Books@Work helps your employees take a break from work—together.
Even as I write these words, having learned what I have from hundreds of participant interviews, I cringe a bit–worried that they will somehow be misunderstood. After all, do employers really want large groups of employees taking a break from work together? We have overwhelming support that Books@Work helps people connect with each other at a deeper level, to explore ideas they rarely get to share and to create a culture of respect, inclusion and openness to diverse perspectives. The benefit of these outcomes to the workplace is not hard to understand.
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In each of our programs, we survey participants to find out what genres they like to read. In those surveys and in interactions we have throughout the program, we often discover that people like to read mysteries and suspense stories. Our forays into this genre have surprised and delighted us—these books make for a marvelous Books@Work experience. In fact, one group recently shared that they made a pact not to read ahead and they solved the mystery together, intensifying their connection as a group.
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A 2013 study from the New School concludes that “reading literature improves theory of mind”—“the capacity to identify and understand others’ subjective states.” As the authors note, theory of mind is critically linked to empathy, that all-important ability to intuit and experience the feelings of another. Together with the cognitive component of theory of mind (“the inference and representation of others’ beliefs and intentions”), empathy is a crucial element of “positive interpersonal and intergroup relations.” We need to practice it, in other words, to be effective and considerate people at home, at work and throughout our lives.
Reading fiction had previously been shown to increase empathy by “[expanding] our knowledge of others’ lives, helping us to recognize our similarity to them.” But in this study, authors David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castono argue that literary fiction helps people practice empathy because of its complexity, too.
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In a rapidly changing world, many low-skilled jobs have given way to automation, replacing individual workers with machines and reducing workforces considerably. But are high-skilled jobs immune to such automation? No, says Ji Shisan, a media executive with deep background in neurobiology, in a recent and provocative piece in the New York Times. In fact, computers and artificial intelligence are replacing human engagement in a wide variety of contexts. These include the Associated Press’ Automated Insights software, which “[produces] thousands of articles about corporate earnings each year,” Facebook’s “virtual assistant,” which “uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer user questions” and “IBM’s Watson,” which “[determines] the best course of treatment for individual cancer patients.” All the programs require human supervision, but as Shisan notes, “white-collar workers are understandably starting to worry about the day when AI can go it alone.” But rather than underscore this worry, Jisan reassures us: “The future’s still bright,” he says, “thanks to our creativity – our unique trait.”
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In a recent Harvard Business Review article, YesWare’s VP of Product, Jake Lavirne, asserts, “An environment of discomfort contributes to creativity by breaking people out of their normal thought patterns, encouraging original thinking and risk-taking.” Interestingly, an effective Books@Work seminar does just that—by creating opportunities to discuss provocative narratives, it pushes participants to challenge their own assumptions and reconsider their beliefs and their routines. Time and again, participants tell us that they come away seeing the world and themselves anew, able to take a step back from their daily lives to consider what those daily lives might really mean. In a recent Books@Work seminar, Professor Ryan Honomichl (whose work has been previously featured on The Notebook) led a seminar with a group of participants in a distribution center near Cleveland on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Reading and discussing Ishiguro’s haunting novel permitted them to cultivate “creative discomfort”—together.
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Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce’s new report makes the need to adapt for working learners clear and urgent. After all, as the authors state, “nearly 14 million people – 8 percent of the total labor force and a consistent 70 percent to 80 percent of college students” are working learners. “Learning while Earning: The New Normal,” takes a fascinating, detailed look at the people who work while going to school, either pursuing their first degree or returning for additional credentials. But what it leaves out is as important as what it includes. What happens to those who never pursue a first degree? And what about the 65 percent of the “$772 billion spent on postsecondary education and training . . . spent outside of the formal postsecondary education system”?
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Talking about literature helps us develop complex skills such as “critical analysis”: the ability to see beneath the surface, to reason through the meaning of details, and to situate the object of analysis within a larger context. It enables vital, careful thinking about texts, yes, but also about people, organizations, experiences. We all become better employees and co-workers, friends and citizens, mothers and fathers, when we improve and refine our ability to understand what’s around us through observation and thoughtful analysis.
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How can you read a place? What is the value in reading for dystopic places– “communities and territories that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated?” And what does a western American town have in common with a Soviet prison city? Kate Brown bridges the gaps between peoples and cultures by reading for commonality in the unlikeliest places.
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Creativity in general aligns with our sense of why literature is important for readers and writers–it flexes our thinking capabilities and connects us to others. As Polly Car notes, the power of creativity is, in part, “To see yourself small on the stage of another story; to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power to make your life, to make others, or to break them, to tell stories rather than be pulled by them.”
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