Sidelined in small team: help!

[Eloise01]

Left one job (it was very insecure) to start another one (permanent and full time) in the same organisation. In this small team, I find I am over and over again excluded from conversations.

My colleagues are perfectly nice to me when I talk to them one to one, but when there’s a group meeting or conversation, casual or more formal, I am almost invariably side lined. All bar one (who, like me, is quite new) exclude by not looking in my direction and, if they remember to, it’s really fleeting.

I’ve just popped out for a short walk and my eyes were welling up. In this job where it is important that we all get on and co-operate, I feel so flipping lonely.

I do my very best to engage with the others – to take part in conversations even in these uncomfortable circumstances. I look at my colleagues, I’m certainly interested in what’s going on – but this exclusion is wearing me down.

I’ve thought of talking confidentially to the other new colleague who is very decent but what can she do or advise? There isn’t really any line management as such – just a busy top manager who I’d rather not take this to in case in can be sorted out very much more informally.
This small team is having a non work coffee/chat on Monday and I’m not at all looking forward to it – normally I really would – as I know in advance that, putting it very simply, I won’t get a look in.

I’m feeling really disempowered right now and it doesn’t at all help that I’m not introduced to colleagues outside the team who I could usefully be getting to know to help me enhance what I do. I have mostly to rely on the longer established colleagues for their knowledge and contacts – this is rarely forthcoming.
I know they wanted me in this post but this side lining is making me so unhappy.
Any thoughts or suggestions, please?

Make friends with the other new colleague at least? I know that's not helping with contacts but will make you feel better.

Can you talk to your manager about how you feel, and maybe suggest you all take part in some teambuilding exercise of some sort? What about some sort of fundraising event, which you could organise and get everyone involved in?

Are there any activities you could get involved in? I know that some people get to know other people through the gym, if you have one at work, and I am part of the company's women's association, which has been far better for me to meet people throughout the rest of the company than other methods. But I don't know if that sort of thing is available in your organisation.

Divide and conquer ie get them on their own and suggest a coffee or something.it might just be they are used to each other in their little clique and feel insecure without each other. I've often had this - misconceptions about what people are like on first meeting but have then gone on to be friends with people I never thought I would. I remember all my colleagues running out the building to go to the cinema without me when I first arrived. I started speaking to people individually and expressed how difficult I was finding the job and fitting in. Lo and behold the next time they went, they invited me and then I eventually joined them - just took av while!