3 Ways to Retain Your Top Employees If you really want to make your team happy, stop thinking like a boss ... and start thinking like an employee.

Entrepreneurs know how to make customers happy: We learn their needs and then create products and services to match. But too often, we don't do the same thing with our employees. We make incorrect assumptions about what workers value — and, in the process, overlook what will give them long-term stability.

It's based on good intentions, but the delivery is bad.

For example, some employers offer profit-sharing incentives. People like more money, right? But in the U.K., when researchers surveyed more than 13,000 employees across nearly 1,300 workplaces, these profit-­sharing incentives got mostly bad reviews. Why? Because profit sharing is based on the company's overall performance. Employees don't feel rewarded for their individual effort. In fact, they feel like the rewards go to the people with the best positions — not the best workers.