Top 5 - Summer Must Reads for HR

Bridging the Soft Skills Gap: How to Teach the Missing Basics to Today’s Young Talent by Bruce Tulgan

Bridging the Soft Skills Gap?explains how to nurture workers’ people skills. The book argues that younger generations have technical prowess but often lack soft skills such as conflict resolution, communication, and teamwork. Furthermore, different generations tend to have varying standards of professionalism, and younger workers’ failure to conform to existing corporate culture can harm their careers.?Bridging the Soft Skills Gap presents time and research tested methods for teaching millennials and Gen-Zers abilities like interpersonal communication and stress management. The book includes activities and exercises to help readers teach these crucial capabilities.

We love this Quote: “There is a growing gap between the expectations of employers and the reality of how today’s new young talent is showing up in the workplace….What they are missing–way too often and more and more– is the old-fashioned basics, what many refer to as “the soft skills.”

Conversations at Work by Dr Tim Baker

Conversations are critical for HR and people leaders. Read Conversations at Work to embed freer communication on the job, every day, and reap the benefits of a more positive, energised workplace. Tim Baker and Aubrey Warren have skillfully broken down the elements required to become a highly successful communicator!

Design Thinking for Training and Development by Sharon Boller and Laura Fletcher

Design Thinking for Training and Development applies the design approach to the learning and development process. This book champions a human-centered approach to course building. The authors invite readers to devise curriculum the way one might devise a product prototype, with the intent of sparking interest and making the end result as user-friendly as possible. The book follows the product development cycle, relating each step in the process to the journey of delivering the perfect professional lesson.

We love this Quote: “Our industry tends to think first about creating courses and workshops instead of recognising learning as a journey that involves many steps and stages. The experiences we have at each stage of the journey either propel us forward or cause us to exit. We spend billions of dollars each year on training solutions without significant success stories to share in terms of results or rave reviews from learners. That’s a problem if people opt out of the journey or the journey leads to nowhere. When that happens, we have failed our learners and our organisational needs.”

Putting Stories to Work by Shawn Callahan

'Shawn Callahan is a master at telling stories, applying stories and coaching others in the art of storytelling. This is a delightful book that is hard to put down. A wonderful book that's both practical and fun to read.

The most successful leaders are storytellers. By mastering business storytelling, they achieve extraordinary business results. As a modern-day leader, you know you should develop this skill, but you don't have the time to do this in an ad-hoc way. What you need is a practical, reliable method to follow, one that will allow your business to reap the benefits of storytelling as soon as possible.

In Putting Stories to Work, Shawn Callahan gives you a clear process for mastering business storytelling. He demolishes the thinking that storytelling has no place at work, reminding us that sharing stories is what we all do naturally, every day, and that it's one of the most powerful tools for getting things done. You just need to adapt this natural superpower to boost your business.

Shawn's story mastery process of Discover, Remember, Share and Refresh is based on over two decades' work with high-achieving global companies.

Investing in people. Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives by KirsWayne Cascio, John Boudreau

In investing in people, Cascio and Boudreau take a highly structured and data-driven approach to solving common problems in HR. The book, originally published in 2008, takes a deep dive into strategic HR measurement and complements #4 and #5 with its depth and focus on specific HR topics.

The first chapter is titled “Making HR Measurement Strategic”, followed by the second “Analytical foundations of HR Measurement”. These chapters also contain the now-famous ‘Wall of Boudreau’, which is the barrier that companies need to break through to go from operational reporting to analytics.

As you can imagine, the book is fairly technical (although understandable for the layperson). After explaining the foundations of solid measurement in HR, the book continues to explore a number of case studies. These are about absenteeism, employee turnover, employee wellbeing, engagement, and more. For each of these topics, a structured approach is taken to explore them in detail and the reader is offered tools to assess cost and measure impact of interventions.

This is is definitely highly valuable when you are tasked with HR measurement or other quantitative challenges in HR.