Best Workplace Culture Books of 2025

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect is a national bestseller that offers essential lessons in hospitality for every business. Written by Will Guidara, former co-owner of legendary restaurant Eleven Madison Park, the book explores how to transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences through over-the-top, bespoke hospitality. Guidara’s insights on leadership and entrepreneurship are applicable to all industries, making this book a must-read for anyone seeking to improve their business. Overall, Unreasonable Hospitality is a refreshing and inspiring read that highlights the power of going above and beyond for your customers and team.

The "Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity" is a highly recommended book for anyone looking to improve workplace relationships. Kim Scott's concept of Radical Candor provides a practical approach to effective leadership, emphasizing the importance of caring personally and challenging directly. The book helps leaders avoid the perils of Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and Ruinous Empathy, and create a culture of compassionate candor, build a cohesive team, and achieve results collaboratively. Overall, this book is an excellent read for managers, team leaders, and anyone looking to improve their leadership skills.

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek explores why some teams work together while others fail. Sinek observed that great leaders create environments where people trust each other and work together to achieve remarkable things. He calls this environment a "Circle of Safety," which separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside. Sinek uses real stories from the military, business, and government to illustrate his ideas. The book has an expanded chapter and appendix on leading millennials, based on Sinek's viral video "Millennials in the workplace." Overall, Leaders Eat Last is a thought-provoking book that provides valuable insights into building a successful team.

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson is a practical guide to building and scaling a company's most important resource: its people. The book offers tactical information on crafting foundational documents, strategic planning, hiring, team development, and feedback mechanisms, all of which can be applied to companies of any size and industry. The author provides dozens of pages of worksheets, templates, exercises, and example documents to help company builders create scalable operating systems and lightweight processes. Overall, Scaling People is a detailed roadmap for creating sustainable and scalable companies that are set up for long-term success.

THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER WITH OVER 28 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT!. A timeless business classic, Who Moved My Cheese? uses a simple parable to reveal profound truths about dealing with change so that you can enjoy less stress and more success in your work and in your life.. It would be all so easy if you had a map to the Maze.If the same old routines worked.If they'd just stop moving "The Cheese."But things keep changing.... Most people are fearful of change, both personal and professional, because they don't have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or by the individual, Dr. Spencer Johnson, the coauthor of the multimillion bestseller The One Minute Manager, uses a deceptively simple story to show that when it comes to living in a rapidly changing world, what matters most is your attitude.. Exploring a simple way to take the fear and anxiety out of managing the future, Who Moved My Cheese? can help you discover how to anticipate, acknowledge, and accept change in order to have a positive impact on your job, your relationships, and every aspect of your life.

Limitless by Jim Kwik is a groundbreaking book that provides science-based practices and field-tested tips to help you unlock the superpowers of your brain and transform your life. Kwik, the world's #1 brain coach, reveals practical techniques that accelerate self-learning, communication, memory, focus, recall, and speed reading. The book is designed to help you change your mindset, motivation, and methods to accomplish more and achieve personal and business success. The author's approach to teaching readers how to identify what they want in every aspect of their lives is unique and empowering. Limitless is an excellent resource for anyone looking to improve their memory and cognitive abilities.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition, written by Eli Goldratt, is a must-read for managers in the industry. The book tells the story of Alex Rogo, a plant manager who has ninety days to save his failing factory from being closed down by corporate HQ. With the help of a former professor, Jonah, Alex breaks out of conventional ways of thinking and discovers the Theory of Constraints (TOC). The book's serious message for all managers in industry is to define their goals in terms of ongoing improvement. The book's 30th Anniversary Edition includes a graphic novel version and an article by Eli Goldratt on the rules of operations. Overall, this book is a compelling read that offers practical insights for anyone aiming for continuous improvement in their organization.

***Please contact [email protected] if you purchased your book new and the access code is denied.. Based on the #1 New York Times bestseller The 5 Love Languages®(over 12 million copies sold), . Dramatically improve workplace relationships simply by learning your coworkers’ language of appreciation. . This book will give you the tools to improve staff morale, create a more positive workplace, and increase employee engagement. How? By teaching you to effectively communicate authentic appreciation and encouragement to employees, co-workers, and leaders. Most relational problems in organizations flow from this question: do people feel appreciated? This book will help you answer “Yes!” . A bestseller—having sold over 300,000 copies and translated into 16 languages—this book has proven to be effective and valuable in diverse settings. Its principles about human behavior have helped businesses, non-profits, hospitals, schools, government agencies, and organizations with remote workers. . PLUS! Each book contains a free access code for taking the online Motivating By Appreciation (MBA) Inventory (does not apply to purchases of used books). ***Please contact [email protected] if you purchased your book new and the access code is denied. . The assessment identifies a person’s preferred languages of appreciation to help you apply the book. When supervisors and colleagues understand their coworkers’ primary and secondary languages, as well as the specific actions they desire, they can effectively communicate authentic appreciation, thus creating healthy work relationships and raising the level of performance across an entire team or organization. . Take your team to the next level by applying The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified.  Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health―complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way―one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr is a #1 New York Times Bestseller that introduces the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) goal-setting system, which has helped tech companies like Google achieve explosive growth. Doerr shares his experience of OKRs and how it can be applied to any organization. The book provides first-person behind-the-scenes case studies of companies that have implemented OKRs, including Google, Intel, and the Gates Foundation. The benefits of using OKRs are profound, including a focus on important work, fostering coordination, and boosting retention. Overall, Measure What Matters is an excellent resource for anyone looking to improve their business strategy.