About three years ago a storm began that soon went full-economic tsunami, with unrestrained waves of cutbacks and layoffs that seemed to have no end.

At its peak you and your colleagues scrambled into a lifeboat and bailed frantically, hanging on as the indifferent seas pitched you around. At one point it seemed like your buckets were shrinking incrementally until you ended up bailing with cone-shaped paper cups from the water cooler. You watched helplessly as colleague after colleague drifted away and, after a while, you avoided eye contact with your fellow survivors who likewise hunkered as deeply into the lifeboat as possible. For a time you bobbed along, hitting pockets of turbulent waters here and there but for the most part things sort of calmed down.

But how long will that relative calm last? While there have been proclamations of the recession ending as long as a year ago, people are still losing their jobs, businesses continue to be sunk and underwater homeowners go on floundering. The recession may be over on paper but the uneasy sense of being adrift and utterly rudderless lingers.

And there's something else - lately you have noticed that your lifeboat has begun to tip to one side. In recent weeks the tipping has become more pronounced and sustained. You look around and realize that the tipping is caused by some of your surviving colleagues who are poised pre-swan-dive on the edge of the lifeboat. Yes, after everything you have been through together, your colleagues have had it with the all-hands-on-deck mantra and are about to jump overboard into awaiting speedboats that will carry them away to the higher salaries, better benefits and flexibility they dreamed of while treading water. You think you must be crazy not to follow.

Employers should get ready for the next tsunami - the wave of defections that will build rapidly once the U.S. labor market opens up in earnest. And who can blame workers for jumping ship? Longtime employees who took huge pay cuts, saw their workloads double, triple, then quadruple, and eschewed vacations for fear of appearing to be less than fully engaged at work may be the first to throw off their lines and navigate their own courses.

And professionals who were set adrift during the recession grabbed at any lifeline thrown to them the past three years, so the glut of people who are underpaid and ridiculously overqualified for the jobs they currently occupy is significant. Experts warn that employers will likely be caught unprepared, and Joe Light recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that "employers who snapped up top talent on the cheap in the depth of the recession should start worrying about defections."

What can employers do to try to hang on to their top talent? Research conducted by i4cp found that the most commonly used retention strategies include increasing communication to employees, increasing focus on talent management and succession planning and offering leadership training for first-line managers/supervisors. But your best bet is sweetening the deal with pay increases and advancement opportunities.

Has your organization started ramping up its retention efforts?