New hires slog through a lot before they’re ready to operate at the rate of someone who’s been there for years. And should you leave out important steps when getting someone set up, you could end up with a new employee who doesn’t know where to go for help, isn’t sure what they’re supposed to be doing every day, and ends up regretting their decision to join your company. New hires are also judging you during their first weeks at the company.

People love to give advice. And when the whole world seemed to go remote in 2020, the advice of how to best work remotely started to flood in. Some advice was sound. Other advice was downright harmful. There are threads all over Reddit, Twitter, and at least a dozen established Facebook groups with countless experts in remote work—”experts” who have barely been doing it for a year.

Can you hop on that meeting? Will you take a look at this graphic? Give me your thoughts about this initiative quickly. What do you need me to do here? Here’s a task I need you to complete by the deadline. Which of these common workplace requests sound like collaborating? I’ll give you a hint: it’s none of them. The truth is, most of us aren’t really collaborating at work.

Business growth is the focus of so many company goals but the very idea comes in only a few forms: Sales growth. Profit growth. New products. Traffic or audience growth. These are what most think of when they discuss growing the business, but they’re far from the most important factors. Not only do they contribute to company growth, but also help to maintain it. Most inexperienced business owners never predict what happens to the business’s structure when they achieve those growth goals.