There is always that phase in a new job when you know everyone’s name but still do not know whom to ask for the Wi-Fi password. You have attended the induction, read the handbook, found the coffee machine and survived the first team meeting. And yet, somehow, you still feel like a guest.
Settling into a new workplace is rarely about knowing the formal rules. It is about learning the things no onboarding presentation can explain: who you can casually message, where people actually go for lunch, what “urgent” really means in this particular office, and whether it is acceptable to admit that you have no idea what is going on.
For HR leaders, these small moments can mark the difference between an employee joining an organisation and actually beginning to belong to one. Three of them recall what made that transition real.
Find your people
Ranjith Menon, SVP Corporate HR, Hinduja Group
Ranjith Menon’s view of settling in begins with an observation that sounds simple but gets to the heart of the matter: employees do not really settle into an organisation. They settle into a network of relationships.
His first job offered an early example. On his first day, a senior salesperson did something beyond the standard welcome. Rather than simply introducing himself, the colleague told Menon he had made the right decision in joining the company. He had been there for fifteen years himself, he added, and still thought it was a good place to work. For someone entering his first job with all the excitement and nerves that entails, that small reassurance carried more weight than any formal welcome programme could have.
Menon came to understand that every organisation runs on two sets of rules. There is the official version, which is documented, and the real version, which is not. Who actually makes decisions? Can you challenge a manager in a meeting? Which issues need immediate escalation and which can wait? Who does everyone call when something goes wrong? A newcomer can read the handbook from cover to cover and still know none of this. What they need is someone who does.
He experienced the value of such a guide when he moved to Germany and was assigned a colleague who helped him understand not only the local culture but the particular culture of the organisation. The two, he discovered, were quite different and equally important.
The moment that stayed with him longest, however, involved a mistake rather than an explanation. Early in a new role, Menon gave a presentation that missed the organisation’s way of approaching the subject entirely. With colleagues watching, it could easily have become an uncomfortable introduction to the new workplace. Instead, his manager stepped in, reframed the situation and told the room that the newcomer had brought an outside perspective to the problem. During the break, he worked with Menon to realign the presentation.
That intervention did something the onboarding process had not. By allowing a newcomer to get something wrong without making the mistake define him, the manager made being new feel safe.
Never underestimate a lunch invitation
Varadrajan R, HR Leader
For Varadrajan R, the memory of settling into his first workplace comes down to something more ordinary still: a plate of dosa and a cup of coffee.
Fresh out of management school, he remembers his first day going much as expected. Introductions, an office tour, the usual formalities. By the second day, the reality of being new had begun to settle in. At lunchtime, he watched colleagues gather in familiar groups, everyone moving naturally towards where they already belonged. He was not sure where that was for him yet.
Then a senior colleague from another department walked over and asked whether he wanted to join him for lunch. They went to a small café nearby, and the conversation moved away from job descriptions and company policies almost immediately. Over the meal, the colleague talked about his own first week, including how lost he had felt and how he had eventually found his way. There was no formal mentoring session, buddy programme or checklist. Just lunch.
What stayed with Varadrajan was not the advice. It was the fact that somebody had noticed a newcomer standing alone and decided to do something about it. Years later, when he was involved in setting up a new company, that memory influenced how he approached onboarding. Every Friday, forty-five to sixty minutes were kept aside for a session with no agenda, no recording and no fear of asking something that might sound uninformed. New and existing employees could ask about anything, from processes and culture to who disliked the cafeteria menu.
The logic was much the same as that lunch decades earlier. The fastest way to make a workplace feel familiar is not always to explain the organisation better. Sometimes it is simply to sit down with the new person and make them feel that they are already part of the conversation.
Give people room to land
Viekas K Khokha, CHRO, Sharda Motor Industries
Viekas K Khokha thinks about the first three months differently from most onboarding frameworks. His starting point is not what the organisation needs to communicate to a newcomer, but what that person is still quietly trying to work out.
The team around them already has its rhythm. Deadlines are moving and everyone has work to get through. In that environment, it is easy to forget that the newest person is still building a basic map of how things work: who does what, how people interact, where their role fits and what contribution looks like in practice. Knowing the job description, Khokha notes, is one thing. Understanding how that job actually lives inside the team is another.
His approach is to give newcomers structured access to the right people early. A one-on-one with the reporting manager on the first day. Time with the wider team within the first ten days. Clear goals that connect individual objectives with those of the department and organisation, so the newcomer understands not only what is expected but why it matters.
The element Khokha returns to most, however, is also the hardest to systematise. Someone outside the newcomer’s immediate team needs to keep checking in, not merely to ask whether the work is progressing but to understand how the person is actually feeling. An employee can say everything is fine while quietly wondering whether joining was the right decision. That gap between what someone reports and what they are experiencing is where early disengagement can begin.
Technology can bring consistency and structure to onboarding. What it cannot do particularly well is notice hesitation, read discomfort or recognise that the person saying “I’m fine” may need another question. A human being can. In those first few months, that distinction matters more than most onboarding programmes acknowledge.
Belonging begins before familiarity
None of these experiences involved complicated HR programmes, expensive platforms or perfectly designed onboarding decks. What they share is something much simpler: somebody noticed that a newcomer was still finding their footing and decided to make it easier. A word of reassurance on the first day. A lunch invitation on the second. A manager who turned a public mistake into a private coaching moment.
Employees eventually learn the names, the shortcuts, the meeting rituals and the informal lunch groups. The office stops feeling new. But long after all of that becomes routine, most people can still remember the person who made those early weeks less awkward.
That is the point at which a workplace stops feeling like somewhere you have joined and begins to feel like somewhere you belong.
What was the moment that made a new workplace finally feel like home? Share it in the comments.