In a previous blog post titled hire for attitude, train for everything else, I wrote about the importance of why employees should be required to read books. At the time, it was just an idea spawned from observing another company and how they operate. However, I am now giving this kind of idea serious consideration in my own organization. See, this year we are going to focus on emphasizing our corporate culture as a recruiting tool, and this is just one more thing (strategy) to set us apart from the average employer.

Why I Believe in Reading (And Why HR Should, Too)

Before I try to sell this idea, I want to explain why reading matters to me. According to some (terrifying) statistics, in 2002, nearly 90 million adults in the US did not read a single book. That might not have an impact on you; but it should. I’ll put it another way.

Those are our employees. Those are our managers. Those are the unemployed who so desperately want to find jobs. Reading has taught me so much that I never would have learned in my job experience or formal education. Picking up a book and gleaning a new idea from its pages is something akin to magic. You are literally absorbing someone else’s ideas into your own brain.

Compared to other learning activities, it’s extremely inexpensive. If you purchase a book for $20, and you get one really good idea you can use to enrich your career, then you got a really great deal. While seminars and training programs can cost hundreds of dollars, reading has a relatively high ROI.

By now you should understand how passionate I am about reading and how it can benefit you. Now let’s jump into how you can develop a program that encourages employees to read, learn, and grow.

The Basic Idea

New employees receive a few books when they are hired as a gift from their new employer. They have 90 days to read them and sign off acknowledging that they have completed the task. This isn’t just another “sign it and get it back to me” form. It has real significance in how the employee feels about the organization and how he or she fits in from the very beginning.

Tie It To A Core Value

If you have read anything I’ve written before, you know how much I believe in the power of solid core values that a workforce can be committed to. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Zappos at this point. Zappos requires new employees to read specific books, and they tie the reading requirements to one of their core company values: Pursue Growth and Learning.

Holding people accountable for the reading gives Zappos a platform to encourage further study. Getting people involved in their own long term development is a great way to increase retention and job satisfaction. When people feel like they are in control, they are generally happier.

In my own organization, we have “inspire innovative solutions to solve customer needs” as a core value. That’s pretty specific. How innovative would you expect people to be if their knowledge consumption includes the DJ on the morning commute and three hours of sitcoms every night?

Now imagine you’ve given them some tools to help further generate ideas and encourage creativity. I’m feeling more confident in our ability to innovate with the latter!

Carrying it further

If you get into the midst of a program like this and find that it’s working well for you, there are ways to make it even more engaging. Some organizations have libraries where employees can borrow books to continue building their professional development. Companies can even hold workshops and lunch and learn sessions to explore the main themes from the books.

Infinite Options

There are so many great books out there to fit the program to your organization that I hesitate to recommend specifics. From customer service and technology, to innovation and leadership, there are hundreds of excellent books to target your needs and have the most impact on your company. It defeats the purpose if you require someone to read a book that isn’t remotely connected to your organization or industry.

Better Than Book Clubs!

I can hear it now. But wait, we have a book club in our company. Isn’t that the same thing?

Face it, book clubs might sound neat, but it’s really just made up of people who would be reading whether there’s a club or not (hail, fellow geeks!). Or it’s full of people who feel like they need to do it because their buddy is in the group as well and they’d like yet another opportunity to socialize. And the nonparticipants? They just look at the book club as a silly fad that will die off eventually. Getting everyone engaged and involved by setting some required reading is a better alternative and less likely to seem like an exclusive clique.

Top 3 Benefits of Developing an Employee Reading Program

• Common ground for all: Employees know after they read The Pursuit of Something Better what your feelings are on the topics of customer service, ethics, and leadership. There is no ambiguity or “here’s how we did it at my last job” involved when you get everyone on the same page from the very beginning.
• Kinship: It seems funny, but there is a certain connected feeling that exists if you know someone has read the same book as you. At seemingly random times you might strike up a conversation about that chicken-catching idea from Be Bodacious: Put Life in Your Leadership. Helping your people to feel like a part of the team early on is a must if you want great collaboration.
• Cost comparison: If you were going to bring in a high-dollar speaker to talk to your employees, some people would undoubtedly miss out on attending. And new employees would not be a part of that experience. Other team-building programs can cost a lot of money with little results. However, purchasing a few books per employee is relatively cheap in the larger scheme of things, and the potential benefits more than outweigh the associated costs.

What if they hate reading?

Yes, this is the default response I always hear. But my employees can’t/won’t/don’t read now. What do I do?

Let’s look at reading as a job requirement. Do your employees hate staying current on industry trends and competitive news? Is “I don’t like reading” an acceptable excuse when it comes to reading company reports? This excuse will only be a barrier if you allow it to be.

There are so many great book options that are short enough to hold some great ideas for any attention span.  One of the things I often tell people is everyone can love to read if given enough time and encouragement, and if presented with interesting material.

So, what do you think? Is this something that you might explore for your own organization? Why or why not?

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I hit a session Tuesday morning at SHRM10 called “Strategic Planning for Maximum Performance” that I didn’t think would  get me very far as a post. While I had some good tweets and sound bytes from Art Jackson, “The Human Performance Facilitator,” I didn’t catch anything that was especially groundbreaking for me. But then I started thinking about what I’d heard and how I felt about it, and there was some positive and encouraging material in there.

Everyone is a business person

Each and every employee, from the receptionist to the accountant to the Chief HR Officer, needs to know what your company does to make money. Knowing how the business works is crucial if someone is going to play a strategic role. Getting them into action as believers and contributors in the mission is going to help push your organization forward.

Manage performance daily

Another amazing quote during the session was “Don’t hope for a yearly performance appraisal to encourage people to do their job better.” It takes so much more than half an hour per year to communicate expectations and goals to your staff. If you think a quick session on an annual basis will solve a performance problem, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Stop rewarding poor performance

When we keep paying poor performers on a weekly basis, we’re giving some level of approval to their conduct. While it may be easy in the short term to just “let it ride,” it’s going to be much more painful to address the problem the longer it goes on.

Expect the best

If you want people to give their “A” game, you’re going to have to expect it. People live up to their expectations. If you expect them to do poorly, they will. If you drive them to do their best, then you might be surprised what you can get out of someone.

Are these things new and innovative? Not particularly. However, if you’re serious about getting the most from your people, it doesn’t hurt to get a little refresher course on people management periodically!

Anything else you’d like to add that I forgot?

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The days start running together when you’re up at seven in the morning after a late night, but I enjoyed the session this morning quite a bit. as I’ve said before, I’m here for the leadership, strategic planing, and culture coverage, and that’s what the session by Tom Roth was all about.

Creating a culture of engagement: The HR leader’s new strategic role

The session kicked off by talking about customer engagement. I quickly snagged my guide to make sure I was in the right session, because I thought it was supposed to be about employee engagement. A short story later and I understood the intersection of the two. I’ll paraphrase the anecdote:

Company A is selling parts to Company B who is reselling those to Company C. Somewhere between B and C something is breaking the parts, because they are in good condition when they leave A. Instead of just saying to Company B, “That’s your problem; deal with it,” Company A put together a team of engineers from across all three organizations to find and solve the problem at their own expense.

Just like the #SHRM10 session on customer service, this short story embodies that extra effort needed to truly excel as either an individual or an organization.

Quick hits from the session

• There are five keys to employee engagement. They include the quality of the relationship with your manager, meaningful work, development opportunities, cooperation with coworkers, and the level of trust at work. Speaking of trust…
• High levels of distrust are causing a rift between employer/employee. Mr. Roth quoted some research showing the high level of distrust/disconnect between employees and employers. The gist of it? A high percentage of people don’t think leaders laid off workers due to economy, but they did to it due to ulterior motives.
• The real definition of culture. The stock definition of culture involves the shared beliefs and behaviors of a group. The business application of that is the set of behavioral patterns in the workplace that is encouraged by leadership. That gets us around those silly corporate values statements and places responsibility on leaders to encourage the behaviors that support their value system.
• What problems do executives see with engagement? Mr. Roth said that a major issue for the C-suite is the lack of consistency in how organizational leaders are approaching engagement. Another problem is that they want to work on engaging employees, but they don’t know how to make it happen.
• Tell your own story. One of the exercises we did in the session required us to think of the person in our lives who embodies the “ideal” leader. We then had to share the qualities about that person that make them such a powerful figure in our eyes.
• What sort of culture do effective leaders create? Leaders establish a culture that places emphasis on the elements of opportunity, personal accountability, validation, inclusion, and community.

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The first session I hit at the SHRM10 conference was titled “The 10 Simple Truths of Service.” I’m a bit of a fanatic when it comes to customer service, so I was intrigued to hear what the speaker, Barbara Glanz, had to say. The basis for the session came from the story of Johnny the Bagger. Johnny was an employee at a small regional grocery store in the Midwest. His efforts to go beyond the ordinary level of customer service inspired a movie and helped his company to win a national award.

Ms. Glanz emphasized the importance of going beyond the basic level of service required for the business transaction and making an effort to have a human impact on the customer. A good example most of us can identify with is a doctor visit. How many of you have had a doctor that treated you like a friend? He asks about your kids, your job, or your life in general. His interest in you makes the experience more pleasant by a long shot. On the opposite side of that coin is the doctor who treats you like a nameless, faceless revenue stream. He’s trying his best to prescribe something so he can get out and see someone else as soon as possible. I don’t think I have to ask which one you’d prefer to see!

Other noteworthy takeaways from the session:

• It’s not just for external customers. The speaker also took this message of service farther by applying it internally to organizations. Managers who give that human touch are more likely to create loyalty among their subordinates.
• Shift your bell curve. If you aim for standard service or you’ll fall short half of the time. Aim for amazing service and you’ll be above average most of the time.
• Great service trickles down. There are times that the business impact of providing a knock-your-socks-off level of service might seem minimal. While business impact may not be immediate, it will come out somewhere down the line.
• Customer needs are fairly simple (even if they’re not always easy). What do customers want? They want service that is friendly/caring, flexible, and solution-oriented. It also has to provide some sort of recovery process (empathize, take responsibility, and provide recourse).
• Companies need to find and share their own service legends. Organizations should collect and internally share customer service stories. One neat idea is to aggregate them and create a small booklet to share with employees.

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