It should probably come as no surprise to the board and top managers of Yahoo that the just-released annual poll of its workers — called the Yahoo Employee Satisfaction Survey — paints a picture of a deeply demoralized workplace.

Apparently, Yahoos can’t get no satisfaction.

The YESS questions went out to employees the week that the company fired CEO Carol Bartz, with most of the responses gathered in the ensuing weeks.

One major drop — not much of a shockeroo — was the employee assessment of senior leadership, under the question of whether “Yahoo is an effectively managed well-run organization.” That dropped 11 percent from last year.

Also troubling, according to numerous sources who have recounted the results to me, was that 19 percent of employees said they planned to leave the company within less than a year, in case a better opportunity arises.

(I like to call that the anywhere-but-here question.)

This is a large figure for any tech company for such a survey, which is commonly done throughout the industry. Typically, those numbers are around 10 percent, according to several human resources execs I queried, although Yahoo’s chart noted that the industry benchmark was 14 percent.

In any case, this YESS is Yahoo’s highest percentage of negatives for departure intent in several years.

Worse, it is higher in the product unit, where most of Yahoo’s engineers work and which is key to any technology company’s viability. Intent not to stay is 21 percent in the division.

On the plus side, numbers for manager effectiveness, teamwork and accountability did grow year over year in the product unit.

YESS documents sentiments I have been hearing widely and ever louder anecdotally from a plethora of mid-level managers at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Most are worried that they cannot hold onto critical employees as Yahoo is conducting a major strategic review of its businesses, either to sell it or make sweeping changes.

The uncertainty has put its employees on edge and there has been a spike in attrition throughout the company.

And worry. At a recent meeting with its staff, interim CEO Tim Morse was buffeted with questions about the fate of employee stock options and other similar issues.

Despite all the turmoil, Yahoo has surprisingly not yet put an overall new plan into place for retention, although it has given some employees more money and other benefits.

“Can a company collapse from attrition?” one exec joked to me recently.

Yes, it can, which has to be of prime concern to the board of Yahoo, as it seeks to right itself. I cannot stress enough how many talented and committed employees remain at the company, desperately hoping for some effective leadership to finally take hold.

Because for all the swirl of what will happen to the whole company, one truism of technology innovation in Silicon Valley remains, if you want to survive: It’s still all about the talent.

[UPDATE: Here are some more YESS stats, according to sources:

"Yahoo is innovative": 42 percent agree, 27 percent neutral, 31 percent disagree.

"Yahoo anticipates changing customer needs and wants": 33 percent agree, 37 percent disagree, five points worse than the previous year.

But here is the hopeful kicker: 79 percent feel proud to say they work for Yahoo.]

There are many other Fortune 500 CEOs in the same boat, and they certainly have plenty else to do with their time than post Facebook photos from Davos.

But non-Twittering CEOs are likely a dying breed, as transparency and authenticity in corporate communications come into vogue, and the younger generations move up through the ranks.

Google’s entire executive leadership is particularly anti-social for an Internet company, although unlike Page, Eric Schmidt, its CEO of the last 10 years, had the gumption to at least try Twitter and post updates every couple of weeks.

That their bosses decline to participate in what many see as the future of the Web is particularly grating for some young Google employees.

While the company circles around launching its own fully fledged social strategy, many Googlers feel that accountability for “getting social” starts at the top by leaders using the products themselves, rather than outright ignoring them.

Certainly, Page is incredibly private in all sorts of situations, both online and off. Here’s a memorable section from Ken Auletta’s book “Googled”:

“Larry Page is aggressively disdainful of marketing and public relations. In early 2008, Page instructed Google’s public relations department, which consisted of 130 people, that he would only give them a total of eight hours of his time that year for press conferences, speeches or interviews.”

That doesn’t seem like an approach that will go over well now that Page will be CEO of a company of Google’s stature, although perhaps he could save some time by crafting short tweets in lieu of full speeches.

While Page seems to be ignoring the social Web’s existence (he said Thursday he thinks it’s at the “very very early stages,” ceding comment on the topic to his co-founder Sergey Brin), the category has already had a significant competitive effect on Google.

The company says social is not yet negatively impacting its search business, but there are other ways it is creeping in: Through a significant talent drain to companies like Facebook, and a tarnishing of the company’s position as a tech leader.

In a way, part of the reason Page took control seems to be in response to the rise of Facebook, although there are clearly many other factors at play).

That’s because Page has now reinstated himself in a sacred position in Silicon Valley: The founder CEO.

One of the most impactful things the social Web has done is raised a new founder CEO to the tip-top of the tech industry: Mark Zuckerberg.

And, according to sources, the rise of Zuckerberg has been especially hard for Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to watch.

Zuckerberg was also just named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, an honor Page and Brin have never received.

And his company also just arranged a deal to raise money at a $50 billion valuation, making his own stake worth $15 billion, which happens to be the approximate net worth of each Page and Brin.

(As for Zuckerberg’s social media presence, he obviously uses Facebook quite actively, and also has a bare-bones LinkedIn profile and a Twitter account that hasn’t been updated in more than a year. And, like Page, he would not be considered a social butterfly in real life.)

So now Page has returned to presumably make Google innovative again with the passion of a founder. But with 10 years elapsed since he last had the job, he may want to go out and do a little personal market research on this whole social thing.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Though Microsoft (MSFT) has taken responsibility for the offense–perpetrated by a third-party vendor with which it contracted–it has not offered accountability, says Plurk. And that makes the microblogging outfit inclined to pursue legal action, or threaten it, anyway.

“We are currently looking at all possibilities on how to move forward in response to Microsoft’s recent apology statement,” Plurk co-founder Alvin Woon wrote in a post to the company’s Web site. “We are still thinking of pursuing the full extent of our legal options available due [to] the seriousness of the situation….”

Elaborating, Woon added, “This event wasn’t just a simple matter of merely lifting code; Due to the nature of the uniqueness of our product and user interface, it took a good amount of deliberate studying and digging through our code with the full intention of replicating our product user experience, functionality and end results. This product was later launched and heavily promoted by Microsoft with its big marketing budget.”

It would seem, then, that Plurk is angling for some sort of financial settlement. And given the situation, it may get one–though perhaps it would be better off seeking it not from Microsoft, but the vendor that actually pilfered Plurk’s code. Not as good a PR angle there, though, I suppose.

My favorite anecdote collected so far about new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is the one in which she recently called together two separate groups of execs who were direct reports of former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker.

Bartz, several sources recounted, went around the table and asked them one by one what they actually did, making various outspoken comments along the way.

Two execs, for example, were a “two-in-one box,” meaning they did the same thing to her mind. And she had to get well around the room until she could find someone who made some dough. “Finally, revenue,” Bartz reportedly joked.

Stories about Bartz’s take-charge style have been ricocheting through Yahoo (YHOO) and outside it too, which is probably just what the tough-talking veteran exec has been aiming for as she navigates the troubled company to come up with a plan to revive it.

And despite all the jokes about Yahoo’s proclivity to constantly rearrange deck chairs, most expect Bartz to launch a significant reorganization as soon as she is up to speed. Which might be very soon indeed.

But of all the various things many employees I have talked to hope she does first is dump the “matrix” and replace it with a much simpler management system where top execs are more directly responsible for their P&L and less with complicated cross-functional corporate hairballs.

Ah, the dreaded matrix of Yahoo–that much maligned organizational structure that was instituted at the company under the reign of then-CEO Terry Semel and complexified drastically under Yang and Decker.

How to explain the matrix, whose goal was to simplify the huge global behemoth that is Yahoo by having a lot of managers over employees working on similar products?

Simply put, shared ownership, presumably, would make the troops of Yahoo work better across geographies.

There are pluses explained one exec: “The theory behind all of this is that if you centralize the functions you can share resources across various projects….Some degree of centralization is absolutely appropriate at big companies. You don’t want each business unit having its own finance or legal people, for example.”

But that also removes a lot of critical tools from line managers, many said, putting them into a larger pot where many are cooking.

Thus, the matrix has come to symbolize a drastic lack of accountability at Yahoo.

And, more to the point, a horrible gridlock in decision-making, which has stopped it from moving quickly in the face of more nimble and, let’s be honest, more dictatorially-run companies–think Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and you have a good idea what I mean.

Said one exec who has left the company about the downside of the matrix: “The great people leave because they don’t feel they have the tools and authority to be successful with what they are notionally responsible for. Or because there are so many people who think they are in charge, they can’t get anything done. The mediocre people stay as they are protected and not held accountable.”

Said another still there, in what is the more prevalent opinion of more than a dozen people I spoke to: “I hope Bartz takes the blue pill and we can forget all about the matrix.”

It’s a reference to the movie, “The Matrix,” in which the hero, Neo, is given a choice by Morpheus between a red and blue pill.

Says Morpheus: “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Many at Yahoo, by contrast, are hoping the days of rabbit holes are finally over.

In any case, until Bartz acts, here’s the cool red pill/blue pill scene from “The Matrix”: