Newsletter No. 26

No.26 January 1992 • CUHK Newsletter To Know More about The Ma l l Buildings Managemen t Offic e If you take ‘mall buildings' to mean only those buildings that line the University Mall, then you'll never quite understand the scope of responsibilities of the Mall Buildings Management Office. Some buildings that actually line the University Ma ll are not managed by the office, examples being the Institute of Chinese Studies and the University Administration Building. Some buildings that are managed by the office are physically quite far away from the mall itself. The Fung King Hey Building and the new Leung Kau Kui Building fall into this category. The cluster o f buildings currently managed by that office are a historical accumulation by convenience rather than a logical categorization by location. In the seventies, each building a t the University had its own management committee. With the completion of more and more multi-purpose buildings on the central campus and the increased number of user-units, however, there arose a need t o centralize the management o f certain buildings so that the use o f facilities could be better coordinated and the deployment of manpower resources made more efficient. The Mall Buildings Management Office was thus set up i n 1980 to look after three buildings: the Sui-Loong Pao Building, the Y.C. Liang Hall, and the Pi Ch'iu Building. The three blocks are geographically near t o one another and all contain offices, function rooms and classrooms. The management office has t o handle the booking o f function rooms, the general maintenance of facilities inside the buildings, the provision o f office support services t o user-units, and the management of a team of office assistants and caretakers. And over the last 11 years, the number of buildings under the supervision of the office has doubled. Additions have included the L i Dak Sum Building (1981), the Fung King Hey Building (1984), and the newly completed Leung Kau Kui Building (1991). The latter three are not exactly on the University Mall, but as they are similar in function to the first three, they have conveniently been put under the same management office. ' The most difficult part of the job is finding ways t o deploy the limited manpower resources t o satisfy the requirements of over 30 user-units in six different buildings,' says Mrs. Yau Suk Ying, who has served in the office for as long as i t has existed. ‘There is always the need t o mediate tactfully between the users, who make all sorts of requests, and the workmen, who are supposed to deliver the services required,' she continues. Mrs. Yau has under her a team of some 20 office assistants and caretakers, and part of her job i s t o assign duties to them, and t o arrange shifts and leave periods. Above her is a supervisor appointed on a concurrent basis, who visits the management office at the Y.C. Liang Hall only randomly. 'I'mprobably the one who has experienced the most frequent change of bosses in one single office', she jokingly remarks. From the first supervisor, Miss Julia Woo (now Secretary o f Shaw College Office), to the current head of office, Mrs. Betty Tsang (Executive Officer of the Faculty of Medicine), Mrs. Yau has worked under seven different bosses in 11 years. And all through these years, she has been the only full-time staff in the general office, tackling day- to-day problems on her own most o f the time. When there were only three buildings to look after, Mrs. Yau was able to make regular visits to each block to check i f everything was in order. She had to attend to every minor detail: whether the light bulbs i n the corridors need replacing, whether there is enough xerox paper for the copying machines, whether refuse has gathered in some unnoticed comer ...The list is really too long to enumerate. But as her workload increases with the increased number o f buildings t o manage, Mrs. Yau has been forced t o reduce the frequency of such inspection tours. ‘Problems i n the general office alone keep me busy all day. I simply cannot afford the time for such "excursions" any more,' she says. Having worked in the management office for 11 years, how does Mrs. Yau find her job in general? ‘What is most frustrating is knowing that you could do a lot better i f you had sufficient time. There are really a thousand details to attend to, but I have only one pair o f hands. I hope the user-units w i l l understand our constraints,' she says. ‘ I still like my job, though, for i t has trained me to work independently. Through my job I get to know a lot of people from different departments and I have made a lot of friends.' This must have been the reason why Mrs. Yau has chosen to stay in the office for so long.