#1 –Be Tardy on your first day of work!

Rule # 1 is “No-no” to your new job. Being late can harm your reputation because this makes you seem unreliable and incapable to plan for possible hindrances. Do you think your manager will trust you to finish a project on time if you can’t even make it to work on time?

For the first few weeks so you can get a feel for traffic patterns and how much time you’ll need, it is best to allocate an extra time to get to work. You may bring a book or magazine to read in case you get there early.

#2 – Dress appropriately based on the company culture:

Before your first day on the job, take the time to understand the company’s culture and check with your new manager or HR representative as to what attire is appropriate.

If you’ve been hired by a start-up company where everyone wears jeans and shorts to work, wearing a dark suit is not a good idea. Similarly, wearing too casual attire to a company where most employees wear suits five days a week won’t work either.

Do not wear perfume or cologne to work – leave these for evenings and weekends. Indeed, there’s almost nothing more bothersome as a manager than having to hold a discussion with a new employee because their over-powering perfume/cologne is disrupting office productivity.

#3 – Refer regularly to how your previous company did things.

Nobody likes an egotistical know-it-all who thinks they are better than other employees or who believes their previous company did things better.

When you keep saying, “That’s not how we did it at ABC company,” or “Where I came from, this is how we did it and it worked much better,” you will severely damage your reputation.

Once I led a department after the parent company had purchased and merged five companies into one. Each would brag about their former companies and this was so rampant, so I applied a fun way of calling attention to this negative practice. What I did was, whenever anyone used the name of his or her former company and someone pointed this out, the person had to add $1 to an empty shoebox in my office. When the shoebox was filled with money, I used it for a pizza lunch for the team and to talk about the ego-bragging and why it was so damaging to our newly combined company. After that, the negative practice almost immediately ceased.

#4 – Ask the way and why things are done: As I mentioned in item #3, no one likes an arrogant know-it-all.

Take the time to identify all angles of a situation before promoting your opinions in your new job. It is important that you consider the stakeholders, inputs, resources, processes, and outcome or results. Once you have this information, you may dig deeper into certain circumstances using terminology such as, “Help me understand how…” and “How does department ABC then use this information to…?” Rule think before you speak.  How you words are just as important as the questions you ask.

#5 – Ask for time off:

You’d think this would be a no-brainer “no-no”, but you’d be surprised at how often hiring managers express their frustration to me about new employees blindsiding them with time off requests.

Before you begin your new job, let the hiring manager know right away about your vacation plans.  Say you were hired June and your family already has arranged vacation for mid-July. Proactively work with them to guarantee your vacation will not upset the productivity of the department. It is necessary to be transparent if not it can make you seem like a deceitful and immature person which would surprise your new manager with a personal time off request can actually damage your reputation.

#6 – Spend time “water cooler gossiping” to get the “dirt” on people in the department:

It is common that everyone wants to get to know the people in their new company as quickly as possible – but don’t spend time finding out through the gossip “grape vine” around the water cooler or break room.

Take the time to get to know colleagues firsthand and form your own opinions rather than letting other’s nasty gossip cloud your thinking when it comes to co-workers.

Be aware of the six keyways you can harm your reputation when starting a new job and wisely avoid them for you to avoid the situation yourself. As former career-coaching client found out, it can be fairly easy to damage your reputation in a new job. Once damaged it is destroyed, it will take time and effort to repair your work reputation.