Two Handshakes and a Buddy: Starting a Job in Paris vs. Sydney

🇫🇷 France · 🇦🇺 Australia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In France, your new colleagues will shake your hand every single morning for the rest of your professional life there, and no one will ever explain why. In Australia, someone you have never met will be assigned to make sure you know where the good coffee is. Both of these facts will feel, in the first week, like the most important information anyone has given you about your new job. Neither is in the offer letter.

Do's & Don'ts

🇫🇷 France

🇦🇺 Australia

France: The Hierarchy Handles It

France's onboarding culture is built on the assumption that structure protects everyone, including the newcomer. New hires arrive to a system where the probation period, the "période d'essai," is written into the labour code itself: two months for general staff, three for supervisors, four for executives ("cadres"), each renewable once under Article L1221-19 of the Code du travail. During this period, either side can end the arrangement with only a short notice window, which sounds precarious until you realise it's also mutual — you're evaluating them too.

What replaces the American-style "onboarding program" is something closer to sponsorship: an experienced colleague, usually senior, quietly appointed to walk the new hire through the unwritten rules of the specific office, not a company-wide curriculum. Progress gets checked formally at 30, 60, and 90 days, and those check-ins are not ceremonial — French managers use them to decide, often silently, whether the hire is working out. Communication throughout stays formal by international standards: "vous," surnames, and email openers like "Bonjour Madame/Monsieur" persist well past the point an American office would have moved to first names and exclamation points.

The daily handshake ritual is the most visible artifact of this formality, and also the most disarming for newcomers, because it demands a kind of individual acknowledgment — you greet each person, not the room — that most workplace cultures have automated away.

Australia: The Buddy Does the Work

Australia's approach starts from the opposite premise: that hierarchy is the enemy of a comfortable first week. The standard mechanism is the workplace "buddy" — a peer, not a manager, assigned specifically to translate the office's informal norms, introduce the new hire around, and answer the questions too small to bring to HR. According to the Australian Industry Group, this peer-level relationship works precisely because it sits outside the reporting line; new hires paired with a buddy report 23 percent higher satisfaction after week one, a gap that widens to 36 percent by the 90-day mark.

The informality extends to the working week itself. Australia's standard full-time week sits around 38 hours, reinforced by award-system norms that discourage unpaid overtime as a demonstration of commitment. Expats consistently describe the adjustment as smaller than expected — daily life and office banter track closer to American or British norms than the "laid-back" stereotype suggests, though shops and city life genuinely do wind down earlier, and the leisure-first cultural current runs underneath even fairly conventional corporate structures.

The Reckoning

The two systems solve the same problem — how does a stranger become a colleague — by inverting who carries the responsibility. France assigns onboarding to hierarchy: a senior mentor, a formal check-in schedule, a probation clock running in the background whether you notice it or not. Australia assigns it to peers: a buddy your own level, informal by design, measured in satisfaction surveys rather than legal probation stages.

The irony is that the French system, for all its formality, is more explicitly protective of the new hire — the "période d'essai" timeline and check-in cadence are legally structured and predictable. The Australian system, for all its warmth, offers less institutional scaffolding; if your buddy is disengaged or your team is short-staffed, the informality that makes Australia pleasant can also mean nobody is formally accountable for whether you're actually settling in.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone who joined a French firm after several years in an Anglophone office described the individual morning handshake as the detail nobody warns you about: skip one colleague by accident, even unintentionally, and it reads as a snub that takes days to unwind.

teamblind.com — In a thread comparing "work to live" and "live to work" cultures, a poster who'd worked in both the US and Australia said the biggest adjustment wasn't the shorter week itself but recalibrating what "impressive" looked like — nobody was tracking who stayed latest, and trying to signal dedication through hours logged just confused people.

Reddit — An American who'd relocated to Paris for a corporate role said the first shock wasn't the language but the formality of internal email — writing "Bonjour Madame" to someone she'd been messaging for three months on Slack felt absurd until a colleague explained the writing stays formal even after the relationship warms considerably.

Reddit — A study-abroad-turned-employee account of moving to Sydney noted there was less culture shock than expected day to day, but the earlier closing hours of shops and offices reshaped the whole rhythm of after-work life in a way no orientation session mentioned.

Conclusion

If you're choosing between them on onboarding alone: France will tell you, in writing, exactly how long you're on probation and exactly when your fate gets decided, which suits people who want the rules stated plainly even if the rules are strict. Australia will hand you a friendly stranger and trust the relationship to sort itself out, which suits people who function better without a visible clock. Hofstede Insights' comparative data captures the underlying logic reasonably well — France scores considerably higher on power distance and uncertainty avoidance than Australia, meaning the French system is built to formalise hierarchy and reduce ambiguity, while the Australian system is built to minimise both.

Neither is objectively kinder. One protects you with paperwork; the other protects you with a buddy who might just be having a busy month. If I had to tell a friend over a drink: ask about the "période d'essai" terms before you sign in Paris, and ask who your buddy actually is — by name — before you accept in Sydney. In both cities, the thing nobody puts in the offer letter is the thing that decides your first ninety days.