In Spain, using the informal ‘tú’ is a sign of closeness. If someone addresses you as ‘tú’ from the outset, they are telling you that there is no distance between you, that the relationship is on an equal footing. When someone addresses you as ‘usted’, it indicates formality or a hierarchical relationship. The code is quite clear.
In Switzerland, the rules are different. In the German-speaking part of the country, the informal ‘du’ has become very widespread in the workplace. It wasn’t always like that: IKEA was one of the first to break with protocol when dealing with customers in Zurich in the 1970s, and people remember it as something that caused quite a stir. Nowadays, many companies start using “du” from day one. But that doesn’t mean they’ve welcomed you with open arms or that you’re going to make friends. There are colleagues who’ve been on first-name terms for years but have no relationship outside work. The pronoun says nothing about the actual distance between people. Someone summed it up well in a comment I read some time ago: “I thought ‘du’ meant we could speak frankly. One day I spoke my mind and realised that wasn’t the case.”
In French-speaking Switzerland, the situation is different. The use of ‘vous’ tends to persist longer – with superiors, with people you don’t know, and in formal situations. The transition to using ‘tú’, when it happens, is often explicitly negotiated. It’s almost a moment in itself. For someone from Spain, who uses ‘tú’ with everyone without a second thought, this can seem strange at first.
A common mistake is to apply Spanish social norms to a culture that operates by different rules. In Germany, using ‘du’ too quickly can lead you to speak too frankly, too soon. In the French-speaking part, prolonged use of the formal ‘vous’ can make you feel as though you’ve been working amongst strangers for months. In both cases, it is the meaning of the gesture that changes, not the actual distance between people.