Across the world big businesses are worried about finding and keeping talent.
Good candidates may get more than one offer or be headhunted by a rival.
Chief executives tell leadership expert Steve Tappin about the best ways to recruit and retain staff.
If you need a strict, no-nonsense management style to successfully lead a multinational company, no-one appears to have ever told Henry Engelhardt.The founder and chief executive of UK insurance group Admiral, the 56-year-old American seems far too friendly and easy-going. Much too whimsical, even.
For while he leads a business belonging to the FTSE 100 index of the largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, his relaxed, down-to-earth management methods seem a world apart from his contemporaries.
After all, it is hard to imagine another FTSE 100 boss officially describing their firm's most recent financial results as being like a "jacket potato" (because, using a food analogy, they were comforting - but not exciting like a steak).
Nor do any other companies on the index have a "Ministry of Fun", a team dedicated to organising weekly social activities for staff, such as come to work in fancy dress days, nights out, or computer game tournaments in lunch breaks.
And Mr Engelhardt and other Admiral managers don't have company cars.
Nor will he even have his own office when Admiral's headquarters relocates across Cardiff city centre later this year. He will instead be downgrading himself to just a desk on an open plan floor.
While this is all most unusual behaviour in such a chief executive, for Mr Englehardt it is all part of his commitment to making Admiral a "fun place to work", where all the staff also feel as equal and valued as possible.
Continue reading the main storyI made a dedication to myself that if I could help it, I would never again work somewhere where I was unhappy”End Quote Henry Engelhardt "We have a very simple philosophy - if people like what they do, they will do it better," he says. "Or to put it another way - have fun, satisfy customers, make money."
"And if people are unhappy at work, if they are brooding or jealous, it doesn't help you do those things."
The results of such an approach appear to be twofold. Firstly, Admiral is the only company that has made all 14 of the annual 100 Best UK Companies To Work For reports by the Sunday Times newspaper.
And secondly, Admiral says it is one of only two companies on the FTSE 100 to have reported 10 straight years of higher profits and dividends.
'Incredible industry'A native of Chicago, Mr Englehardt never planned to go into the insurance industry.
After studying journalism at the University of Michigan he got a job as a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Admiral puts having happy staff at the centre of its business model While he enjoyed the job for a few years, he then found that the dynamics and personalities of the firm changed, and suddenly it was no longer a pleasant place to work. It was a key moment in helping to shape his future management style at Admiral.
"I made a dedication to myself that if I could help it, I would never again work somewhere where I was unhappy," he says. "This is because it is simply very difficult to flip a switch and then be happy when you aren't in work."
So Mr Englehardt and his French-born wife Diane - who met as students - quit their jobs and travelled around Asia for six months.While away, he determined to do something else with his life, so he decided to enrol on a Master of Business Administration (MBA) course, the key management qualification, to better equip him to switch careers.
As his wife wanted to be near her family, he did a one-year MBA at Insead in Paris.
After the end of the year, and with the first of their four children having been born by then, Mr Englehardt and his wife decided to move to the UK.
"I wasn't particularly happy with France, and she wasn't happy with the thought of going back to the US, so the UK was our compromise," he says.
A £1m grant took Admiral to Wales, where it now sponsors the national rugby team After some time as a not very enthusiastic management consultant in London, Mr Englehardt said he kept seeing the same advertisement for a job "which just said financial services".
"So I phoned and asked for more details... and it was for a job in car insurance. And I literally thought 'oh no, how boring, what could be worse than car insurance?'.
"But I really didn't want to be a management consultant any more, so I applied, and I got the job. And I found out that car insurance was an incredible industry."
Staff windfallFinding he was a natural at the car insurance game, Mr Engelhardt spent two years at Churchill before he was headhunted by Lloyds of London to launch and lead a new company in the sector.
So on 2 January 1993, he started Admiral.
Mr Engelhardt owns about 15% of the business Cardiff, the Welsh capital, was chosen for its headquarters because after "sending letters to 10 places where you could get grants from, Cardiff was the only city we heard back from".
Mr Englehardt adds: "We got a grant for £1m, and we have gone on to put about £800m back into the local economy. It has been a great place for us to be."
Admiral has grown quickly ever since, with Mr Englehardt leading a management buyout in 1999, and then a share flotation in 2004.
In addition to ensuring the staff are as happy as possible, Mr Englehardt and his team have also made some key strategic decisions.
Admiral was one of the first car insurance firms to cut out the brokers, and instead sell direct via call centres. And in more recent years Admiral led the way in launching its own price comparison website - Confused.com.
Admiral's Ministry of Fun organises social events for staff Today the company is worth £4bn, and has more than 5,000 staff, all of whom - including those in its Indian office - automatically get shares.
Mr Englehardt, who owns about 15% of Admiral, also personally introduces himself to all new members of staff in the UK, Canada and India.
After the 2004 flotation, non-management staff at Admiral shared a windfall of £56m, which equated to an average of £40,000 per person.
Mr Englehardt says what makes him most proud is that the company scores even higher now in independent staff satisfaction surveys than it did back then.
And as he is keen to reiterate - happy staff means happy customers, which makes money.
While sleepovers are standard fare when you're a child, spending the night with your boss is a level of intimacy that most people would rather avoid.
But for Whole Foods Market chief executive and founder John Mackey, escaping the constraints of the office and spending time with colleagues in a more personal setting is the best way to build up a trusting relationship.
"I know this sounds weird, but there's something about sleeping in the same house and then fixing breakfast or dinner together that is very much a bonding experience," he says.
Whole Foods opened its first store in 1980 This level of personal interaction, says Mr Mackey, prevents staff compartmentalising their work life and personal life, and means workers can relate on a deeper level.His approach stresses the importance of emotionally involved leadership and creating a culture that allows workers to flourish.
Gallup's most recent study of employee engagement in the US workplace found an alarming 70% of those surveyed either hated their jobs or were completely disengaged.
Right from when he founded the natural and organic food firm in 1980 with just one store and 19 staff, Mr Mackey has been on a mission to change this.
The company now has 80,000 staff across 373 shops in the US, Canada and the UK, but his main objective remains ensuring employees feel valued and that their work is more than just a pay cheque.
"If you want to create a good culture and a good company then people have got to have that sense that their work matters and that they matter."
Whole Foods sells natural and organic foods Staff power To get this across, Mr Mackey says "caring leadership" is emphasised from the top down, with a conscious effort not to promote "the jerks".
This isn't just rhetoric. In each store, workers are divided into eight teams in different departments.When new employees join they are assigned to a team and put on two months' probation. Only when they are approved by at least two-thirds of their team members in a secret ballot can they stay on permanently.
While it is easy to be sceptical about an approach that appears to have come straight from the 1960s hippie era, the results suggest it is very effective.
For the 2013 financial year, Whole Foods reported the best sales in its 35-year history. In the 52 weeks to 29 September, total sales rose 12% to $12.9bn (£7.8bn), and net income rose 18% to $551m.
And for the past 17 years in a row, it has been listed as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" in the US by Fortune magazine.
Room at the topPart of its appeal for workers is the consensual culture. Even the very top job is shared, with Mr Mackey leading the firm alongside co-chief executive Walter Robb.
Walter Robb (left) and John Mackey say sharing the chief executive role works better than the traditional corporate hierarchy of a solo boss This approach continues throughout the firm, with individual stores having control over budgets and staff having the power to make decisions.
Mr Mackey says this "decentralisation" approach differs from the standard corporate chain model and helps to drive innovation.
One idea that came via this process is the "tap room" - an in-store beer and wine bar that lets customers nibble on food while sampling local wine and beers by the glass.
It started out in one store after an employee came up with the idea, but has now been rolled out to more than 100 stores.
The tap room came from a suggestion from a member of staff Mr Mackey believes most chief executives are afraid of handing their staff this level of responsibility, mainly because they fear they will lose control.
He admits the approach can be messy and inefficient, with time wasted duplicating existing ideas, but says the upside - "a much more dynamic and turned on workforce" - is worth it.
Pay is equally egalitarian. The seven-strong executive team, which includes the co-chief executives, all earn the same salary, which is capped at 19 times the average pay of a full-time worker.
And it ends all meetings with what it calls "appreciations", thanking people on the team for specific contributions to the firm, a simple idea that Mr Mackey says has had a "huge revolutionary impact" in terms of improving staff relations.
"You have to create a culture where everybody has an opportunity to be recognised," he says.
This feature is based on interviews by Steve Tappin for the BBC's CEO guru series, produced by Neil Koenig and Evy Barry.