It is a truth worth remembering: Not every employee in a workplace will have warm and fuzzy feelings about every one of their coworkers. It's easy, of course, to remind employees that they have to treat everyone with whom they work with respect, even if they don't like all those people. But leaving an employee conflict with nothing more than this kind of warning doesn't do much to enhance workplace culture or build strong teams. There is something more an organization can do to build better workplace relationships.
Why not try books?
Books can be a way for people to connect and generate meaningful conversations. Talking about books is a safe way to get at deeper issues and feelings without revealing too much about oneself or one's personal demons. It doesn't matter if the book is fiction or nonfiction because talking about any kind of book tends to help people open up.
Consider the baby boomer who gets annoyed simply by spying the millennial sitting behind a computer wearing AirPods, and the millennial who is frustrated that the boomer seems to prefer working through stacks of paper to operating digitally. Friction rules their relationship because, based on two narrow traits, they draw all kinds of unfavorable conclusions about the other. They might not be open to examining their limited perceptions of each other and how those perceptions keep them from noticing and appreciating the substantial skills and experience they both bring to the team.
However, when the millennial and boomer have both read Pride and Prejudice, they can examine the transformations of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy — characters who formed hasty impressions about each other because of prejudices that proved unhelpful. Discussing those characters' transformations occurs in a safe zone and can allow for insight into their own behaviors.
Book discussions can help in other ways. Of course, nonfiction books can be used to teach a topic. Need your team to work together better? Maybe reading and discussing a book like StrengthsFinder can help team members appreciate their differences.
How can an HR professional introduce books into the workforce? At ASCM, we use books in several ways that leaders everywhere can adopt for their teams.
1. Assign a business-related book to a team to read. Bring team members together to discuss. Ask them to brainstorm ways to apply the principles of the book to their everyday tasks.
2. Host a "little lending library." In a location where employees naturally congregate, create a space for employees to leave books they wish to discard, and require them to leave a slip of paper or a Post-it indicating who left the book. Encourage the next reader to discuss the book with the coworker who left it behind.
3. Create a book club where members all read the same book and then discuss it over a brown-bag lunch. A different member should be the moderator each month. This is an effective relationship-building tool in the workplace for so many reasons. First, the group has to come up with a way to decide on the books. They learn to work together as a team and experience what happens in the low-stakes group dynamics situation when a book that is selected is unpopular. They can start to apply those dynamics to workplace decisions with far more significant consequences. Second, discussions about a book often lead to discussions about more significant things. For example, have the group read a Jodi Picoult book (if you don't know, Picoult writes novels about topical moral dilemmas), and your employees will soon be talking about the choices one of the characters in the book made, the implications of that moral choice and whether the ends ever justify the means.
4. Entertain a literary society (aka, a "lit soc(k)"). I first heard about this idea on the podcast What Should I Read Next? The idea evolved from Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows' Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (a book that might just be a great starting point for your workplace book club). Essentially, members come together and discuss whatever book they are reading at the current time. Serious readers can chime in and make suggestions about other books the reader should read — or avoid. Quickly, everyone acquires a shared goal of coming up with a book title for a particular reader. Sharing books one is reading is an easy way to talk about one's preferences. Discussions will be very free-form, but it doesn't matter, because everyone — no matter how well they got along on the last work project — suddenly will be sharing something they love with another person who also loves books. It's a beautiful thing.
If you're an HR leader in search of new tactics for conflict resolution and ways to generate meaningful conversations among team members, consider how books can create a safe space for every employee to better understand themselves and each other.
