Your first 90 days in a Hong Kong office: the unwritten rules

The formal onboarding covers your laptop, your MPF enrolment form and the fire exits. Everything that determines whether the job goes well is transmitted informally, in the first six weeks, and mostly to people who already knew where to look.

Understand what probation actually is

Three months is the Hong Kong norm, six is common for senior roles. During the first month of probation, either side can generally end the contract without notice; after that, the notice period during probation is usually short — commonly seven days — before the full contractual notice takes over. Read your own contract for the exact terms. The practical implication is that probation is a genuinely two-way trial, and you are allowed to be evaluating them.

The first week: map the building, not the org chart

• Find out who actually approves things. In many Hong Kong firms, especially family-controlled ones, the org chart and the decision chart are different documents.
• Get added to the WhatsApp groups. There will be a formal Teams or Slack channel and a real WhatsApp group, and the second one is where the work is coordinated. Ask; nobody adds you unprompted.
• Learn the lunch pattern. Whether the team eats together at 1pm is a genuine signal about how the team works, and joining for the first fortnight buys you more goodwill than any amount of visible late-staying.
• Note who is called by an English name, who by a Chinese name, and who by title. Follow what the room does rather than importing habits from your last firm.

Weeks two to six: deliver one small, visible thing

The most reliable predictor of a good probation review is not effort or hours. It is having shipped one modest, complete, visible piece of work by about week five — a cleaned-up report, a process someone had been complaining about, a dashboard that answers a question your manager keeps being asked. Small and finished beats large and pending, because the review happens before the large thing lands.

The Hong Kong-specific etiquette that matters

• Business cards, if exchanged, are still taken with two hands, read, and not immediately pocketed. This has not gone away in client-facing industries.
• Disagreement in front of a group is expensive. Raise the objection privately first, then support the decision publicly — this reads as competence here, not timidity.
• Reply to your manager's messages outside hours if the culture does that, but set the pattern deliberately in week one, because whatever you do in the first month becomes the expectation.
• During Lunar New Year, if you are married you may be handing out lai see rather than receiving it, and there is an office convention about amounts. Ask a peer quietly rather than guessing.
• Do not comment on anyone's flat, their commute or their salary in the first month. All three are more loaded here than they sound.

The 90-day conversation you should ask for

Most Hong Kong firms will confirm your probation with a form and no conversation. Ask for the conversation anyway, and bring three things: what you have delivered, what you have found that is broken, and what you want to own next. It converts an administrative moment into the first performance conversation of your tenure — and it is much easier to reset expectations at month three than at month eleven.

If you are in that quarter, say so at the 90-day mark rather than at the one-year review. It is the last moment where the conversation is a clarification rather than a complaint.