LEARNING TO LEARN
How to turn lacklustre employees into stars

By Sydney Jones

A major hotel chain in Hawaii had problems in its housekeeping department that included poor attendance at staff meetings and absenteeism.
Staff were mainly immigrant women with minimal English language skills who simply wanted to do the basic work and collect a paycheque.
Corporate trainer and educator Trinidad Hunt of Elan Enterprises was hired to lead supervisory training. In the group was the top line employee, the department manager and his first-line manager.
Hunt said management had the attitude that housekeeping employees were not well educated and therefore not educable. The top-line employee, a Filipino woman, thought she couldn't learn.
After five sessions, the woman raised her hand and told the group she now understood anyone could learn and she would teach the others.
Management subsequently told Hunt staff meetings had been changed based on what she had taught them. A 62 per cent attendance rate shot up to 98 per cent and errors have been reduced.
"We used to critique them and tell them what wasn't happening, but our behavior was so automatic we didn't realize we were doing that," said Hunt in relating management comments during an interview this week in Kamloops.
Instead of focusing on three unmade beds, they talked about the 97 good ones. So if compliments were going to be handed out, employees wanted to be there to receive their share.
Hunt said supervisors learned to praise, acknowledge, look for the good and empower.
The same theories were applied to 22 management people and 60 truckers employed in refuse collection in Honolulu. Hunt was hired because the truckers were sleeping on the job, wasting time, arguing and missing work.
"(The company's) going through a tremendous transformation. Behavioral change takes time," she said. "In working with corporations, we highly recommend a relationship in which the manager is coach. Manager as coach means 'I have started to understand my employees' gifts.'"
Hunt emphasized that Elan training is the "human side of enterprise." Skills should be applied at home and at work.
"If I'm not happy at home, I definitely bring it to work. It's the realization that a human being is a whole person," said Hunt. "It's unusual to hear, 'I like coming to work'."
Hunt's self-help book Learning to Learn identifies seven different types of learning and is the textbook for all levels of her work, from kindergarten to corporate level.
"The human body was built to learn. Between zero to seven, we absorb an entire culture, often several languages. When we hit school, something slows the process down," said Hunt.
Hunt said she is known for speaking from the heart.
"Wisdom comes from the merging of the heart and the mind, not from pure intellect," she said.

Trinidad Hunt, of Elan Enterprises conducts a seminar Saturday for teachers, parents and managers titled Shaping the Future Together, The Human Side of Enterprise, at the University College of the Cariboo Campus Activity Centre.
The Kamloops Daily News