ]