It’s time to retire the corporate book club. Enter the content club

For many organizations, book clubs have served as an oft-used tool intended to strengthen employee engagement. In theory, the traditional book club serves as a unique opportunity for individuals and teams from across an organization to come together in discussing a relevant and/or pressing topic.

Done right, teams can take away new insights from one another and from the reading material, they can align around a series of experiments meant to test & iterate on how the material could apply into their day-to-day work, and they can build deeper relationships with their colleagues in the process.

But, unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

Where Book Clubs Fail

In reality, the sheer amount of time needed to dedicate to consuming an entire book leaves only a few active and willing participants. What’s more, the day-to-day responsibilities of the job aggressively assert themselves at all the wrong times so as to otherwise freeze any available free time. The idea starts with a bang, but disappears with a whimper, never to be heard from again.

It isn’t all bad. Companies can claim victory because they actually launched a book club, even if no one really participated or it translated into little more than “Employee Engagement Theater.”

The Idea — The Content Club

Enter, the Content Club. Content today is so much more immersive, expansive, and compelling than that which can be confined to a simple book.

Although books are no doubt an essential ingredient to learning & knowledge, the omni-channel explosion of videos, podcasts, articles, and other mediums (e.g., Medium…) has created the opportunity to weave together various sources in such a way as to vastly extend beyond the scope of a single book.

As such, this is not to be considered a book club, but a content club!

Logistics — How to Run It

Is the idea compelling? Here’s how to run it for your own team:

Every 6–8 weeks, participants will engage with a new and specific topic. It could be about a specific skill set (e.g., Facilitation, Data Science, Finance); it could be about emerging trends (e.g., Machine Learning, Remote Work); or it could be related to a soft skill (e.g., Empathy in the Workplace, Effective Teaming, Design as a means for Organizational Transformation).

As the facilitator and creator of the process for your team, you should propose and advance an initial topic, but crowdsource and vote on those that come after it with your full group! A democracy, if you can keep it.

Here’s the special sauce: To ensure that everyone who wants to participate can, I recommend that you provide content across three engagement tiers:

• Low-effort — “The Toe Dipper” — primarily exercises and articles, meant to offer significant learning at a minimal “cost”
• Medium-effort —”The Lap Swimmer” — expanding to longer form journalism, podcasts, and things like TED talks
• “All in” — “The High Dive” — for those most serious about a topic, this is where you’d recommend longer pieces like books for deeper exploration.

Content Club participants should be given 6–8 weeks to read, watch, and/or listen to the content across any of the engagement tiers.

With holidays and other things here or there, this would allow you to cover ~8 topics per year.

Synthesizing Insights & Designing Experiments

One of the major drawbacks to a traditional corporate book club is that there are no takeaways. You read a book, you come together for an hour on a Friday afternoon, talk loosely about what you learned, and then return to your day job, without any opportunity to actually apply what you’ve learned.

Content Club is different. At the end of the 6 week topic period, the program sponsor will facilitate a remote session through a digital white-boarding tool like Mural or Miro with a series of activities designed to:

• Capture key takeaways and learnings from the material
• Articulate how we could apply what we’ve learned to the work that we do on a day-to-day basis
• Design experiments or action plans that allow us to design, introduce, and measure new ideas, approaches, tools into our work

Each Mural board you create will serve as an artifact for your team to keep and come back to, with opportunities to potentially revisit topics months or years down the line, to assess what’s changed and how successful you were in acknowledging/staying ahead of the curve.

The above lays out a skeleton framework for advancing a new way of democratizing design & innovation mindsets and approaches throughout your organization in a compelling, interactive, and relatively low-lift way. It makes the most of the time that you do have, to not just advance a new way of working across your team or organization, but build and strengthen relational bonds in the process. What more could you ask for from a content club?!

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