Day 200 - When Is An Employee Not Really An Employee?

Before I went to Doha, I had lots of consultations with people throughout the Department, most of whom had something to warn me about. Life had not gone smoothly for members of the embassy the year before I arrived. One thing about small embassies that continues to be true is that almost all of the staff at them are first-timers. The vice consul was a first-tour officer. I was a second-tour officer, but my first tour was as a consular officer, so Doha was my first tour as an administrative officer. The ambassador's secretary had been a secretary overseas before, but it was her first tour as secretary to a chief of mission. Even the ambassador was a first-timer: he was a political appointee whose qualifications for the job rested on his reputation for having delivered the Armenian-American voters in southern California for President Reagan.

That meant that every one of us was dealing with most aspects of our jobs for the first time. And there were no experienced hands around for us to ask. These were the days before e-mail, when international telephone calls were very expensive, so picking up the phone to ask a question also wasn't an insignificant cost. And that is why I had so many consultations and why so many people wanted to be sure I understood the challenges I would face when I arrived.

One of those challenges was that my predecessor, a first-tour officer who had been assigned as the vice consul but was moved into the administrative officer's position half-way through his tour, was not only a first-timer in the job - he hadn't received any training for the job either. It wasn't a surprise that some of the actions he took were not exactly according to the regulations. I was expected to fix those irregularities.

Judy

One of them - replace a locally hired American citizen for whom there was no legal basis for hiring. Those were the days when the only American citizens who could be hired locally were dependents of Americans assigned by the Foreign Service or the military to the country. Well, that is practically the truth, although technically there was a provision for locally resident American citizens to be hired, but the process was so complex and took several years to complete that it was not an option. Even under that provision, an American who was married to a non-American was not eligible to be hired through it. And Judy, the American in this case, was married to an Egyptian. My predecessor hadn't hired Judy as a Foreign Service National employee; he used an alternate staffing method referred to as a Personal Services Contract, so technically he didn't violate the hiring rules. But his bringing Judy on board through a PSC coincided with the Department's effort to regularize contract positions to ensure those who worked inside an embassy as contractors received the same benefits as those hired as employees. The PSCs were coming under scrutiny as well.

I spoke with my predecessor about this before I left Washington, and he assured me it was taken care of. He had already hired an Egyptian woman to replace Judy. Her first day on the job would be my first day on the job. Judy had agreed to stay on for a week to train her, but after that, she would no longer be  part of the embassy staff.

So on my first day at the embassy I met Judy, her boss Jirius, and the Egyptian woman hired to replace Judy. The reason I can't remember the Egyptian woman's name is that she didn't last very long. About 45 minutes into the morning, Judy came to my office to tell me that the Egyptian woman wanted to talk to me because she had decided she didn't want to work for the embassy.

When she came into my office, she was shaking like a leaf. I did what I could to make her comfortable and asked her what she wanted to do. She said she didn't want to stay at the embassy. She was uncomfortable with the guards outside the compound wall, with the bars on the windows, and by the lack of light in her office. I told her she didn't have to stay, that I wouldn't - I couldn't - make her stay if she didn't want to stay. At that point she visibly relaxed and talked with me more comfortably. She explained that it was her husband who had convinced her she should accept the job with the embassy because he thought it would be a good move for her. On her last day in her previous job, her boss had told her that if she wanted to come back to her old job, she could. Over the weekend, she had thought about that offer and she realized that is what she wanted to do. She asked if she had to stay until the end of the day. I told her she could leave right then if she wanted. And at that, she smiled. She called her husband and left.

I learned later that there were a few more factors in this scenario. One was that Jirius, the senior local employee in the section, really wanted someone who was fluent in English in the position. That is why my predecessor hired Judy. And because Judy had lived in the middle east for more than 20 years, she also spoke Arabic, making her the ideal candidate for the job, except for those pesky regulations that precluded her from being hired. Jirius' next preference was Gaynor*, a British woman who was married to an Iraqi. But the ambassador had refused to hire her. Everyone around me told me that the ambassador was very particular about his desire not to have any British staff members, something that I found very difficult to understand since the public affairs officer had both an Irish secretary and a British student advisor.

image of a clean slate by Underpuppy,
via Flickr.com

During my first meeting with the ambassador, he told me that I would likely hear many stories about him from those around me. He knew that he wasn't everyone's favorite person. But he asked that I not pay heed to what I heard from others, that I instead listen to what he had to tell me and to begin my working relationship with him from a clean slate. I said I would. I also then explained to him that the woman my predecessor had hired as Jirius' assistant had decided she didn't want the job so I would have to begin again to find a suitable candidate. The ambassador said nothing beyond asking that I let him know how the search went.

When I went through my predecessor's files, I found that the criteria he had used to determine the best candidate was based solely on translation of English into Arabic and vice versa. Since I had no Arabic knowledge, I couldn't assess how well the candidates did on this task, nor could I tell whether translation was a major portion of the job.

So I sat down with Judy to learn what she did in a typical day. I learned that most of what she did was to refer to a series of business directories in order to identify companies in the United States who might be good trading partners for Qatari businesses and which Qatari businesses might be interested in working with American businesses. While Judy was able to translate between Arabic and English, it was obvious to me that understanding English was much more important. Judy also handled telephone calls from both the U.S. and locally. She used Arabic when speaking with local business people, but she told me that the Qatari business people could all conduct their business in English as well. In her opinion, Arabic was a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, skill.

I took the information Judy gave me and created a series of exercises around the type of tasks Judy did each day, hoping for two different outcomes. First, I would have some semi-objective data to determine how well the candidates could manage the work. Second, the candidates would have a better idea of what they would be expected to do than a translation exercise offered.  The next step was to place an ad in the paper for the vacancy. I also reached out to neighboring embassies to see if any of their staff would be interested in being considered for the vacancy.

The exercises involved using the directories that Judy used each day to find information in response to a series of questions. Then, because many of the entries in the directories were referrals to other terms, such as pets, See specific animals, I provided a list of ten words with the task of writing down as many related words for each as the candidates could think of. Since the directories were alphabetical, I provided several lists of words for the candidates to alphabetize, including a string of words that all started with the same letter and where looking to the fourth letter was necessary to determine the correct order. The last exercise was for the candidates to write a few sentences of what they thought they had learned about the job from the exercises.

When I brought candidates in for interviews, I gave each of them the exercises and a fixed length to complete as many as they could. Once the fixed length of time passed, I gave them the short writing exercise. I didn't write the names of the candidates on any of the exercises. I assigned each of them a letter so that no one would know which papers were completed by which candidate.

There were two candidates in Cairo, one Egyptian and one British, who were interested in being considered, so I had the personnel officer there give those candidates the same exercises. By the time I was done, I had results for nine candidates. I gave the exercises to Jirius for him to identify the top three candidates based on the exercises and I then arranged for him to interview the top three.

He picked Gaynor, again. Everyone around me told me that the ambassador would never allow me to hire her. But I stuck to my agreement that I would not listen to others. I had kept the ambassador informed of the process and he hadn't yet told me that I could or couldn't hire anyone of a specific nationality. So I contacted the security officer in Riyadh to begin the process of getting Gaynor cleared. And I sent a letter to Gaynor offering her the job, subject to satisfactory security and medical clearances. And she accepted.

When I told the ambassador the security officer would be coming to interview the candidate, he finally asked questions that gave away his true feelings. Eventually he asked a question I couldn't finesse - he asked what passport she carried. I told him she was British, he lost his composure and said that I couldn't hire her, that everyone knew he would not allow a British citizen to work for the embassy. I just looked back at him and said, "but you never told me." And he realized he hadn't.

So he decided he would conduct her background security investigation. He contacted the security officer to tell him he didn't need to come to Qatar. And he did his own digging. I don't recall the details, but the end result was obvious before he began. He declared that it would be a security risk for us to hire her. I had to contact Gaynor to tell her that I had to withdraw the offer based on the results of the security check. She had to know that was bogus since no one had even come to talk with her.

Judy remained at the embassy throughout the time I was in Doha. To avoid the appearance of employment (as well as the lack of any legal basis for employing her) I structured a non-personal services contract for her to ensure that she would be paid for the work that she did, but she received none of the benefits that other employees received. It wasn't fair. But it was clear that Jirius would never accept a non-native speaker of English, the ambassador would never accept a Brit, and I had no authority to hire an American. So we waited until the ambassador and his family left Qatar before advertising the position again - nearly two years after I arrived. The woman who was selected that time? Gaynor.

What about the British woman who was the American student advisor for the Public Affairs Office? The ambassador made the public affairs officer fire her, too.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.