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These books for employees are guaranteed to fly off your company bookshelf.

Reading a book is a particularly valuable way to educate your staff on leadership and management. We work with hundreds of companies that regularly buy books for their employees. How do these companies get people to actually read the books? They start with short books that tell good stories.

Here are five quick and easy books your employees will want to read:

1. 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

I'm personally a big fan of business parables. Rather than telling how to do something, they show you how. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is the perfect example of an effective business parable. Learn how do identify issues within your team and how to resolve them through the lense of a business executive struggling to save a fictional company called Decision Tech.

2. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, MD

As long as your employees don't mind being compared to mice, Who Moved My Cheese? can be a very useful tool for helping people deal with change. We have customers who regularly buy this book by the hundreds. It might sound "cheesy," but Johnson is clearly onto something.

3. The New One-Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, PhD and Spencer Johnson, MD

The New One Minute Manager teaches you the three secrets to managing people in a quick and efficient manner. I timed myself to see how long it would take me to read this book — 49 minutes. How's that for quick and easy? Your employees can read this book during their lunch break, learn how to be better managers, and still have time left over to go for a walk! That sounds like a recipe for success to me.

4. Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, and Ron McMillan

Crucial Conversations is the longest of the five books I've included in this post, but I promise that learning how to communicate effectively in high-stakes situations is worth the extra few pages. This book is easy to read because the content is broken up into short, manageable sections. Most importantly, the authors provide meaningful stories and other examples throughout the text. One might say this book is "crucial" to your organization's success.

5. Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter

Kotter tactfully appeals to our innate human obsession with penguins in order to teach a very valuable lesson on how to manage change. Following the classic business parable model, Our Iceberg Is Melting tells the story of a penguin fighting to save his colony, followed by explanatory material that further emphasizes the lessons taught in the fable.

When your employees read more books, they gain access to a wealth of knowledge and experiences that they might have not otherwise come across. One of the best ways to motivate your employees to read more is to host a company book club! Our newest white paper explains the benefits of starting a book club for your company, and provides a step-by-step guide on how you can start and manage one successfully.

This post was written by Michelle Drucker, the manager of marketing at BookPal. She is currently reading #AskGaryVee by Gary Vaynerchuck.