How corporate houses in Gurgaon are using Library@Home to sharpen professional skills of staff

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers," said Harry Truman. The quote explains the logic behind the increasing number of corporates in Gurgaon opting for library solutions for their employees and catering to them is Library@Home, an online library service.

Library@Home started full-fledged operations in Gurgaon in January, 2011 and launched its corporate library services Library@Office in July, 2011. Since then the company has already tied up with 13 corporates at 24 facilities in Gurgaon and Manesar including Genpact, HCL and American Express among others. The company extended its services to other parts of the national capital region in February, 2012.

"The main objective of our corporate library service is to help employees have easy access to books they want to read. Reading is a must to sharpen professional and personality development skills of employees. More importantly and extremely relevant to today's fast paced corporate world - reading reduces stress. Considering these benefits of reading, corporates have two choices - to create their own corporate library or to avail services of an existing set-up; the second option is hassle-free and less expensive," said Shyam Patnaik, CEO of Library@Home located in Sushant Lok 1.

"We have an in-house offline library in office for IT related books but there are times when employees would want light reading. We were getting many request for such kind of library solutions which made us tie up with Library@Home," said Amrit Kaur, Global HR for employee engagement, HCL Technologies, which started taking corporate library service for their employees in Gurgaon and Noida four months back.

Kaur said the initiative has got a very good response from the employees and as many as 200 HCL employees in NCR have already taken up the service so far. "The best part is that the book is delivered and picked up right from your workstation which makes the entire process hassle free besides getting cheaper membership plans when compared to their market rate," she added.

Library@Office basically offers two types of plans to corporates. First where the company subscribes on behalf of the employees for the library services to be availed by the employees and second where the company allows the employees to subscribe directly as a corporate tie up. In the first plan, the pricing is decided based on either the number of logins or the number of books borrowed. In the second plan, the Library@Office offers a discounted subscription plan to the employees as they save on the delivery cost. "The pricing varies depending on the number of employees/logins and books borrowed," said Patnaik.

The library has over 10,000 books listed on its website and the listing is live which means that books that are borrowed will be seen as out of stock. Members can browse through the books and place orders online - the convenience of 24 X 7 access from the comfort of office or home. The deliveries are at the members' doorstep.

"I was in the US for some years where I could find multiple branches of a library to read books and that was something we were missing here when we came back to Gurgaon there being no library around. The only choice we had was to go to the British Council Library and some others in Delhi but driving 40-50 km for the same did not make sense to me so when I came across the corporate offer from Library@Office I took it as they offered a good discount besides delivering books at your convenience," said Sumit Rajan Srivastava, delivery head with a Gurgaon-based IT company.

As a member of the corporate plan Rajan pays Rs 500 per quarter when compared to a market rate of around Rs 1600 per quarter.

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