The number of hours and minutes in a day are finite, therefore time to read comes at the cost of something else. If that ‘something else’ happens to be employee home time and after hours, skimming is going to happen (if the reading gets done at all). If the reading time comes out of business hours (15-20 minutes a day) in a conducive environment, so much the better. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I have to grab 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, for reading. I bought a Kindle so that the books I want to read (both personal and business) are always with me. Since the Kindle weighs the same if it holds 5 books or 50, there’s nothing extra to carry around with you. The iPad does pretty much the same thing, but at twice the cost and it has a lot more distractions on it since the eBook capability is a ‘feature’ and not the core design. I’m not saying that the Kindle is the answer to your problems necessarily, just that it lowers the barrier to getting your reading done. Since I bought my Kindle, the amount of reading I do in a week has tripled. YMMV.

The goal is to put in 30 minutes a day towards it, of paid time.

I considered the Kindle, wish it had a monitor/report for how long someone spent on a page or on a book, kind of how Word tells you how long someone has been working on a document.

-Vlad

This may be one of those areas where trust has to be the moderator. If you hired smart monkeys, then they should be trusted to take the task you give them and run with it. Something as simple as reading should be pretty easy for them to handle.

As far as them BS’ing their way through it, I would not worry much about it. If they are caught BS’ing their way they might just have enough embarrassment to actually start reading. But even if they BS the whole thing they will have to put some effort and thought into the BS they present, so at least they will be thinking. Also, they may come up with good BS that is actually useful information.

As Steve Winwood sings, “Roll with it, Baby.”

Isn’t quality the metric anyway? If you’re getting great reports and discussions, do you really care how much or little time went into the reading? This seems like a case where if one or two people do an enthusiastic job, the others will want to get on board, if only to keep themselves looking bad in comparison.

Sometimes BS’ing is more work than actually doing the task (but some make careers of it.)

To Tim’s point of so few minutes to do extracurricular activities not of their own choosing, I would recommend audio books. Many of the popular business books are on Audible and they can be easily listened to whilst driving, vacuuming, doing yard work or visiting the in-laws and they are usually quite entertaining.

So now if you hand out audio books, your biggest competition to training is Lady Gaga.

I would say to make it FUN! Perhaps instead of mandating more daily “work” by requiring them come up with a new business idea for OWN, ask them to come up with any idea using what they’ve read for inspiration. It could be for their schedule, their desk, a process, the community, any idea really. If it doesn’t seem like work that’s mandatory, then it won’t seem like drudgery and hopefully they will then actually “want” to do it. You might be surprised at the direction that could happen within your book discussions.

I’d also think about getting a vote going and asking them to pick the books they want to read. Perhaps from a pre-defined list, or maybe just within certain topics or subjects. In theory they would then have a more vested interest in actually reading the book because they chose it.

Tim hit a great point about whether this is on or off the clock work that is now required. If you keep it off the clock, I’d recommend some sort of prizes or rewards or something in order to help them feel like it is worth it because they can get something from doing it. Hopefully, it will catch on and your employees will grow to enjoy it as part of their job and work environment.

Cheers!