Employers Can Still Make These Holidays Special

We were happy to help out CBSNews.com at the beginning of the holiday season with ways to help keep employees focused during what can be a difficult -- as well as rewarding -- time at work.

And if you're helping manage a place that needs to keep operating right on through from now into the New Year, then these ideas can be doubly helpful.

Here are some of the suggestions we shared with CBS News for helping workers to feel engaged during the holidays:

Give them a temporary flexible schedule. We told CBS that if people are worried about making flights or being home for deliveries, it can distract them from work. So try to work around that reality of the holidays if you can.

Plan some corporate holiday cheer. Company Christmas parties are all wrapped up, but what about some kind of social occasion recognizing those who must work during the week between Christmas and New Year? Even the smallest gesture will be appreciated.

Give back to others. There's never only a season for doing this, but the winter holidays in American culture can punctuate the need. 

It might even be a good idea to organize some kind of company-level effort that would be executed during the last week of the year, because there's always so much do-gooding right up until Christmas -- and then it sort of drops off a cliff (no fiscal pun intended).

Want Engaged Employees? It's Up To You!

Two new studies are out that underscore the importance of managers in determining whether employees consider themselves engaged in their work and in the mission of their companies.

The studies focus on different levels of management as being determinative in employees' feelings of engagement. But the overall point is that workers' sense of welcome by their company, and commitment to their work, tends to be highly influenced by the behavior and attitudes of their leaders at any and all levels of the company.

Three key drivers of employee engagement, identified in a survey this fall of 1,500 employees nationally, were their relationship with their immediate supervisor, belief in senior leadership and pride in working for the company.

"The attitude and actions of the immediate supervisor can enhance employee engagement or can create an atmosphere where an employee becomes disengaged," the recent study by MSW Research and Dale Carnegie Training concluded.

At the same time, in a recent study by Modern Survey, the No. 1 factor in driving engagement was this: "I have confidence in my company's senior management." The biggest problem with that finding, the survey outfit said, was that "favorability ratings of senior management haven't changed much over the past year, and remain at depressingly low levels."

This outlines a clear challenge for corporate managers and executives: As much as they may massage other lever of employee engagement ranging from benefits to good business performance, the biggest influence they can have on the men and women in the next cubicle or out in the field or on the factory floor below is individual exhibition of leadership qualities and their personal relationships with their subordinates.

Or, as the MSW-Carnegie study put it, "Believing in the ability of senior leadership to take their input, lead the company in the right direction and openly communicate the state of the organization is key in driving [employee] engagement."

Most Important Developments at Yahoo Are Beneath Surface

The young reign of Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo is getting a lot of attention. That's especially true as she tries to get a strategic handle on a company that's been messed up for a while.

This week's news of a shuffle on the Yahoo board, for example, is hardly surprising.

Yet the bigger story in Mayer's attempted transformation of Yahoo may be occurring beneath this high-visibility surface. There is evidence that one of the new CEO's most important initiatives is to improve the company by boosting employee engagement.

It may seem that a culture of true care about their work should come naturally to Yahoo employees and management; after all, isn't every Silicon Valley company and everyone there just wild about how they're using digital technology to transform the world?

But obviously, that hasn't been the reality for a while at Yahoo, which has been losing a struggle to stay with Amazon, Apple and Google in the top tier of companies that indeed continue to transform the world through digital technology.

So Mayer is taking the possibilities of greater engagement seriously, some reports suggest. For example, she recently e-mailed employees that each of them had the choice of a free Apple iPhone 5, a Samsung Galaxy S3 or a comparable smart phone. 

Making sure Yahoo employees reside on the cutting edge of mobile technology is a huge part of Mayer's business plan for the company, to be sure. But this gesture shows that she truly wants to compel employees to join her in overhauling the company rather than simply imposing her new vision from on high.

It'll be interesting to track the evolution of engagement at Yahoo as Mayer's high-stakes overhaul picks up speed.