Many employees today live in constant fear of losing their jobs – and that fear is a major productivity drain for the entire company or organization.

When leaders are worried about their jobs, they create reports to prove how successful they are and how great their teams are. They ask their staffs to create notebooks of outstanding work, run statistics and stop mid-activity to develop activity reports to prove they are productive.

While teams are busy proving how productive they are, they stop working toward real results. They lose focus on the goals they’re trying to accomplish, and may actually create a self-fulfilling prophecy by failing to achieve their goals – and losing their jobs.

When staff members live in fear, they are constantly looking for another job – searching job sites during the day, making connections with friends at other companies, going to breakfast and lunch meetings with potential employers, and checking their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts for postings that might be a way out of a bad situation.

If you are a CEO, president or executive director, you have the responsibility to help control the fear factor in your organization. If your employees are safe, reassure them. Then reassure them again.

Reward and lift up your great employees; don’t take them for granted. In this economy, your best people are the ones you are most likely to lose if they are worried about the stability of your company, their departments or their personal jobs.

If you do have lay-offs, spend extra time working on your messaging about the situation – and make sure the leaders at every level of your business know how to discuss the situation to create the least fear among the people you really want to keep.

Fear is perhaps the greatest drain on productivity and success in the current economy. If your company is stalling out, morale seems low and your turnover is going up – check the fear factor.