Lan Li, facilitator of the hospitality administration program in NIU’s School of Family, Consumer and Nutrition Sciences, worked in human resources for the catering of the Beijing Olympics in August.
Li, a native of Beijing, was assigned to the human resources department of Media Village two weeks before the games started. The Media Village served food to more than 6,000 media personnel and more than 3,000 staff.
Members of the catering staffs cane from 11 countries, and most did not know each other before entering the village with their diverse technical, culture and language backgrounds. Li’s main responsibilities included assistance with scheduling, employee discipline and accidents and payroll.
Over the course of the Olympics, the catering staff served:
The work was tiring but the experience was rewarding, Li said.
“It allowed me to get an inside view of how a mega-event was run, the problems that came up and how they were overcome. More importantly, it gave me a tremendous platform to understand how it feels to manage teams of staff who had a different culture and value system,” said the College of Health and Human Sciences professor.
“Maybe it’s in my nature as a professor – I also played the role of a motivator and a patient listener to these young students after their long working hours,” she added. “In some emergency situations, I also stepped in to be a translator between international managers and student workers, and arranging for a cleaning company to pick up thousands of dirty uniforms.”