Your first 90 days in a new job

Week one: the paperwork

Most of this affects your first pay, so do it in the first few days rather than the first few weeks.

Your tax code comes from IRD's IR330 form, and it changes if you have a student loan or a second job. Work through the questions on the form rather than copying your last job's code.

KiwiSaver. The minimum and default employee contribution rate is 3.5% of your before-tax pay, and your employer must contribute at least 3.5% as well, less employer superannuation contribution tax (IRD). You can choose a higher rate for yourself, which does not change what your employer has to put in. If you do not want to be in, you opt out using IRD's form, and only between day 14 and day 56 after you start. Miss that window and you stay in until you apply for a savings suspension.

Then check your first payslip against your agreement: the rate, the hours, the tax code and the KiwiSaver line. A payroll error is easier to fix in week three than in month nine.

Read your employment agreement properly

You signed it before you started, which is a legal requirement if there is a trial period. Read it again in week one, now that you know what the job actually is.

Every employee in New Zealand must have a written employment agreement, and your employer must keep a signed copy and give you one when you ask (Employment New Zealand). It has to cover the names of both parties, a description of the work, where and when you work, how you are paid, and a plain explanation of how to resolve employment relationship problems, including the 90-day limit on raising a personal grievance. A permanent agreement must also contain an employee protection provision, which says what happens to you if the business is restructured or sold.

• Find your notice period, both ways, and the date any trial period ends.
• Find the hours clause: availability, overtime, on call, and whether your hours are guaranteed.
• Find the pay clause, and whether it promises a review or only a conversation.
• Find anything you may have to pay back: training costs, relocation, a device.
• Find any restraint of trade and confidentiality clauses, and what they would stop you doing next.

Nothing in an agreement can take away a minimum legal entitlement, so a clause that gives you less than the law does simply does not apply. Trial and probationary periods are a subject of their own: 90-day trials and your first six months covers what makes a trial valid and what the law gives you at six and twelve months.

Learn the place

Every workplace has an organisation chart and a real one. The chart runs on titles. The real one runs on who actually decides, who has been there longest, and who everyone asks when something breaks.

Ask your manager for fifteen minutes with six to ten people in your first month: whoever you will work with most, plus someone in finance, someone in the team that receives your work, and someone who has been there years. Three questions each.

• "What do you do, and where does my work touch yours?"
• "What do you wish the person in my role did differently?"
• "Who else should I be talking to?"

Write the answers down the same day, with names and roles. Then learn the rhythm: when the leadership team meets, when budgets are set, when the busy season is, when reporting falls due. Decisions and money follow that calendar, and the things you will want later, a course, a tool, a pay review, have to arrive before it rather than after.

Last, the unwritten rules. Does the team live in email, chat or the corridor? Is a meeting for deciding or for reporting? How long before someone replies? Does anyone actually take a lunch break? None of this is in the induction pack, and all of it decides whether you look like you fit.

Agree what good looks like

The most useful conversation of your first month takes half an hour and produces one page. Ask your manager: what does good look like for me at three months, and how will we both know?

Take a draft in rather than a blank page. Three or four priorities, what you think finished looks like for each, and what you will need. Your manager's corrections are the valuable part.

• The priorities, in order, and what is explicitly not yours.
• What done looks like for each one, in a sentence someone else could check.
• How you will be measured, and by whom.
• What you need: access, training, a budget, an introduction, time with someone.
• How often you will meet, and for how long.

Send it back in a short email afterwards: "Here is what I took from that." This is not bureaucracy. It is what you reach for at three months when someone asks how you are getting on, and again at your first review.

Ask for a weekly or fortnightly 1:1 and keep it. After each one write down two things, what was agreed and any feedback, in their words. Three lines is plenty. Prepare for your performance review has more on what those notes are worth later.

Start a wins journal on day one

A win is anything you finished, fixed, improved, learned or were thanked for. In a new job they come thick and fast, and you will remember almost none of them by your first review.

One line, the day it happens, with the number it moved where there is one:

• "Week 2: rewrote the weekly report so it builds itself. Was 90 minutes every Monday."
• "Week 5: took the three worst accounts off Tane while he was on leave."
• "Week 7: finished the site safety induction and the forklift refresher."
• "Week 9: Anahera said the draft was the clearest version anyone had sent the board."

Two minutes on a Friday is enough. The first ninety days are the richest they will ever be, because you can still see the place with fresh eyes: what is obviously broken to you is invisible to everyone who has been there five years. Write those observations down too, including the ones you decide not to raise yet.

Keep a link to the evidence where you can, such as the email that thanked you. Do not copy confidential or client information out of work systems to do it, and keep the journal somewhere that is yours rather than on a work drive you lose access to on your last day.

The first month

By the end of week four you should be able to answer three questions without thinking: what is my job, who decides, and how does this place make its money or meet its purpose.

• Ask for feedback early, before anyone schedules it. "What is one thing I should do differently?" in week three is a cheap question with a very useful answer.
• Finish something small and visible. One completed thing beats three started ones, and it buys you room for the bigger one.
• Do not rebuild everything yet. Note what is broken, ask why it is like that, and wait until you have earned the right to change it.
• Learn the systems properly. An hour with whoever really knows the payroll, rostering or case system saves you weeks.
• Say yes to the social things a few times, even if they are not your thing. Being known is what makes the next twelve months easier.
• Check your leave and hours are being recorded the way you expect, and ask how leave is requested here before you need to request any.

Watch your own money too. Four weeks in, you know what the commute really costs, what you spend on lunch, and whether the parking you were told about exists. That is the first honest comparison against the job you left, and it is worth writing down while the numbers are in front of you.

The 90-day mark

Three months in, do a deliberate stocktake instead of letting the date go past.

1. Check the trial period date. If your agreement has one, it can run no longer than 90 calendar days from the start of your employment (Employment New Zealand). Know the exact day it ends.
2. Ask for a proper conversation, not a corridor "how's it going". Bring the one-pager from month one and say where each thing got to.
3. Ask two questions: "Am I where you expected me to be?" and "What would you want to see from me over the next three months?"
4. Read your wins journal back. Ninety days of it is already the spine of a self-review.
5. Put the next dates in your calendar: six months, twelve months, and your first pay review if there is one.

Six and twelve months are real legal thresholds rather than milestones somebody invented. At six months paid sick leave, bereavement leave and family violence leave begin; at twelve months you are entitled to at least four weeks' paid annual holidays (Employment New Zealand). 90-day trials and your first six months sets out what each date gives you.

This is also the moment to write the job down properly while it is fresh: what you actually do, what you have delivered, the systems you now use, the size of the thing you look after. It becomes a CV line long before you need one.

If it is going badly

Sometimes it is the job, sometimes it is the fit, and sometimes it is three weeks of bad information. Deal with it early, while it is still fixable and while you still have goodwill.

• Name it once, specifically. "I am not getting the work I expected" is easier to answer than "this is not working out".
• Ask for the facts behind the verdict. If you are told you are too slow, ask what the expected turnaround is and how it is measured.
• Put it in writing afterwards, short and factual, so the conversation and what was agreed exist somewhere other than memory.
• Keep the record going: dates, what was said, what you did next.
• Get advice early. Employment New Zealand is on 0800 20 90 20 and offers free mediation. If you are a union member, ring your organiser. Community law centres also take employment questions.

A personal grievance generally has to be raised within 90 days of the problem, so do not sit on something serious such as discrimination, harassment or bullying (Employment New Zealand). A trial period does not take those grounds away: it only affects a claim of unjustified dismissal.

If you decide to leave, check your notice period, resign in writing and be straightforward about it. Short stints happen and are explainable. Leaving without notice is much harder to explain than leaving early.