Day 227 - The McDonald's Model

About six months into my tour in the consular section, our offices were moved from the third floor of a downtown building to a standalone building about a mile further away from the embassy. The main reason was security. Consular sections need to provide easy access for the visa and passport applicants who visit them, but they also need to provide security for the staff. In a mixed use building the former is possible, but the latter is complicated. At that time, there wasn't pressure to collocate (that's the way the Department spells it; I prefer co-locate) all U.S. government operations in the same building. That preference came later.

The layout of our new consular facilities was touted by management in Washington as the model for all future consular sections at other locations. Someone in the upper levels at State was supposed to have said, "If McDonalds can use the same building layout everywhere in the world to provide their services, we can do so, too." Once we moved into the new offices, I concluded that it was the wrong model, but no one ever asked me my opinion.

This statement reflected the Department's desire to shift away from having all embassies designed by expensive, internationally known architects in order that they fit within the local settings because those buildings were so expensive to build. Following the same layout inside was an initial step in the direction of standardizing, expected to save money when purchasing furniture and equipment.

image of an open plan office by jasra, via Flickr.com

Most of us had never seen the new location before the Friday when we packed the contents of our desks into boxes and watched them removed from the building, put into trucks, and then driven down the street. It took us all of the Friday normal business hours to pack up our offices, the storeroom, and the common area but we were expected to be open the following Monday so we had to spend most of Friday evening and much of the weekend getting unpacked and set up in our new quarters. Even putting in those extra hours wasn't enough, but we had to open so we limped along the rest of the next week, juggling visa interviews with office setup.

Our old offices had been one large square space divided into quarters with one quarter serving as the waiting area, the two quarters adjoining it were large rooms with multiple desks without partitions between them and the fourth quarter had private offices for only four of the Americans - the Consul General, the Deputy Consul, and two of the Vice Consuls. My office was a desk in one of the common rooms. The advantage was my proximity to the windows where I could enjoy the sound of the rain.

image of cubicles by Michael Lokner, via Flickr.com

Our new offices were entirely an open floorplan with cubicles for everyone except the Consul General and the Deputy Consul. I looked forward to having cubicle walls around my desk so that I would have more privacy. Our desks, however, were more like tables. There were no drawers to put the things we had packed up. And the desk surface area was smaller than what we had in the old location, making the option of stacking things on them inadequate. There was also a problem with the outlets in our cubicles. The phone jack was on one of the cubicle panels but the electrical outlet was on the opposite panel. That made positioning the desk to allow for both a telephone and a computer challenging. We ended up using extension cords draped over the cubicle walls so that the desks could be against one side without running a cord across the floor that might trip someone.

But the cubicles proved to be a big cultural challenge for us. We Americans saw cubicle walls as providing privacy to anyone within them. When we walked by the cubicles of our local staff, we respected their privacy and walked by without disturbing them. The Bajan employees on the other hand saw that behavior as very rude. They expected each person to greet every other person every morning. We had followed that rule in the old space when we said "Good morning" while we walked through them to our office space, but we Americans stopped following that rule in the new space because we really didn't know about this cultural norm. In the new building, our respect for the staff's privacy was seen as our being impolite and the local staff set out to prove this to us by their walking around the building first thing each morning and popping their heads into each of our cubicles to say "Good morning," even if we were on the phone or speaking in person with someone else in our cubicles. "How rude," we all thought.

All of this happened before the fight between the Bajan secretary and the wife of the American General Services Officer.

Even without the benefit of our later cultural sensitivity training after the fight, I saw one aspect of the new layout as very disrepectful to the local staff, although I didn't discuss it with any of them. At this point, not many of the local staff seemed willing to talk to me about anything and I wasn't eager to rock the boat.

Here is what I thought showed disrepect to our staff:

The new consular section was one very large rectangular room, divided into two parts by a wall of interview windows the full length of the space. The smaller portion, roughly one-third of the space, was the waiting room which had its own entrance with a walk-through-metal-detector and package Xray machine, to improve the security of the space. We employees entered through a separate entrance that did not have those extra security measures. There were chairs in the waiting room, but once we called an applicant for the interview, they stood on their side of the windows. No chairs were provided for the applicants at the windows because it is more difficult to encourage someone who is seated to leave when they are told we would not issue them a visa than it is to encourage someone who is already standing.

That meant that we consular officers either had to stand all day on our side of the window or our side needed a raised floor so that we could sit. The latter design option was selected, but instead of raising the floor of the entire work area, only enough of a platform to allow a row of chairs was created. Then, because it was a safety risk for us to be seated in desk chairs with wheels on the platform, they added a banister at the back of the platform so that we wouldn't roll off and get hurt. That was a good thing, but there were only two places along the row of 13 interview windows where there was a break in the banister to allow us to step up and squeeze our way through to our windows along the very narrow space behind the chairs. Once we each took our seats, we pretty much stayed there until all the applicants in the room had been interviewed, four to five hours later.

Here comes the culturally insensitive part. In those cases where we decided to issue the visa, we had to get the passport and application to the local staff behind us. The options were:

• Get up out of our chairs and make our way to the steps at the closest break in the banister and go to the table where the local staff worked, then making our way back to our window;
• Put the passport and application on the floor behind us which would require that the local staff bend over to pick them up;
• Place the application and passport on the banister, hoping they will balance there until one of the local staff collected them; 
• Keep all the passports and applications at our desks until the local staff asked for them or until we finished our interviews when we would then hand over the work to the local employees who now would have less time to complete their part; or
• Raise a hand and snap fingers or shout to get the attention of one of the local staff in order that someone would collect.

The first option disrupted the other consular officers and interrupted the flow of work. The other four options seemed very disrespectful of the local employees, especially since all of the American visa interviewing officers were white and none of the local staff were.

Image of McDonalds in Japan by Akoaraisin, via Flickr.com

I've never worked at McDonald's, so I don't know if there are aspects of their employees' workspaces that show so little respect to one group of them as I saw in our model consular section space. I felt strongly enough about the cultural factors that should have been taken into account in the new consular layout that I drafted a telegram to share those thoughts. The Department uses draft instead of write because not everything that is drafted gets sent. My draft telegram remained a draft, never sent. The pessimist in me (I let that side show every now and then) thinks it doesn't matter because it would likely never have been read either.