By Molly McNamara, Marketing Manager

Employee engagement is one of the most important indicators in gauging work satisfaction. So, it’s no surprise that organizations are seeking ways they can enhance their company culture while also developing professional and personal skills for their employees. It’s not always an easy task for HR professionals or leaders of any organization, but we have one way to easily achieve both.

Has your organization hosted a company-wide or team-led employee book club? If not, you may be missing out on some major benefits to your teams and your organization.

Here’s some important benefits an employee book club can bring to your organization:

  1. Company culture enhancements: Bringing employees of all levels together in a shared experience to openly engage in free-flowing discussion contributes to a strong culture. Titles selected can also reflect and support your organization’s unique mission and values. Consider allowing employees to select the titles they’re most interested in, whether it’s a recreational fiction read or a professional development title.
  2. Team strengthening: Regularly bringing employees together to meet outside of project-specific work allows relationships to develop and grow organically. Book clubs can be company-wide and you can consider encouraging leaders throughout the company to have team-specific reads, allowing for more focused subject areas like sales, technology, marketing and more.
  3. Employee development: Books that align with your organization’s business strategy, or hard skills paired with the right discussion, can help enhance employee’s professional and technical skills. Post-book club insights can be implemented into day-to-day work or current projects.
  4. Encourage diverse perspectives: Open discussion allows employees to discover more of what they have in common, but also how they may perceive something differently. It enables your employees to better understand why someone may have a differing viewpoint and learn more about the background that may have shaped it.
  5. Innovation and creativity: Sharing and exchanging insights, ideas and opinions about the books can foster out-of-the-box thinking and even inspire new approaches to professional projects and goals. Your organization may even learn more about what’s important to their teams, sparking new ideas for employee engagement initiatives or crucial changes.

How to host your own

We’ve put together a how-to guide for kicking off your organization’s book club, which you can find on the OverDrive Professional Resource Center. In addition, our digital content librarians can help you find the books that match your goals and even provide title-specific discussion questions directly from the authors or publishers.

The OverDrive catalog offers thousands of choices in topics and a variety of lending models that allow for multiple users to borrow the same book simultaneously. Whether your teams are meeting in person or virtually, they can access the title from wherever they are with their phone, tablet or desktop through the Libby app.

Your book club can be as robust or simple as your organization has the time and resources for. From a single company-wide quarterly read to monthly breakout book clubs among your employee resource groups, there’s endless opportunity to create what suits your needs.

Reach out to your Account Manager to get started or contact professional@overdrive.com to learn more about bringing the OverDrive Professional digital library to your organization.