Do you think a soft economy lessens your need to engage your staff? Think again. Your most valuable asset-and single biggest investment-is walking out the door. Your greatest competitive differentiator-your talent-is seeping out of your organization's business engine while you are asleep at the wheel. That is unless you are managing and measuring the performance of your talent while filling the pipeline of succession.

It's now a proven fact that talent drives business performance. Your executive team and board know this already. They are waiting for you to execute your talent management strategy. When will you deliver?

When employees make the decision to leave a company, replacing valuable staff can cost from 30 to 250 percent of annual compensation. These numbers take into account lost business performance, customer satisfaction, cost of acquisition and the high cost of developing new staff to the same level of performance as predecessors. Developing a solid program for reducing staff turnover, however, can be tricky in the best of times-and even more so during an economic downturn.

According to the US Bureau of Labor's most recent statistics, IT jobs are at the leading edge of job growth and expected to grow by 18 percent from 2006 to 2016. This is currently more than twice as fast as the average for all other occupations.

For the CIO, this is further complicated by another key statistic from the Bureau of Labor: approximately 40 percent of all US employees will leave their jobs within the next 12 months. On the surface, the current economy-fueled by the collapse of the housing market and current credit crisis-appears to be the culprit. However, the telling statistic for US employers across all departments is that more than half of that turnover is actually workers voluntarily walking out the door. But why?

Effective talent management cannot solely be the focus of HR. Indeed, it's becoming increasingly mission-critical for today's CIOs to develop a centralized and streamlined process for HR to meet employee retention and recruiting initiatives. When it comes to staff turnover, here are four top reasons people decide to leave an organization and what smart CIOs can do to mitigate the situations:

Poor communication: To foster an environment where employees are empowered and encouraged to stay, companies should look to make retention a high priority and implement programs that increase employee satisfaction. This can mean addressing inconsistent workplace practices and ineffective collaboration and knowledge sharing between business units and departments. To improve communication, incorporating more transparent and consistent management processes can help enhance the relationship between managers and staff. This also includes developing internal mobility initiatives that combat excessive turnover and boost corporate financial performance.