Sabine Carver Audiobooks

HR Safe: the fine art of saying what you mean at work without saying it

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

10 listener ratings

Who is Sabine Carver?

Quotation marks around a single word can do a great deal of work. Sabine Carver puts them around professionalism in the subtitle of HR Safe: How to Say It Without Saying It, and with that one gesture the register is established. This is a guide written with a raised eyebrow, for people who have worked out that the office runs on a second language.

Our catalogue files it under business and careers, education and learning, and personal development, which between them describe the intended audience well enough. The subject is workplace communication, specifically the gap between what is meant and what can safely be said aloud, and the promise is fluency in that gap rather than an argument about whether it ought to exist.

Sabine Carver in audiobooks

At two hours and twenty minutes this is deliberately compact, the sort of guide that fits inside a return commute and can be revisited whenever a particular conversation is looming. Practical advice benefits from that shape, since nobody wants a treatise on how to phrase an email.

Val Caruso narrates, and dryness is the required tone. Material of this kind falls flat if it is read too earnestly, because the humour is doing half the teaching.

Early listener scores are strong at 4.6, though from a small pool, so take that as encouragement rather than proof. Come to it if you have ever redrafted a message half a dozen times and still felt it said too much. Details are on the shelf below.