Posts in category: Books – Professionals

Are you looking to increase productivity of your employees?

Grab a Book!

In the book Increasing Human Efficiency in Business published in 1911, Walter Dill Scott told the corporate world & all future HR exactly how to do this.

Human Efficiency can be increased by Imitation, Competition, Loyalty, Concentration, Wages, Pleasure, Love of the Game and Relaxation says Scott.

These are all basic things, yet often ignored in our attempt to look at the fancier & trendy fads. Hence this book forms part of my #bookrecommendation list for all HR folks.

Here are some of my most favourite lines from the book:

– Men who know how to get maximum results out of machines are common; the power to get the maximum of work out of subordinates or out of yourself is a much rarer possession.

– Co-operation of employees is the first purpose of organization. Without loyalty and team work the higher levels in output, quality, and service are impossible.

– Where there is no heart in the work (absence of feeling) relatively little can be accomplished, even though the intellect be convinced and the will strained to the utmost.

– The boss to whom his employees turn in any serious perplexity or private difficulty for advice and aid is pretty apt to receive more than the contract minimum of effort every day and is sure of devoted service in any time of need.

– The personality of the worker must be respected by the employer. “Giving a man a chance” to develop himself, allowing him to express his individuality, is the surest way of enlisting the interest and loyalty of a creative man.

– He is exhausted, not because of his achievements, but because of the expenditure of energy in resisting distractions. He is inefficient, not through lack of industry, but from lack of opportunity or of ability to concentrate his energy upon the single task at hand.

– Every business man is careful to locate every piece of machinery where it will work best, but equal care has not been given to locating men where they may work to the greatest advantage.

– A successful day is likely to be a restful one, an unsuccessful day an exhausting one.

– But in many instances work seems menial and ignoble because it is not understood. The single task as performed by the individual is so small and so specialized that it does not seem worth while.

– When the interest in work is dependent on novelty, the plateau comes early in the development, and further progress is possible only by the injection of new motives to action.

– In general, the most valuable men in any organization are the ones who have grown up in it.

Author: Laszlo Bock

Year of Publish: 2015

About: People Practices of Google that made it the best employer.

Why I recommend it to every young HR:

The current layoffs aside, Google has been a pioneer of some of the best #peoplepractices the world has seen. It is no mean feat to get consistently ranked as the Best Place to Work by its employees for years together.

Also, during your career, you’re bound to get into a conversation with a senior stakeholder on how can you make the current #workplace like Google. At that time, you need to know the Google, that’s beyond its famous bean bags or spas in office.

Here are some of my most favourite lines from the book:

– The most talented people on the planet want an aspiration that is also inspiring. The challenge for leaders is to craft such a goal.

– The benefit of so much openness is that everyone in the company knows what’s happening. That may sound trivial but it’s not.

– Hiring is the single most important people activity in any organization.

-If all companies are recruiting the same way, why would any of them get a different outcome than their competitors?

– The predictions from the first ten seconds of an interview are useless. Equally worthless are the case interviews & brain teasers used by some organizations.

– We take as much power away from Managers as we can. Less formal authority they have, the fewer the carrots & sticks.

– Almost every major program we roll out is first tested with a sub-group.

– What managers miss is every time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up.

– Performance Mgt has become a rule-based bureaucratic process, existing as an end it itself rather than actually shaping performance. Everyone hates it.

– Performance evaluation & people development conversations needs to happen separately.

– Making the feedback templates more specific reduced the time spent on writing reviews by 27%.

– the 70-20-10 learning framework used by most learning professionals doesn’t work.

– Entitlement, the creeping belief that just because you receive something you deserve it, is another risk in our approach.

Do come back & share your learnings from the book, once you’ve read.

Stay tuned for more on #hr & #communicationskills.

Are you one of those #hr professionals who constantly wants to question the commonly held beliefs & practices?

– What exactly is corporate culture?

– Why teams are not succeeding despite a well-defined goal?

– When the global workforce engagement percentage is 20%, how can I make my engagement score high?

Then you’d love this #bookrecommendation.

Book Name: Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World

Authors: Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall

Who are They: Goodall is Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco. Buckingham is a New York Times bestselling author and head of People and Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.

Year of Release: 2019

Why I Recommend this Book: It’s full of Research based findings which have been viewed in line with real-life employee behaviours. It has interviews, data, what works & what doesn’t- A gold-mine!!

Here are some lines from the book that I loved:

– What is the “culture” of this three-person team-within-a-team? Is it different from the “culture” of the bigger, fifteen-person team, and if so, how?

– When we ask someone to rate someone else on an abstract quality such as empathy or vision or strategic thinking, their responses tell us more about the person doing the rating than the person being rated.

– Experience varies more within a company than between companies.

– When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team.

– Companies almost universally miss the importance of teams, as evidenced by the fact that most companies don’t even know how many teams they have at any moment in time, and who is on them, let alone which are the best ones—we are functionally blind to teams.

– You may not care which company you work for, but since you do care about which company you join, these signifiers (perks & benefits) are crafted to help a company attract a certain kind of person by highlighting what the company thinks this kind of person values.

– Teams simplify: they help us see where to focus and what to do. Culture doesn’t do this, funnily enough, because it’s too abstract.

– McChrystal, describing the system he ultimately created in Iraq, makes this same point: “In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.”

If you read this book, do let me know. I’d love to have a book summary discussion with you.

Liking the book recommendation series? Do share it with young #hr professionals in your network who can benefit from this.

It is the single biggest ammunition in the hands of a #hr professional.

If you don’t know which ones to pick, you can start with any one under my #bookrecommendtaion series.

Today’s pick-

Book Name: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization

Year of Release: 1990

Author: Peter Senge

Who is he: an American scientist, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management & the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning.

Why this #bookrecommendation: It forces you to think long term. In today’s fast-paced, short-term gains kind of working, the biggest sufferer is the #learninganddevelopment professional. Despite their best efforts of designing & executing relevant annual training calendars, they massively struggle to identify the linkage between these activities to the impact it has on the organization.

This book is a must read for every #hr professional, & not only L&D folks. In a non-textbook manner, the author explains the benefits of being a #learning organization & ways to become one.

Truth be told, most HR folks won’t get an experience to implement these learnings in their #workplace. And still I’d recommend you to read this- to visualise an org like that, of the impactful work you could do, of what can be.

Some of my favourite lines from this book are:

– The team that became great didn’t start off great—it learned how to produce extraordinary results.

– When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar “vision statement”), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.

– Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where the rubber meets the road; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.

– As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, “They always say ‘Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.’ They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.”

– When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that “someone screwed up.”

– The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems. We must look beyond personalities and events. We must look into the underlying structures which shape individual actions and create the conditions where types of events become likely.

Stay tuned for more content on #humanresources & #communicationskills

I love listening to CEOs. Their thoughts & ideas on how to build organizations really excites me as an #HR person.

What kind of #workplaceculture do they want to have?

Would they expand immediately or take it slow?

How did they do their first hire?

How did they grab their first customer?

Those stories have so much depth & learning.

As a #booklover, there’s no great pleasure than reading a book which is written by CEOs.

The last book in my #bookrecommendation series for young HR professionals is REWORK. Written by @JasonFried & @DavidHeinemeierHansson, this book is full of things that made their start-up 37Signals a USD 100 billion company.

In today’s times when start-ups are made with an intent to reach a certain valuation, without worrying too much about #peoplechallenges or Long Term Impact of current policies, this is a refreshing read.

The authors have built a successful company with a very different thought-process.

Some lines from the book that I loved:

– Planning is guessing. Call your business plans business guesses & then stop worrying about them. They aren’t worth the stress.

– Once you get big, it’s really hard to shrink without firing people, damaging morale & changing the entire way you do business. Ramping up doesn’t have to be your goal.

– Workaholics (those who out in more hours at work) aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

– Interruption is the enemy of productivity. Long stretches of alone time is when you’re most productive.

– The worst interruption of all are meetings.

– When there’s something new to announce every two weeks, you energize your team and give your customers something to be excited about.

– We decided that if anything takes one of us longer than two weeks, we’ve got to get other people in.

– Don’t be impressed by those people who brag that they sacrificed sleep to get some work done. Never forego sleep.

– Divide problems into smaller & smaller pieces until you’re able to deal with them completely and quickly.

– Never hire anyone to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself.

– Hire only when not having a person starts hurting.

– There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with 6 months of experience & one with six years. It doesn’t matter for how long someone’s been doing something, what matters is how well.

This book helps to open up one’s mind to endless possibilities. It helps you believe in all things good about a #workplace. It leaves you feeling nice & happy, hoping to get to work with such people some day.