DETO realities: 3 months in

Well, I guess it’s time to talk about work! Since this is ultimately a blog about being a diplomat, I can’t get around talking about my work life for too long. Even though I generally find it much more fun to talk about my travel, hobbies, and daily adventures overseas.

To recap: this is my third assignment as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer generalist and overall my eighth tour overseas. What makes this tour different is that I’m doing a domestic job, a “desk job” rather than a “field job,” which makes me feel more of a bureaucrat than ever before. I live in The Gambia because my spouse is posted here but my own job has nothing to do with West Africa. I work on refugee processing as a Domestic Employee Teleworking Overseas (DETO).

Sorry I missed that meeting!

I’ve been in this position for about three months now. The first challenge of working in a different location and time zone was trying to make virtual meeting appointments and then showing up on time. This was exacerbated by the fact that I changed timelines a few times in my first month. I didn’t miss too many key meetings but in the beginning I found myself signing in from roadside restaurants, or at 6 AM in the morning, more than I cared for. It probably didn’t help my first impression.

On the other hand, I immediately loved the flexibility of overlapping only half my workday with DC. When I’m in the office, particularly in a busy consular section, there often seems no conceivable way around being glued to my desk for eight or nine hours every day. Now it’s much easier to allow myself an hour of running or tennis because nobody knows or cares about the exact moment I start work, or how sweaty I am. It’s not that I work less—I’ve stayed up until midnight to work on urgent paper more than once already—just generally more efficiently and flexibly.

The second challenge is definitely feeling that I’m missing out on getting to know my office and learning what’s going on and, perhaps, being on people’s mind when an important project comes up. I have no doubt that I wasn’t selected to work on some of the more high profile portfolios because of this. I expected it, but with my ever present drive to be relevant and useful, acceptance comes slowly.

Everyone works from home

What will this do to mt relevance and my career progression? It’s too harsh to say that remote employees are second class employees, I’m sure some people working from home are quite impressive, but as someone who is new to the office and still learning, I have no doubt that being in-office is valued more. It depends a lot on the supervisor’s perspective, but I’m convinced a human connection will always beat a virtual one.

However, the degree to which colleagues interact in person is going down across the board. Some colleagues call into a meeting from their desks whenever it’s allowed. Usually with their cameras off. And everyone, as I’ve noticed, calls in remotely at some point, either because they work from home certain days or just because we can—we used to just be “out” if we had to pick our kids up unexpectedly, or had a meeting across town, but now we can participate in meetings from anywhere.

In fact, my entire 4-person team is working remotely 100% and I think only one of them was ever full time in the office before. But that’s not a negative thing for getting work done. These people are experts at responding to any request through time and space within minutes. Our work relationships are as professional and efficient as can be.

Goodbye daily drama

To be honest, I don’t really miss the daily small talk with whomever happens to sit next to me in the office. And I definitely don’t miss the feeling that my performance is judged more by my strict adherence to office hours and a smile on my face than by the work I produce. It’s also easier to unplug from work by not having a massive commute or overthinking colleagues personal comments, gripes, moods and preferences.

I used to work in an office space with over 120 people. Oh, the personalities! And the amount of personal information that came my way on a daily basis was astounding; from pregnancies to terrible illnesses to gossip, office politics, clique forming, birthdays and farewells. Even within my 30-person team there was enough drama to keep me up at night. One colleague stopped talking to anyone due to a failed promotion. Another one was untrainable. Yet another one needed daily pep talks just to feel they could get through the day. It was a lot.

The art of self motivation

The remaining challenge for the moment is staying motivated. It’s not that I can’t bring myself to do the work—I like working too much for that and it’s not like I don’t have serious responsibilities. It’s more about seeing and feeling the value in what I do and propelling myself forward even if my supervisor sometimes seems to forget about my existence a little bit.

When you go to work at an embassy, the act of passing so many heavily secured doors alone makes you feel important, and swimming along in the current of national security issues alongside many smart colleagues easily makes you feel like you did something meaningful at the end of the day. Even if it was just meetings and grunt work. Now I sometimes feel like I’m not even really working because I don’t have any office related gatherings or responsibilities. Sometimes literally all I do is editing a policy document for clarity, or figuring out how to access a software application and pull some data. It doesn’t feel like a big deal.  Never mind all the experience and skills I had to learn in order to do these things effectively. I have to remind myself of that sometimes, a bit more often now than before.