« Kirkus Reports looks at Fire Someone Today | Main | Shoe Shine Guy »
January 12, 2006
Read for Cash
I want my employees thinking about the big picture, so every year I run a Read for Cash program and pay them to read business books. This year’s program ended on Monday and saw the largest participation yet, with nearly a third of our employees reading and reporting on at least one book.
The rules were simple:
- The book has to be approved by me.
- Payment will be made if a short (one paragraph to one page) book report is sent to the AllOffice email alias. It doesn't have to be brilliant and it won't be graded. It should show that you read it, tell us whether or not you found it useful, and whether or not you'd encourage others to read it.
- Payment will only be made for pages read in "whole book" units.
- Payment will be made at the rate of $0.15 per page using the last page number in the book. Maximum payout for one employee is $175.
In just over a month, 32 employees read 104 books on marketing, sales technique, business history, leadership, and customer service. The mini-book reports were great: the readers extracted the key points of the book and often included their own thoughts on how we could put to use what they had learned from the book. In an anonymous survey afterwards, participants rated the program 4.6 on a scale of 1-5.
Participants were evenly split on their primary motivation -- learning or cash -- but 96% said they read books they would not otherwise have read, and 100% said that what they learned was applicable to their job or personal life.
Posted by Bob Pritchett at January 12, 2006 4:00 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://ancientblogs.logos.com/mt-cgi/mt-tb.cgi/53