I took my 15-year-old daughter to a birthday party. When we got to the house, she wasn’t sure whether to knock on the front door or go around to the side gate like she normally does when visiting.
“Why don’t you just walk up and ring the doorbell?” I asked. “I’ll text her,” she responded.
Sure enough, the birthday girl texted back about 10 seconds later, with instructions to go around to the gate. Since we were about 10 minutes late, there were already a number of girls there when we arrived. So here we had the birthday girl having fun in the midst of her friends and texting with others outside the party at the same time.
Arguments about courtesy and tradition aside, it is no wonder that employers are mystified about how to handle young workers who expect to maintain multiple conversations on multiple platforms while serving customers face-to-face. This is the reason why we need to embrace, rather than resist, the skills of the digital native. Setting parameters without their investment will make us irrelevant over time.