  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformations across
industries, but also introduced new challenges into workplaces, including the
difficulties of effectively socializing with colleagues when working remotely.
This challenge is exacerbated for new employees who need to develop workplace
networks from the outset. In this paper, by analyzing a large-scale telemetry
dataset of more than 10,000 Microsoft employees who joined the company in the
first three months of 2022, we describe how new employees interact and
telecommute with their colleagues during their ``onboarding'' period. Our
results reveal that although new hires are gradually expanding networks over
time, there still exists significant gaps between their network statistics and
those of tenured employees even after the six-month onboarding phase. We also
observe that heterogeneity exists among new employees in how their networks
change over time, where employees whose job tasks do not necessarily require
extensive and diverse connections could be at a disadvantaged position in this
onboarding process. By investigating how web-based people recommendations in
organizational knowledge base facilitate new employees naturally expand their
networks, we also demonstrate the potential of web-based applications for
addressing the aforementioned socialization challenges. Altogether, our
findings provide insights on new employee network dynamics in remote and hybrid
work environments, which may help guide organizational leaders and web
application developers on quantifying and improving the socialization
experiences of new employees in digital workplaces.
