When it’s Friday evening, and the week is done, a few employees of furniture-retailer Urban Ladder step into the weekend, a book in hand.
They meet at the cafeteria of the company’s Bengaluru office to pick a book and discuss it threadbare. Recently, they discussed All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy.
A book is chosen on the basis of voting. Sometimes, the book discussion is followed by a get-together outside the office. Recently, members of Urban Ladder Book Club went together to watch Fantastic Beasts 2 . All of them are Harry Potter lovers — that explains the choice of the film. Probably, everything, even films, has to have something to do with books.
From their experience, these employees say corporate book clubs promote team bonding and energises employees after a hectic work week.
You may call this a book lover’s version of bonding and unwinding, and that it may not work for a majority of employees. You may just be right. But the fact remains that it does work for some employees. So, there are a sizeable number of companies that promote book clubs, providing a space and some support for them to grow. Development Manager at SAP Labs India Sumeet Shetty moderates the activities of the company’s book club “Literati”, which is around since 2009. Literati invites the the literati as speakers. Its list so far is star-studded: Amit Chaudhuri, Amish Tripathi, Amitabha Bagchi, Anuja Chauhan, Arun Shourie, Chetan Bhagat, Mark Tully, Sam Miller, Shashi Tharoor, Shobhaa Dé and Sudha Murthy, to name a few.
In his company’s blog, Sumeet draws a parallel between literature and coding. “Software code can be as elegant as prose. Both writers and programmers value elegance, but in different ways,” he says. “Authors value brevity in expressing their ideas through prose, and programmers try to write powerful code in the most concise way.”
A learning mechanism
Rajeev Shroff, a leadership coach and a board member at Cupela Consulting, says book clubs in the corporate space can serve as an informal platform for leadership development. “Fiction can help managers get into other’s shoes and resolve issues,” he says.
For a book club to work, a company should allow it to be shaped by the reading interests of employees.
Dream 11, a sports tech company, has built a library, buying books entirely on the basis of recommendations from employees. Books are added on the basis of their interests.
Reading hour
Shroff says companies must create an environment conducive for running a book club. This includes earmarking a time for reading.
He cites the example of a Hyderabad-based company, SmartDrive Systems, that has reduced the number of working hours in a day from nine to eight to allow employees to take up personality enrichment programmes, which includes reading.
***
A RULE OF THUMB FOR CORPORATE BOOK CLUBS
* Book clubs may not register considerable footfall. Readers may constitute a small percentage of the workforce.
* The goal is to get as many employees as possible hooked on books. So, choose your books wisely and go in for a mobile library.
* Keep changing the venue of the library, but ensure it does a round of all departments of the office. Wherever it goes, add books related to the specialisation of that department. Of course, books across genres should also be offered.
* Before taking a library to a department, find out if there are any books they would like to see on the racks and try to purchase them.
