You won’t find books by Stephen Covey or Jim Collins in a Books@Work program. Rather than a book club where company employees are required to read a business book, the participants read everything from Hemingway, Shakespeare and Jane Austen to more contemporary literature.
The intent is to improve the critical thinking of employees — particularly those who have not had the opportunity to attend secondary education.
“Our goal is to be sure to include as many people who haven’t had an opportunity to go to college as we can,” says Ann Kowal Smith, executive director. “There are lots of opportunities for managers to do professional and personal development, but there are usually very few opportunities for folks on the shop floor to do it.”
Birth of an idea
Smith, an adjunct professor and director of praxis for the doctor of management program at Weatherhead School of Management, says the idea for the program came from her observations in college.
“The best lessons I had on how to be open to somebody else’s ideas came through the ability to have open-ended conversations and seminars,” she says. “The minority of the population has had a chance to go to college, but the majority has not.
“It was born of this idea — how can we bring a really meaningful respectful college experience to folks who haven’t had a chance to go, knowing that many of the times only money or personal situation or work expectations made it impossible for them to be there.”
Smith defines critical thinking as the ability to explore information, to take things from a divergent set of sources, to combine them with information a person already knows and to be able to act upon it.
She sees the core of the critical thinking program as the following areas:
- Opening yourself to putting your own personal experience into a room of people.
- Using that as a form of expertise in sharing that with others.
- Looking at how other people perceive facts that you are reading at the same time.
- Understanding that there are different perspectives.
- Being able to pull those ideas together.
- Coming up with a different conclusion and trying to figure out how to act on it.
Results are seen early
When a pilot program was in the early stages, Smith saw evidence that the premise would work.
“There were folks in the program that were not very talkative at work,” she says. “What we were told by their supervisors was that there were some who just went from participating in the program to participating in the workplace and really to be much more open about sharing their ideas and their innovations.
“That is really at the core of confidence. If you give somebody a chance to say I’m going to give you an idea, and if you like that idea, you give them really positive feedback, it says, ‘OK, the next time I have an idea at work, I’m going to try that there too.’”
Supervisors as well may participate in the program. Smith says the managers are realizing similar results.
“Supervisors who have participated along with their employees have seen tremendous initiatives come out of it,” she says. “A couple have said, ‘I have started to see something in people. I saw how they thought in ways I never really had a chance to.”
The opportunity to share ideas about something that isn’t about work opens the possibilities of being able to share ideas that are about work.
“Doing it in that way makes it safe and risk-free, gives people an opportunity to bring a little bit more of themselves in to the process and just by definition they grow,” Smith says.
Underwritten by companies
The first Books@Work program was at AVI Foodsystems in Warren, with professors from Hiram College serving as facilitators. Since then, the program has expanded into some manufacturing companies, industrial distributors, hospitals and in the nonprofit space as well.
There is no cost for employees because companies underwrite the Books@Work program. Companies pay roughly $4,500 for a five-month program.
“We really want to reach the shop floor,” Smith says. “And to do that, we know that we have to keep the cost quite low. We ask companies to reimburse us for books because we want the people to keep the books and build a library or expand their existing libraries. We pay an honorarium to the professor. So it’s a very low-cost program for a long period of time and that covers all those things.
“So over the course of the program, the employees get a chance to get exposed to different professors, different kind of literature, different books and to really connect as a group.”
How to reach: Books@Work, (216) 800-1292 or www.booksatwork.org
Sample titles:
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot
“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
“Fried Green Tomatoes” by Fannie Flagg
“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler
“I Know Why a The Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
“The Color of Water” by James McBride
