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Comment by bensonn | Hacker News Reader

Do managers give books as a work assignments and provide time/place to read the book. If you want an employee to "change the way they react to stress" giving them 8 hours of voluntary (but not really) homework probably doesn't help. If you want them to read it make it a required task and provide them work time, otherwise management/company is expecting the employee to give up personal/family time to read the book off the clock.

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In the USA, at least, they aren't required to provide a time/place, but they would be required to compensate you for it, by the Fair Labor Standards Act [1]. It sounds exactly like "Lectures, Meetings and Training Programs", which means it qualifies as "working time". It's on the clock.

[1]: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs22.pdf

Schedule a workday to spend reading the book, or bill the company for taking up half your weekend.

If this worker is in a union, this is precisely the sort of issue to take up with the steward. Most programmers aren't, but apparently non-union workers already have an "an open and direct dialogue" with their managers, though it's kind of hard to tell if that's the case here since the manager is the one who can't seem to schedule one simple task for the employee.

I get this at my work. We get constant lectures about stress, sleep, healthy eating and such. Every one feels like the bosses trying to tell us how to spend our weekends. The last slide always has a series of references that we are expected to read on our own time.

My favorite is the lecture about sleep dept, about how two good nights sleep can reverse several days of sleep deprivation. Great. Work me 18-hours a day all week and leave it up to me to resolve it on the weekend. How convenient for the employer.

I assigned my last manager a book to improve his communication skills and he just got mad at me.

My thoughts exactly. Put 7 hours of book-reading as my schedule for the day, and I'll be happy to.

That's excellent advice too. It should apply to other things like youtube videos that are educational too.

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