While there are fewer cars on the road than ever before, the number of people driving has started to slowly uptick again. Oftentimes, in the construction world in particular, employees spend anywhere between 5 – 15 hours in their cars each week driving to and from their jobsites. This is potentially up to 38% of their working hours. While some people will make phone calls during that time, it’s been understood in our industry as useless, must do hours
If you could take that time and make it more valuable would you?
Offer audio books!
Decrease the wasted drive time between the office and your jobsites. Some sort of a book club program allows all of your employees to further their education in business/personal development areas that are of interest to THEM. With a program like this you can encourage your employees to read and learn because as you grow, your reputation as a knowledgeable, experienced, and performance-driven company grows.
But what about your employees who are still at home?
Provide your employees with two different options of either an Audible version or a Kindle/hard copy of the book. Once they finish that book they can immediately ask for the next, no strings attached. If it’s a hard copy, they can bring it into the office for the next person to read. Additionally, people didn’t have to use it while driving and could read the books whenever they preferred.
How should I roll this out?
- Ask one person in the organization to be the go-to for people to request books from. They will need to be able to create an online account and have access to a company credit card (at least for setup)
- Share this new program with your organization. Its best to start it by have the CEO/President recommend a book they are currently reading to get people engaged from the start
- Let your employees know that there is no limit to the number of books employees can ask for and the only limit in types is that they be developmental in nature.
- Send out a newsletter company wide on a monthly or quarterly basis and provide 3 book recommendations
Do you want to take it one step further?
Connected employees who have chosen similar books to get together to speak about those books and what they’ve learned from them as a type of book club to discuss afterwards. For the book recommended by your CEO, you could schedule a review of the book and discussion 6 months after the push to see how people were still utilizing what they learned and rejuvenating the topics for those who may have forgotten.
Show me the value!
I’ve rolled this out formally to a handful of organizations. Here are the results from one of the organizations who saw the value:
“Two months after we rolled out the program our CEO pushed out a book that he recommended all employees read. He presented this at our all company meeting and had our Director of Field Operations discuss it at a Leadership Summit two weeks prior for the leaders of our organization. Additionally, our CEO has begun recommending books he has been reading on a monthly/bi-monthly basis and is happy to speak with any employees about those books at length.”
Prior to the program about 2.5% of their organization were utilizing audio books. Over a 9 month timeframe this particular organization saw that increase to 20% of their organization with 50% of their participants becoming repeat users and continuing to utilize this program to learn and grow while driving. With each book on average taking about 8 hours to listen to, they reduced their wasted hours by 680 hours overall in the first year alone, a cost of about $34,000 in wages going to better use. With a cost of about $2,000 spent on books, I’d say this was a good return on their investment!
