Pascal Lauener / Reuters

Yahoo Inc Chief Executive Marissa Mayer attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in this January 25, 2013, file photo.

UPDATED 12:28 p.m. EDT: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who sparked an uproar and hurt her image as a working mom when she banned telecommuting two months ago, is now offering employees generous new family leave benefits.

Under the new policy, mothers can take 16 weeks of paid leave with benefits, and fathers can take up to eight weeks, each time they have a new child via childbirth. Both parents receive eight weeks off for new children via adoption, foster child placement or surrogacy.

This change is a significant increase for Yahoo employees, particularly mothers, who will basically get twice as much paid time off. Under the old policy, moms received eight week paid after pregnancy, or 10 weeks if they had a C-section.

Read more from NBCBayArea.com.

Yahoo will also give new parents $500 to spend on such things as house cleaning, groceries and babysitters, plus Yahoo-branded baby gifts.

Mayer's decision, which brings the Sunnyvale-based Yahoo closer to Silicon Valley titans Google and Facebook, could help repair the damage as she works to turn around the struggling media giant.

But it doesn't only make sense from a public relations standpoint, observers said. The new policy could fit into a broader corporate strategy to attract and retain more talent and ultimately improve Yahoo's financial performance.

"It's a smart move," said Rachel Sklar, a New York-based blogger and founder of The Li.st, an organization dedicated to elevate the status of women in New Media and technology. "It suggests a long-term strategy. This is a great precedent."

Companies who provide "everything" to their employees, such as free lunch and daycare sites at Google, do better financially in the long run because there is nothing to "distract" their workers from working, Sklar said.

"The temptation will be to see this through a gender lens - -that of course she did it because she's a new-mom CEO," Sklar said. "And this certainly would suggest she has a heightened awareness as a working mom, but this will encourage new parents to be engaged with the company and have a financial piece of mind. When companies nickel-and-dime their employees, it just adds to their burden."

From the moment she became Yahoo's new chief executive last year, Mayer, 37, has been seen as a symbol of corporate gender politics. She took the job when she was five months pregnant and worked through a two-week maternity leave that ended in October.

Her decision to return to work so quickly attracted both praise and criticism - praise for showing that a new mother could continue to steer a Fortune 500 company, and criticism for failing to set a realistic expectations for America's working moms.

Mayer drew praise for adding perks such as new iPhones and free food, cutting company bureaucracy and redesigning work spaces. Many of those amenities were standard at her prior employer, Google.

In February, Mayer sparked another debate when she decided to end Yahoo's lenient telecommuting policy. Employees with existing work-from-home arrangements were told they had to start coming into the office or look for another job.

The move reflected Mayer's an all-hands-on-deck approach to turning around Yahoo and make it more competitive. But she was again accused of making it harder on working parents.

But her decision to double family leave for new parents from 8 weeks to 16 weeks puts Yahoo in the same ballpark as her Silicon Valley rivals: Google gives between 18 and 22 weeks off to new mothers, and Facebook told the New York Times that it gives new mothers and fathers four months of paid leave.

A Google spokeswoman said that all the Mountain View-company perks - which include preferred parking for expectant mothers and $500 in "baby bucks" to spend on things such as takeout dinners, like Yahoo is now offering - are so that life can be as smooth as possible for new parents. That's of course, the spokeswoman noted, so that they can come back to work fully rested.

In California, workers are eligible for six weeks of partial pay through the state's disability benefits program.

Mayer's move also comes amid a broader debate in America about the country's commitment to family leave. The United States, which hasn't updated its Family and Medical Leave Act in 20 years, ranks among the worst of all developed countries. Sweden, Denmark Russian mothers get at least a year off paid and Canadian mothers get 50 weeks off paid.

The U.S. law requires large companies to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to employers who need to care for a newborn child or an ill relative. And that relatively stingy benefit covers only workers who have been at a company for at least a year. That leaves millions without access to the benefit. Many more cut their absences short because they can't afford unpaid leave.

Employee engagement is recovering since the end of the recession, new research from Gallup shows, but the improvement is uneven: Those higher up the corporate ladder are experiencing much greater gains than the people they supervise.

Engagement rose in eight out of nine sectors measured, with “managers, executives and officials” recording the most dramatic increase: 10 percentage points between 2009 and 2012.

By contrast, workers in manufacturing and sales — the next two highest improvers — had increases of six and five percentage points, respectively. People in other fields including transportation, installation and repair, clerical and office, professional, and construction and mining jobs were all slightly more engaged than they were in 2009.

“It is possible that, amid tough economic times, managers and executives are increasingly motivated to drive a sense of purpose in their organizations,“ Gallup said. The research organization also suggested that executives might be more optimistic about the recovering economy or might experience a greater sense of control than their underlings.

This last possibility is likely, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I suspect that they feel empowered in the current situation,” he said via email. “While managers might be relatively secure in their jobs, most other workers are not.”

This hunch appears to be borne out by the one outlier in Gallup’s survey: service jobs, where a complete reversal has taken place. Three years ago, these employees were the most engaged; today, this is the only sector where engagement fell.

“During the recession people were happy just to have a job,” said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. “Now, those that are most marketable are feeling more confident in their options.”

A report last year from the National Employment Law Project found that employment gains in the years following the recession have disproportionately been in lower-paying fields, many of them in the service industry.

“Lower-wage occupations constituted 21 percent of recession losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth,” the group said. Between 2010 and 2012, 1.7 million jobs — 43 percent of net employment growth — came in the food services, retail, and employment services sectors.

With low pay, minimal benefits and erratic hours, these aren’t what most Americans would consider great jobs, and even an increase of 1.7 million leaves a significant overflow of jobseekers.

Employers can afford to be choosy, and replacing departing workers isn’t a challenge in these lower-skilled industries. Employees know this, and that uncertainty is a contributor to their falling engagement, Lister said. “There’s a lot of fear remaining.”

“It is much easier to be engaged in a job that you expect to hold for the foreseeable future (than) a job that you could lose at any time,” Baker said.

studiobananathings.com via CNBC

Need to escape from problems at work? Take a nap at your desk in peace with the Ostrich Pillow.

Napping has been endorsed by everyone from NASA to the NBA. Studies have shown it can boost your brainpower, improve performance, help with weight loss and even enhance your libido! 

But as compelling as all that is — who has time for a nap?

Enter the Ostrich Pillow, an invention out of a Madrid architecture and design studio that basically allows a human to do the equivalent of an ostrich putting their head in the sand in order to create a quiet space anywhere to nap — from the office to an airport.

The product, which has been called everything from “super cool” (The next Web) to “the most ridiculous idea ever to get funded on Kickstarter” (BusinessInsider.com) was born from the fact that its creators themselves worked long hours, had peaks and troughs in productivity and creativity — and learned that a nap could make a huge difference.

The product makes you laugh the minute you see it (hence the “ridiculous” description) and makes whoever is wearing it look like a hammerhead shark. The pillow slips over the napper’s head, with a breathing hole around the face and  two holes in the sides above the head to put your hands — which makes sense when you’re lying face down on the desk — not so much when you’re sitting upright at the airport.

“We wanted something that would give us a feeling of a different environment — a microenvironment if you like,” said Ali Ganjavian, a partner at the Kawamura-Ganjavian design firm and co-creator of the pillow. “So you could feel that you were away from the madness and had ‘space’ from the outside world. That’s what gave us the cocoon idea,” he said.

The product has been so successful on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.com that it’s already doubled its goal of raising $70,000 and still has more than a week to go.

"We discovered that thousands of people around the world shared our need to nap and we just had to share our dream with you,” Ganjavian says on the promotional video on Kickstarter.

So, yes they take their product very seriously — and yes, they’re aware that people are giggling about the product.

“We think it’s great that people are seeing the ostrich pillow and talking about it. Naturally, we have comments and questions ranging from ‘Is it real’ to ‘We would like to buy these for our army unit,’” Ganjavian said. “We design objects that are intended to be fun and functional so we are not surprised with the joke comments!”

Wait — army units?!

And, while it may seem like a joke product to some, the inventors cite several sober facts for why they decided to get into the napping market: 1) power naps have been shown to improve productivity by more than 30 percent and 2) the well-being market is HUGE — be it alternative therapies, exercise, supplements, spas – or vehicles for mobile napping.

This is what you call a “feeder product,” much like those five-fingered running shoes, where it’s something most people buzz about rather than buy (early on, anyway), said Mike Michalowicz, a consultant for entrepreneurs and the author of “The Pumpkin Plan” and “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.” The people who buy it are the early adopters, he said.

Michalowicz actually has a pair of those five-fingered running shoes, which his wife calls his “clown shoes.”

“Why do early adopters exist? You want to achieve some form of recognition or celebrity status for being a little bit different in some small way,” he said.

The operative word being “small” way.

'A conversation point'
“If I decided to do something extreme and become a nudist, my friends wouldn’t follow me. In fact, they’d probably disassociate with me,” he said. “But if I do something different in small way – five-fingered running shoes or an ostrich pillow – I become a conversation point.”

And the fact that people are laughing about it isn’t a detractor — it’s actually a key to the product’s potential success.

“Any product that’s new is resistant,” Michalowicz said. “You crack that resistance by making it humorous. People will mock it first, then adopt it later.”

The more people hear about it and then see it on people, the more likely they are to buy it.

Take those five-fingered running shoes. At first people made fun of them — calling them clown shoes and the like — then gradually became more comfortable with the novelty as they started to see them all around. Soon, he said, people reach a point where they rationalize a need for the product. With the shoes, it’s walking better, being healthier — I need it.

“With the ostrich pillow, first people will see it and make fun of it, then start justifying why they need to have it,” Michalowicz said. “Humanity has always needed a nap! You start justifying – then you buy it.”

Michalowicz said if this were his product, he wouldn’t spend a dime on advertising the product — he’d spend his marketing budget paying actors or models to wear the ostrich pillow in public.

“Hire a guy to go sit in JFK airport and just ostrich out!” Michalowicz said.

I think he just coined a catch-phrase. You know what’s next don’t you? “Ostrich Out” T-shirts!

And if you’re still wondering why you might need an ostrich pillow, here’s Ganjavian’s 30-second elevator pitch:

“Modern life is busy. We don’t give ourselves enough love, time or space. The ostrich pillow provides that – and all it asks for is 20 minutes!”

Oh, and if you get any flack about being lazy for napping at your desk, consider the following facts:

 Suddenly, a pillow that makes you look like a hammerhead shark doesn’t look so ridiculous anymore, does it?

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People walk past a Wal-Mart store with a banner reading "Low prices, every day, in everything" in Mexico City April 21, 2012.

A deli manager at Wal-Mart doesn’t like how the company is being run and is calling for a change in leadership at the retail giant, but she’s not just moaning about her employer around a water cooler.

Venanzi Luna of South Gate, Calif., has taken her battle to the Web, creating an online petition that already has more than 5,500 signatures as of late Monday.

“It is time for things to change. Wal-Mart needs to take responsibility for its actions and change its leadership,” she wrote on the petition on Change.org, pointing to recent reports that the company bribed Mexican officials.

It’s unclear whether Venanzi Luna will get her wish, but her cyber tactic points to a potentially strong tool for workers to turn the heat up in corner offices across the country.

Social media and online petitions, effectively used by consumers to pressure companies to rethink rate hikes and reassess labor practices overseas, could put power in employees’ hands, said labor experts.

“All of these Internet forces are all of a sudden part of the communications currency in the world, especially in America,” said Lee Howard Adler, who teaches employment law and public sector collective bargaining and labor law at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School. “Even the most powerful see some need to address these.”

Having workers use the Internet to get their voices heard, he said, “could have an impact if there’s a large enough response from employees, consumers and citizens.”

Alder stopped short of saying Luna’s petition is the beginning of a movement, but he’s encouraged that “this courageous deli manager is willing to give it a try.”

Indeed, employees may need a lot of courage to talk so publicly about the top executives at the companies that employs them, especially if they’re not union members.

Wal-Mart is well known for having kept unions out of its U.S. operations, and its unclear how Luna’s petition will impact her career. Wal-Mart would not comment on the petition or Luna's future at the company, but in an earlier statement about the bribery scandal, David Tovar, a spokesman for the retailers said: “We are confident we are conducting a comprehensive investigation and if violations of our policies occurred here, we will take appropriate action."

Luna could not immediately be reached for comment.

Casie Yoder, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Making Change at Wal-Mart coalition, said the organization was approached by Luna to help her write the petition.

“Wal-Mart could fire Venanzi for her petition but that wouldn't seem to me like a smart decision on the company's part,” she said.

Calling for the ouster of top executives is not totally unusual for labor, said John Revitte, a labor professor at Michigan State University. In the last decade, he said, there have been some unions that have had employee members purchase stock so they can complain at board meetings. “But for people unconnected to unions, complaining about your employer is more rare.”

That doesn’t mean, however, a discontented rank and file that isn’t unionized has no sway when it comes to decisions made about top executives, said Kristi Hedges. Hedges, who's with leadership consulting firm The Hedges Company, has been brought in by corporate boards to repair damage or coach CEOs when there’s widespread dissatisfaction with leadership.

Companies that have leaders who don’t have the trust or respect of the rank and file often end up with low retention rates or dissension at all levels, she explained, and boards will move to address that.

“If the pattern over time is an inability to lead, it’s difficult for senior leaders to be successful,” she said.

The Internet, she added, has created a new way for workers to raise their concerns and boards aren’t going to be happy with such public displays of anger toward the top executives, potentially pressuring them to stand up and take notice.

Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute, isn’t sure such employees' Internet tactics will lead to real change in Corporate America.

“We live in a culture where shareholders are king and often shareholders can’t even dislodge CEOs,” he said. “Since employees are even lower in the pecking order I have a hard time imagining they can.”

Martin Poole / Getty Images stock

If you're working for free today, might as well put your feet up.

If you’re a salaried employee and you’re slaving away at work today, you may be working for free.

Leap years present an odd compensation dilemma for employees who don’t get paid on an hourly basis. Such workers receive a set salary for a typical year, which is usually 365 days. But there's an extra day this year.

Alas, for most employers, it doesn’t matter if leap years have 366 days; they still end up paying salaried workers the same amount.

Does this mean you’re actually an indentured servant on February 29? Employment experts are divided on this question.

Daniel Schwartz, an employment attorney for Pullman & Comley in Hartford, Conn., believes employers are getting a free day of work out of their overtime-exempt employees.

“The annual salary is just that, and the paychecks just reflect the portion of the year. Many employers thus get a 'free' day of work from exempt workers because they are not paying anything more than in non-leap years,” he wrote on the law firm's blog this week.

Others don’t see it that way.

“It’s all baked in,” said Brue Elliott, the manager of compensation and benefits for the Society of Human Resource Management.

If you’re making $100,000 a year, he continued, you get paid that over the course of the year, either weekly, bi-weekly, etc., whether you work 365 or 366 days. “Most employers don’t pay exempt employees on a per diem basis,” he added. Typical offer letters to salaried workers don’t specify you’ll be working a certain amount of days per year, he pointed out. They typically say, “you’re paid on an annualized basis.”

For some salaried workers, the leap year may mean you make more money during this 12-month period.

According to Michael O’Toole, director of publications, education and government relations for American Payroll Association, 2012 has 53 Mondays. So that means, if an employees gets paid every Monday they’ll get 53 paychecks this year, compared to 52 paychecks in 2011.

When there are more weeks in a year, some employers reduce a worker’s weekly pay to make it all come out even at the end of the year, he explained. But, he added, “that’s not great human resources relations.”

Hourly workers don’t have to worry too much about this debate. In the end, they could end up getting an extra day’s pay for an extra day’s work if they work throughout the year and the leap day falls on a weekday, as it does this year. 

Anyone who has ever busted a jaw on a Jaw Buster or singed his lips on a Red Hot should be in mourning today.

Nello Ferrara, the man who led the company that invented those confectionery classics and others (Lemonheads, Boston Baked Beans, Atomic Fireballs), has died, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He was 93.

Ferrara was the scion of a candy-making family that emigrated from Italy early in the last century and set up shop in Chicago with the Ferrara Pan Candy Co. The "pan" refers to the method of making the candy whereby "grains of sugar, nuts or candy centers" get tossed around in revolving pans "while adding the flavor, color and other candy ingredients," according to the company's website. The candy gets tossed around until it becomes the desired size and then it is polished with vegetable wax.

Ferrara came up with the idea for Atomic Fireballs in 1954 after serving in post-World War II Japan, the Chicago Sun-Times said, quoting Ferrara's son, company CEO Salvatore Ferrara II. 

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Your abusive boss’s blow-ups may be doing more than just making you miserable. They may also be ruining your marriage, a new study shows.

We all like to think we can leave the tantrums and rude comments of bad supervisors behind when we close the office door and head home. But researchers now say that the fallout from all that nastiness can insidiously chip away at our marriages and harm our home life.

“It spills over and affects our families,” said the study’s lead author Dawn Carlson, a professor of management and the H.R. Gibson Chair of Organizational Development at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University. “It translates into tensions with your spouse. And that leads to poor family functioning.”

To get a handle on how bad bosses affect families Carlson and her colleagues surveyed 280 full-time employees and their spouses.

Participants were asked how often their supervisors behaved in ways such as “Tells me my thoughts or feelings are stupid,” "Expresses anger at me when he/she is mad for another reason,” “Puts me down in front of others,” and “Tells me I’m incompetent.” 

The researchers then asked participants to rate a series of statements from one to five according to how applicable they were. Included in the questionnaire were statements such as, “When I get home I am often too frazzled to participate in family activities/responsibilities.”

The researchers decided to dig a little deeper by questioning spouses about their marital relationships and the inner workings of the family.

Spouses were asked, for example, how often during the past month they felt “irritated or resentful about things your (husband/wife/partner) did or didn’t do” or felt “tense from fighting arguing or disagreeing with your (husband/wife/partner)."

They were also asked to rate on a scale of one to five how well statements such as the following fit their family: “Our family can express feelings to each other,” “Our family is able to make decisions about how to solve problems” and "Our family confides in each other.”

While the employees with bad bosses didn’t report problems with their families, their spouses often did. Bad bosses led to more blow-ups between husbands and wives and to families that didn’t communicate well and weren’t close.

What’s happening, Carlson said, is that employees think they’re leaving their problems behind in the office, but they’re really just playing them out at home.

“They come home grouchy, tense and irritable and that makes them more likely to start an argument,” she explained. “And when Mom and Dad are fighting that makes for more tension in the family.”

What workers have to understand is that a bad job situation isn’t just hurting them, it’s harming their families, too.

There’s a tendency for people to think they can tough it out for the sake of the family, Carlson said. But this study, she said, “shows the importance of trying to remove yourself from a situation like this because it’s not just hurting you, it’s hurting your wife and your kids.”

With the bad economy that can be a tough message for people to hear, Carlson said. “I’m not saying this from an ivory tower,” she added. “I know it’s not easy. But it’s imperative that you try to get assistance, whether it’s from inside the organization or without.”

Linda Carroll is a regular contributor to msnbc.com and TODAY.com. She is co-author of the new book "The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic.”

Eve Tahmincioglu, msnbc.com’s careers columnist, joined us for a live Web chat Wednesday to discuss how best to deal with a bad boss.

(Eve’s column on bad bosses appeared earlier this week on msnbc.com.)

Here’s one of her answers to questions from the live chat. See below for the full Q&A.

Patrick asked:
“Is it smart to complain to upper management about a bad boss? Especially in this economic climate? I'm afraid if I say anything I'll lose my job.”

Eve replied:
“If you get nowhere with your boss and you really want things to change, your only option, other than leaving, is going above your manager's head. This is indeed risky, but there are ways to do it without getting everyone angry.”

Here’s the full chat archive: 

If you have a question for our TODAY Money experts, submit it here.

To sign up for an e-mail reminder for our next chat, click here.

If you want to make a team smarter, just add women -- that’s the key finding of new research by management professors Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone.

This month’s edition of Harvard Business Review (HBR) reports on a study by the two academics who aimed to find a reliable measurement of group intelligence.

Woolley and Malone randomly assembled 18 to 60-year-olds into teams and had them solve a complex problem. After team members brainstormed, made decisions and completed visual puzzles, they were given an intelligence score based on their performance.

The study’s findings showed that the difference between low scoring and high scoring teams had nothing to do with an individual's intelligence, but rather with an individual's gender.

“It’s a preliminary finding -- and not a conventional one,” Malone, who is the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, told HBR. “The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better.”

While researchers have replicated their findings twice, another researcher who worked on the project was hesitant to flat out say that groups of women are smarter than men.

“It’s not that I don’t trust the data. I do,” Woolley, who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told HBR. “It’s just that part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance.”

She said studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do, so what's really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.

Researchers also defined what makes a group intelligent: listening to one another, sharing constructive criticism and having open minds.

"And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups," Woolley said.

While it can be difficult to significantly change an individual's intelligence, it's possible to change a group's intelligence by changing members or incentives for collaboration, Malone told HBR. He hopes that as they continue their research, they will begin to unlock the secret of how to increase the collective intelligence of companies, countries or the whole world.

Until then, you may want to make sure you have more women, or more “socially sensitive people,” on your team.