HR Hero Line editor Wendi Watts reviews Brains on Fire by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, and Geno Church, finding useful insight into engaging both employees and customers.

Do your customers and employees love you? Do you love your customers and employees?

Most HR people would readily admit that a large number of their employees are burned out from all the layoffs, hiring freezes, and constraints the economy has put on businesses. When employees are doing the same work that used to be done by three or four (or more) employees and they haven’t had a raise in more than a year — more than three or four years for some — is it realistic to think that you can get employees passionate about doing their jobs, interacting with your customers, and working for your organization? Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements says, yes.

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Sarah Hulsey, PHR, reviews Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness and finds it uplifting and motivating but not necessarily belonging in the business section of the bookstore.

You’d have to be living in a cave to not have heard about Zappos and the work CEO Tony Hsieh is doing to improve customer and employee satisfaction. Regardless of whether you drink the Zappos Kool-Aid, his first book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose is a worthy weekend read, but perhaps not for the reasons you’d think.

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Employment law attorney Michael Maslanka reviews Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, finding it both interesting and useful. Maslanka particularly focuses on the authors’ idea of fighting “the negative” by focusing on “bright spots.”

In the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, authors Chip and Dan Heath use a great acronym: “TBU” — true, but useless. They astutely note that people find it easy to list their organization’s problems and why the problems can’t be solved, then basically say, “I’m helpless, you’re helpless. We’re all helpless.” It’s the way we’re wired.

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Employment law attorney Hillary J. Collyer reviews Dogs at Work -– A Practical Guide to Creating Dog-Friendly Workplaces, written by Liz Palika and Jennifer Fearing and published by the Humane Society.

The Humane Society of the United States has published a great resource for employers that either allow pets in the workplace or are considering adopting such a policy —  Dogs at Work: A Practical Guide to Creating Dog-Friendly Workplaces by Liz Palika and Jennifer Fearing.

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Resources for Humans managing editor Celeste Blackburn reviews Natalie Holder-Winfield’s book Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse Workforce: New Rules for a New Generation.

In the foreword to Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse Workforce, Natalie Holder-Winfield reveals how she left a successful practice with a well-known law firm to join eight other women to create a firm where their diversity would be celebrated and utilized. While she reveals that she left her firm to pursue a dream, the other women left because they “could not wait to escape.”  These women were left out of social networks, passed over for plum assignments, and generally treated like second-class citizens at the office.

Those stories, combined with an American Bar Association study that showed that “almost 85 % of women of color leave their law firms within eight years of being hired,” led her to begin thinking about minorities in other fields and if they experienced the same disassociation as the lawyers. She writes: “As I thought about writing this book, the number one goal was awareness. I wanted to go beyond the [group of partners] to see if people in other professions encountered similar adversity and how they handled it.”

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Author and talent management expert Carol A. Hacker writes about her book “The High Cost of Low Morale . . . and What to Do About It.” She offers tips from her book for reducing employee turnover.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the average cost of one turnover is 30 percent of the first year’s projected annualized salary. Although sometimes viewed as inevitable, turnover is a controllable expense. Because making money is important, it’s essential to examine anything that interferes with profitability. In my book, The High Cost of Low Morale…and what to do about it, I offer insight into how businesses of all sizes are improving morale, reducing turnover, and becoming more profitable. Regardless of your organization’s size, the principles are the same for reducing morale problems. Here are some thoughts from the book:

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