There are certain realities to management and in many cases one bad employee who is thinking of leaving or planning on leaving can have a huge effect on other people in the office. When that behavior turns into "we should all go work at X" in a coordinated effort it can be hugely damaging and significantly more so than everyday turnover.
What's more is that when something like this happens the owner/manager rarely even gets any reaction time to find out why the person(s) left or are leaving to address the problem.
Sometimes, that one person just needed to go and everybody else will be fine. http://www.reliableplant.com/Read/4768/workplace-bad-apples
I've experienced this recently. Had an employee leave who complained constantly to the point that other staff contacted me to say they were considering looking elsewhere because the office was so negative. That one employee left and tried to recruit 3 other people with her until that clause stopped it.
As soon as she left, everything in the office got better. That was 2 years ago and none of those other 3 employees she tried to recruit away have been so unhappy as to leave...because we do everything to take care of our employees.
One part of keeping employees happy is knowing the company that they work for is stable. Knowing you're doing everything to make sure that is the case goes a long way to reducing workplace stress.
My fear here is that you're dramatically oversimplifying and the basis for that is the shortness of your replies without seeming to read any of my responses.
Running a business is complex and you deal with a lot of things that aren't anywhere in the realm of what you got into the work to do in the first place. What works one place doesn't necessarily work at another. Sometimes it depends on the type of people who you're hiring as to what type of policies will work.
For employees looking at the long term, 401k's with employer matching are huge. For others it's stock options. For some it's flexibility.
The particular business that I'm talking about is in the same city as the main graduate program in the state for the service we offer, so we get a lot of new grads with a lot of workplace inexperience. We've seen a repeat trend of this "Oh, lets all go work here next" behavior but only in this one city, which is what led to the policy in the first place. For that personality, happiness is job hopping and taking their new friends and clients with them.
I'm just trying to help you understand that all situations are not equal.
