When employee morale is low and you’re the person in charge, clearly something needs to be fixed. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been working on this issue for a year—and her effort appears to be bearing fruit.

How Mayer has boosted morale at Yahoo, and more, in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Started from the bottom: As a leader, you shouldn’t be afraid to make tough, but productive, decisions for your organization. After about a year at the helm of a top tech company, Marissa Mayer has done it: She managed to rake in the best employee satisfaction numbers Yahoo has seen in five years, according to Glassdoor data. Mashable reports that, in interviews, employees praised Meyer for her “sense of vision and urgency” and her employee-friendly benefits. Less popular were her crackdown on teleworking (remember that controversy?) and Yahoo’s long hiring process. While Mayer doesn’t have the approval rating of other tech company executives—including her former boss at Google, Larry Page—it seems a year of taking risks to improve the state of Yahoo and its employees has paid off.

Making a comeback: According to Fast Co. Labs, the music social network Myspace is relying on custom content to make a successful comeback. A team of music writers, some of whom Myspace poached from Rolling Stone and Billboard, will produce editorial content around music news, featuring new artists and reviews. Joseph Patel, the company’s vice president of content and creative, explains the network’s content strategy to Fast Company: “The sort of North Star that we’re pointing to internally is that we’re a platform for creatives. We’ve started with music content first, but we’re slowly going to be expanding to photography, design, filmmaking, fashion, style,” Patel says. “There’s a lot more than just the music. There’s the person who directed the video, the person who created the packaging, who styled the artist, who created the set design at a festival. We want to look at all of those creative pursuits.” Think a content strategy could bring a social network back from the brink? And how does your approach compare?

Some afternoon meditation: Is it time to get a yoga mat or two for your office? The staff at the biotech company Promega Corp., in Madison, Wisconsin, gets meditation and fitness time during their workday. Why’s that? According to Huffington Post, management believes it fosters mindfulness and maintains the staff’s emotional intelligence. Plus, it makes them happy and healthy, which, in turn, encourages productivity. And they’re not the only company doing this. “It’s about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity, and to feel connected,” General Mills’ deputy general counsel, Janice Marturano, tells the Financial Times. “That compassion to ourselves, to everyone around us—our colleagues, customers—that’s what the training of mindfulness is really about.”

What’s on your reading list today? Let us know in the comments.

(photo by LeWeb13/Flickr)